THE TERRIFYING HELL REALM: An Invitation to Non-Dual Awakening
Written by Gary Tzu, Ph.D. — Paradoxica: Journal of Nondual Psychology, Vol. 6: Spring 2014
Summary
This article looks at hell realm experiences as an invitation to non-dual awakening. Whether it is
physical death or psychic hell, these magnified nightmare situations offer a portal to non-dual
awakening. Hell experiences can further be deconstructed through inner silence, realizing there is
nobody in charge, and working through our own devilish, black hatred directly. All of this leads
to a deconstruction of hell, and the realization that actual hell is nowhere to be found.
After many years of seeking, Gary Tzu came to a place of absolute hopelessness and total
failurehood and surrendered to rest naturally in what is. He completed a Masters and Doctorate
in transpersonal-non-dual approaches to psychology in which he integrated the transpersonal
work of Ken Wilber and A.H. Almaas with eastern contemplative traditions. After working in
addictions and mental health fields, he joined the Addictions Counselling Program at the
University of Lethbridge in 1998 as a professor. Since then, he also has maintained a private
practice in non-dual psychotherapy, working with both individuals and groups. He is editor of
Paradoxica: Journal of Nondual Psychology, and author of two recent non-dual books, Beyond
Addiction to Awakening and Awakening in the Paradox of Darkness. His websites are:
www.nondualbeing.com and www.garytzu.com
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THE TERRIFYING HELL REALM: An Invitation to Non-Dual Awakening
Awakening in Hell
The invitation is to use the subjective experience of psychic hell as a portal to non-dual
awakening. Why? Because hell brings the nightmarish aspects of existence to the maximum and
thus offers a fertile opportunity for awakening. It is like misery and suffering are infinitely
magnified in the experience of hell, and if we can see through the experience and find the light
within the darkness, the midnight sun, we are then prepared for any experience in existence.
Our Relationship to Death: Fighting Death Is Hell
A key component to our hell experience is our relationship to death. In The Art of Dying, Osho
(1999) laid out three expressions of death in the history of the human mind. The ordinary person
typically finds him or herself in the first expression. Here, the person is attached to the body,
looks to enjoy the pleasures of the body, lives a hedonistic material life, and will try to cling,
resist, and fight at the moment of death. Death will be the enemy. Osho (1999) explained:
Hence, all over the world, in all societies, death is depicted as dark, as devilish. In India
they say the messenger of death is very ugly—dark, black—and comes sitting on a very
big, ugly buffalo. This is the ordinary attitude. These people missed, they have not been
able to know all the dimensions of life. They have not been able to touch the depth of life
and they have not been able to fly to the height of life. They missed the plenitude, they
missed the benediction. (p.13)
Osho referred here to the experience of the typical person when encountering death: a hellish,
devilish affair, as one struggles to survive as a separate being against the black void.
When one sees death as the enemy it can