What do you think hell is like?
07.06.2025 20:49
Oftentimes, attempting to inhibit an evil aspect of yourself to rid yourself of it, and failing to have it manifest in small shocks, can lead to violent outbursts where you succumb to whatever it was you inhibited. The otherwise publicly acceptable you would slowly devolve into an ostracized private form, wishing to rend apart your “uptightness” and leading to a self-hate so despicable you would never be able to escape from it.
Trace their past, assuming they were born roughly alongside you, if not, then presume they appeared when you gained knowledge of what is deemed morally acceptable and what isn’t.
This inability to express oneself through regularity is, in colloquial terms, a trademark of creativity. Most, if not everything, is wack. Comedic even. We evolve through this process of creating rules for the sole purpose of breaking them. What you call “world things”, I call “being human”, which means [almost] the same thing. That’s where you made a mistake: we are expected to f*ck up. In what world does leaving children who barely know anything to handle a particle accelerator the size of a universe ever result in a potentially good outcome?
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Heaven and Hell too are similar; those of Hell would be punished if they went to Heaven for there they would be living a lie onto themselves, wherein their truth and reality would be disgraced and blasphemed. It is in the not-sought Hell that they are in bliss.
For the slate to color itself, to name its “self”, is treated through a series of patterns, writings, or drawings. Anything concise, regular, concrete, and even could be considered a good deed — humans are prone to be attracted by anything even or regular — whereas anything irregular, abstract, odd, and vague is a sin. Both are art, fundamentally different expressions; why we call them order and chaos is more of a matter of how they unfold into their final structure, never the effect they carry.
As strong a definition as it may be, it is flawed. You cannot expect every human to be okay with how they suffered, with the hand that was dealt to them, and the pain they endured. There will always be those of us who curse fate, who challenge the Will, hoping to be content in their cursed states. Such people are termed the people who underwent a fall into depravity, whose rukh was stained black in an attempt to mimic and demean the white rukh of the rest. Initially, these fallen are depicted as the enemies of the series, as irredeemable people who wish for destruction, a change of the status quo, and rebellion against their maker.
Your real self is higher than ‘you’ and ‘me.’
“Let sorrowful longing dwell in your heart,
Pictured Above: Hakuryuu falls into depravity, tainting his rukh [= “soul”] black, in Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic.
“[…] the actions of the vile (fujjār) are in the lowest of the low (asfala sāfilīn), if the Most Merciful was to have mercy upon them from His throne of mercy through the gaze that we mentioned, He would make their dwellings a place of comfort and thus they would neither live nor die therein and they would be in the bliss of hell forever like the bliss of someone who is sleeping and sees happiness in his dreams and maybe his body on the bed is ill, full of pain and poverty and yet in his dream he sees himself as possessor of authority and bounties and sovereignty. If you were to see what the sleeper was seeing in his dream and what he is enjoying you would say: He is in bounties (and you would be correct) and if you were to see him as lying on the hard bed with his ailment, and pain and poverty and injury, you would say: he is indeed in punishment.
I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
You could chalk it to the survival of the fittest to fit natural standards of one having to win, but not only would that disregard the human capacity for altruism and co-existence — ironically these are to be represented by the good wolf — but it would also ignore humanity’s capability of manipulating nature for their intents. Our inner selves are essentially natural with a tinge of artificial affectation, however, the rules they abide by are inherently different from the ones that form our physical observable environment.
Why do creationists ask for proof of evolution and then ignore the answers?
Pictured Above: The Pond, by Aron Wiesenfeld, circa 2023.
Humans embody God in each act, irrespective of how unholy it may be. Animism and pantheism, even mysticism that has you regard All as One, would mean that the excreta you see too are the same as you: disgusting, gross, yet so content with being, that you’d grow envious of them.
Of course, some heinous actions such as murder and rape do deserve chastisement, that will get chastisement. But most if not anything else, will be forgiven. That’s the sort of God I believe in; the Allâh I bow to every day.
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Source: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson
It’s relatively acknowledged by the majority of people who study religion that both Christianity and Islam are remarkably puritanical, especially considering them to be conservatives, enforcing strong moral compasses that decidedly go against liberal thought processes, and clinging to the old ideals. Now, to claim that this is the norm and that religious values are wrong is empirically false, as that not only ignores the accepted evolution of values, but also neglects sociocultural norms of handling, treating, and addressing actions, which are at times seen as being morally reprehensible or good. I won’t say much on the matter, considering that these are discourses involving social, neurological, psychological, cultural, philosophical, and religious subjects that I have no clue about nor do I hold a position strong enough to credit myself with a credible stance.
"Do exactly as you like. That is the true meaning of pleasure. Pleasure leads to joy and joy leads to happiness. That makes our path clear. So clear there is no longer any need to hesitate."
That’s where Magi came in and with it the rukh. Within her world, Shinobu Ohtaka, describes the rukh as the source of everything, permeating through all there is, simultaneously animating them, loving them, and sustaining them, while manifesting as birds representative of the Will of God. Insofar as the Divine Will is concerned, the rukh is irreconcilably tied to fate, defined here not as an unchanging preordained path, but as the acceptance of the unfolding of events, the birth of hope, the choosing of light, and moving on in pursuit of a brighter future. This is termed by Aladdin, one of the protagonists, to be the true meaning of fate, which is brought about by the guidance of the rukh.
Esteem not yourself mere sugar-cane, but real sugar.
Such a statement is, indubitably, counter to the assertion being made: hindering the development of human deviation, subsequently harming the creation within each act, is unwise and reprehensible. How could it be that the God Who wishes to see Himself in each act of humanity, embodied by each person, and represented by their ego having His Ego be involved in their activity, would punish someone for creating something unique and alone?
If you caught a shoplifter at your yard sale, how would you handle it?
The actual attribution to this quote goes to Netflix’s adaptation of the books mentioned above into a one-season series. Mind you, I wasn’t sitting around and randomly watching a weird kid show — that’s way too edgy or dark to be treated as a “modern” show — I had merely grown bored after reading for hours, and simply went to see what my younger brother was watching. As a whole, I found the episodes mildly amusing for a twelve-year-old; not necessarily my style, however, this single line easily won me over.
“Do not praise your own faith exclusively so that you disbelieve all the rest. If you do this you will miss much good. Nay, you will miss the whole truth of the matter. God, the Omniscient and the Omnipresent, cannot be confined to any one creed, for He says in the Quran, wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allâh. Everybody praises what he knows. His God is his own creature, and in praising it, he praises himself. Which he would not do if he were just, for his dislike is based on ignorance.”
This wasn’t a striking realization I hit upon nor was it something I was practically unaware of. Let’s just say I wasn’t able to word it properly.
Why did Britain steal Gibraltar from Spain?
Source: The Rubaiyat, LXIV, Omay Khayyam
God does not punish you, you do. He doesn’t distance Himself from you, you do. Notwithstanding the lack of punishment, there will be chastisement for grave sins (viz. murder or rape), however, that is only to the point of being just; not eternal damnable torture. That’s all there is to Hell. I don’t think Adam ever intended for his line to be used this way, or that Netflix thought likewise. But I do. Hell is only something our perceptions and thoughts make up. We reject ourselves out of embarrassment; the philosophic-mystic separation from God to denote Hell is more of our self-exile.
“Why must you insist on defining joy so narrowly? Where is the paradox in finding suffering and tragedy but other forms of pleasure? There is no one fixed type of joy. Your confusion derives from your failure to understand that.”
Why are white women dating more black guys than ever?
Personally, I believe in a God Who Laughs, indicating that He loves joy, especially joy that is true to oneself, for He is Truth. If trying to act good, to stop yourself from sinning, deprives you of that joy, forcing you to wear a mask to conceal who you truly are, then that means lying to yourself and harming yourself. If All is One, implying that humans are God, this is a betrayal to God, because you are lying to Him — He’s lying to Himself.
Crush your heart, be broken.”
That’s what plagues us, or monotheists, about Hell. To us, it’s a place where those who sin have to be relinquished to. We can’t — for the love of God — figure out what it is or why it is; not even how it is. All we do is punish ourselves by self-flagellating until the very end. Cursing, debasing, defaming, beating, killing, poisoning, torturing, and harming ourselves. We become the black wolf that we think must be killed. What should have been love from a caring humane owner transfigures into mal-intent and victimizing (mostly baseless) anger.
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Pictured Above: Batman reconciling with Bruce, in Knight Terrors: Batman, by Joshua Williamson. Refer to other quotes by Bruce and from others about himself:
There is more at play within the story: the shifting of Divine hierarchies, the purpose of creation, the origin of magic, the challenge to fate, and the reconciliation of worlds, both new and old, however, none had such an impact on me. My understanding of the Godhead has changed from an OOO Deity [= Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnibenevolent] to simply the Truth, which manifests through both lies and truths, to itself, with the purpose of the world being to perpetually manifest the Infinite dissimilar manifestations of His Essence in never-repeating forms, till the end of time and beyond. Labels are meaningful yet concomitantly devoid of meaning.
Returning back to what I think, I correlate this with my conception of all lies and truths being virtually the same — with no difference — leading to an understanding that there are countless ways to traverse this path to the Ultimate, and no certainly true one. I like when Ibn ‘Arabi relates this to the Qur’anic vow that none will worship any but God, claiming that this was a vow of worship (‘ibada), not of the declaration of oneness (tauheed). What we all look for is the Truth, but that Truth is grounded in individuation to an endless degree; we’re just reaching our Truths.
Cling to your real self, quit this dual self.”
"Sinful? Corrupt? I don't understand your logic. Why must pleasure and sin be connected? Pleasure gotten through evil means could be a sin. But pleasure can also result from good deeds. What kind of philosophy calls pleasure itself a sin?"
Is limited in place, the real ‘you’ is not limited.
And when you embrace that change, of a family and loved ones, what you see is not an impairment or death of the Batman. It’s a new Batman that is the previous incarnation simultaneously. Change added to Bruce and Batman. We only need to accept that it does not conflict with our permanence and immortality, it is part of us.
“Oh, petit homme… your drive and passion… they will open the world up to you… And your heart will guide the way through it.”
Why, O pearl, linger you trembling in your shell?
It’s uttered by the narrator when Hansel, one of the brother-sister protagonists, plucks the Devil’s three golden hairs, tries to run away, and looks around at the (formerly) damned denizens. To his shock, none of them were being poked with pitchforks, dangling upside-down on twisted metal ropes, or consigned to a cesspool of (collective) piss. They were all just flailing their hands around in small holes or cages, yelling their woes; “I don’t deserve it!”; “I’m sorry!”; “Forgive me!” It was as if they themselves were the jury, the executioner, the criminal, and the public: they were suffering at their own hands, by their very minds.
Source: The Tarjuman Al-Ashwaq, Preface, Ibn ‘Arabi
“Every day. As the light retreats… my soldiers come out. The bravest young men and women I’ve ever known. Protecting our city. Protecting other cities. An outcome that I could never have dreamed of when I started. Because I had no dreams. I couldn’t afford to.”
Bruce feared change. What if he got soft because of family? Now, he’s learned that Batman’s not his other, nor is Bruce. Both of them are who he is. If Batman is your understanding of God i.e. as something not part of yourself, but a bigger idea, while your ego (Bruce) is finite and smaller; infinitesimal, then that’s not true. You’re both. The two are tied together, intertwined so deeply, that they can never be separated.
That glosses over everything we live by.
Although I haven’t seen/read Narnia properly, I think their closet is the closest (pun-ish reception intended) example of this. Once you enter the wardrobe, you’re magically transported to a new world; one magical and surreal. To any soul, it would seem that this is a different changed world from ours, just connected through a wardrobe. However, therein is the answer: the house was always Narnia. You went to a magical world through its closet (i.e. mysticism) and achieved sovereignty there (i.e. gnosis), however, you fundamentally ignored that the house was the original and not separate from the magical new world.
Source: The Conference of the Birds, Part 3: The Valley of Love, Fariduddin Attar
It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together—that in the agonized womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then were they dissociated?”
Most of us see this as being transported elsewhere. Isn’t that how we all perceive gnosis and change? The former makes us think that by sacrificing our ego and transmuting it into another, we are achieving something or a state other than ourselves. But that isn’t the case. As Rumi said: “The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers do not finally meet somewhere. They are in each other all along.”
Superficially, it’s decent when it comes to explaining a binary dichotomy, especially that of good versus evil or virtues versus vices. However, if everything was as simple as feeding the right pet, then we wouldn’t be here, now would we? Both of them are your responsibility, and simply euthanizing the other via starvation for the preservation of the favorite is not wise, and certainly ill-advised.
Source: Futuhat al-Makiyya, Ibn ‘Arabi
And by and by my Soul return’d to me,
As far as my theology is concerned, that is an imperfection: God is meant to be True to Himself, be those truths subjective or objective, however, they do not contain lies. Wearing harmful masks, not for roleplay, but to have you fit a predesigned mold, is a lie, a very bad one. You can tell that it's filled with uncomfortably, that you’re unhappy, and that being good is bad for you. Why then do you have to be sane? Does sanity help in knowing God? Is it fine to lie? Would lying to yourself also not qualify as a sin?
This visible ‘you’ which you fancy to be yourself
Source: Shaikh Abu Saeed Abil Kheir, "Nobody, Son of Nobody", Vraje Abramian
It was never “outside” but remained “inside” the house, inextricably tied to it. We saw the change as an annihilation of the house, of our ego, and glossed over its role as the addition of an always available dimension to the house; the house itself never changed, but our perception of it did. And as we did, we presumed that our ego underwent an annihilation of its previous existence. The house is both God (through Narnia) and human (through the closet), however, you expanded your perception from the mundane to the Divine.
In a similar fashion, have you perhaps seen or read some good parts of the Batman franchise? Recently, and for some time now, Bruce has been torn between seeing himself as Batman and as Bruce Wayne. Which of the two is the original? Did Bruce Wayne die with his parents? Is Batman the only necessary and permanent existence, hidden by the mere facade of a false non-existent Bruce? More than anything, is Batman perfect, only being limited by his humanity?
“What? Your moral code just won’t allow for that? It’s too hard to “cross that line”?” “No. God Almighty… No. It’d be too dammed easy.”
“Wheresoever ye turn” seems to be quite inclusive of everything, sins would be no exception.
“It is He who is revealed in every face, sought in every sign, gazed upon by every eye, worshipped in every object of worship, and pursued in the unseen and the visible. Not a single one of His creatures can fail to find Him in its primordial and original nature.”
“You are Batman! You need to accept the world you live in and accept what you can control. You need to accept that you did not and cannot save me. You also need to accept that you did not and cannot save your parents. But you can save yourself. And in doing so, you can save the lives of so many people in that city you love so much. Every life you save is a victory against death. Against the Joker.” “I don’t think I can do it alone.” “Then don’t. Find your family. Find your love. Take back your city. Let go of the weight. Let go of the guilt. Let go of me, and do what you must do. Be the impossible man who saves all the families on their way home from the theater.” “If I woke up with my mind intact… I won’t hear your voice anymore. I don’t know that I can do it without you.” “My boy this is you doing it without me. I am only a voice in your head, telling you what you need to hear to steady yourself and do what needs to be done. You don’t need me on the other end of the Bat-Computer to know exactly what I’d tell you in any circumstance. So wake up, my boy. Tell this city who you are.”
We humans sin because we find it harder to draw straight lines, and because limiting yourself to the categories of good deeds, results in diminishing your art skills by forcefully placing restrictions. Sure, it looks neat, cleaner, and fancier, however, the freedom of being messy, decadent, hedonistic, and batshit crazy in whatever art you produce, carries a joy not found elsewhere. It’s why profanity, nudity, hedonism, heretical thoughts, all things considered, unprofessionalism, or crassness are so common in modern music and writings; they are a free medium, untamed, unbound. Wild.
The Beloved says, "The broken ones are My darlings."
Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens. I, for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in one direction and in one direction only. It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; and from an early date, even before the course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.
“With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point.
This is how the people of hell would be “then they would neither die nor live” (Qur’ān 87:13) i.e. they would never wake up from their sleep. That is the mercy that Allâh has on the people of hell, who are its inhabitants and their like […] At this stage if the people of heaven would look at the people of hell and see their stages and what Allâh has placed therein and the ugly scenes it contains, they would say: they are being punished. But if they are shown the divine spiritual beauty for what they call ugly and they were to see what state they [people of hell] are in their sleep and they knew their temperament they would say: they are enjoying bounties
Pictured Above: A Tale of Dark & Grim, by Adam Gidwitz.
I have no long story to tell you and certainly no widely acclaimed source to borrow from. However, what I do have is a fairly simple bottled-down answer: “[Hell] isn’t a place where sinners are tortured. [It’s] a place where sinners torture themselves.”
It is later revealed, however, that to be depraved does not mean that you are cursed or that you may never enjoy your lives, rather it exists as a horizontal barrier, an apartheid-like discrimination, that chose to ostracize those it never understood. The essence of the rukh is Truth; whether or not it is good, is indirectly implied to be a human construct, effectively a lie told to oneself. To look forward to the future and accept all that befalls you is an artificial sentiment, for the rukh never lies, and if one does end up encompassed in their anger, in a “cursed” state, it does not imply that they have strayed from the Truth, rather it means that they have accepted it — to know oneself, one must see oneself without any lens.
You don’t become something else, or gain another ego, you just unlock a part of yourself that you knew was there but chose to forget about. It’s self-realization, not so distinct from recovering from amnesia. As to the latter, despite any change in our lives, we are still ourselves. All we do is change perception to unveil a new part of our being: evil, good, naive, cynical, and whatnot — they were always there, but you chose to give birth to them once more, thus actualizing those lives in a new state. It is no different from what I said about the closet. Instead of transporting elsewhere, you remain where you were, as you were: you remain at home, you just end up adding a new definition to a pre-existing constitution.
In that vein, sin is not a means of creating or expanding a disconnect with the Divine, however, it would function as one way to articulate the aspect with which It created everything. I’ve heard some claim that the purpose of Hell and punishment is to fix humans, which in our river analogy, would mean purifying the hard water to make it suitable for drinking and cleaning. God, in this sense, is no different from a teacher who assumes that hitting students with a ruler to correct their handwriting, to have them fit a homogenous “acceptable” form of art at the behest of one that was uniquely theirs, is correct.
“In this valley, Love is represented by fire, Reason by smoke. When Love bursts into flame, Reason is forthwith dissipated like smoke. Reason cannot coexist with Love’s mania, for Love has nothing whatever to do with human Reason. If ever you attain a clear vision of the unseen world, then only will you be able to realize the source of Love. By the odor of Love, every atom in the world is intoxicated. It owes its existence to the existence of Love.”
“The Truth is yourself, but not your mere bodily self.
And answer’d “I Myself am Heav’n and Hell”
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
God, or the Penultimate Ego, is best apprehended by those who are insane — for a guidebook on how I fit Muhammad (ﷺ) into that see: On Dualism — who fail to understand anything. Perhaps that’s why children are closer to God; they don’t understand anything, and in that they understand everything. Our lives are centered on reverting to that natural state, the clean slate, that knew both nothing and something. “Here to be is to not be / To not be is truly to be”
Source: Futūhāt al-Makkiyah, Volume 1 Page 364, Muhyī al-Din Ibn Al-Arabī
Surely you must’ve heard of the parable of the wolves, where two wolves are fighting in you, one good/white, the other bad/black, and the winner rests upon you. Who you choose to feed takes the cake, while the other loses.
This would leave us with a minimum of a year of shared time with you, with the wolves starting as young pups that develop into fully-fledged adults, similar to a fire that starts from one twig to burn down a forest after it consumes fuel. Supposedly those wolves are a part of you, a fragment of your “I”; by putting down one of them, you’re killing yourself or at least a part of it. Is that wise? Do we have to rid ourselves of ourselves? Does change and growth signify killing aspects of the central spirit and essence that largely defines us, to suit social, cultural, religious, and other norms?
For as long as I can recall, my grandmother has been bedridden, suffering from paralysis in almost half, if not more, of her body. As times would have it, she was always bouncing from one house to another but remained with us for a huge chunk of time, and in her frustration, she strayed quite far from faith: she hasn’t turned to apostasy, however, she hasn’t been practicing much either, oftentimes picking fights with God, which includes holding grudges, nagging, and complaining to him. I was raised in a society that found these actions to be undeserving of faith, to be completely unIslamic, yet here she was, tussling with those very norms.
Learn to love yourself.
Source: The Masnavi, Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi
What I can say though is that these positions, which do not fall into strict dichotomy, can lead to viewing the other as vile — in a similar fashion, I never considered the fact that hedonism, decadence, and depravity can be joyous. Alongside my peers, we were taught to hate these decisions, revile them; and adhere to unchanging polemics that used outdated arguments to stand. Chief of this, was the decision not to challenge God or oppose taqdeer [= fate]. This was hard for me, owing not to any extraneous venture but to my own household.
never give up, never losing hope.
This outward ‘you’ is foreign to your real ‘you;’
Hell’s the exact opposite. It’s a disillusioned world created by people who delude themselves into thinking that discrimination based on worldly actions is decent for ephemeral distribution and that they deserve to be punished more than they actually deserve. If anything, it’s violence upon violence topped with even more violence.
We’re humans. Yes, we mess up and do stupid things. That’s a part of living. And God loves every bit of it. Sinning too is worshipping. And don’t let anyone tell you that you should feel ashamed of being an idiot. We all are. It’s fine to live as an idiot than die believing that you weren’t one.
Heaven and Hell resemble that structure — what we experience is indefinitely tied to our thoughts, however, it’s exoterically dichotomous. Humanity needs madness, and extremities are madness.
Pictured Above: Gilgamesh the “King of Heroes” appearing to aid the Chaldeans against Tiamat, in Fate/Grand Order — Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia. For brevity’s sake, refer to his statements on pleasure throughout Fate/Stay Night and Fate/Zero: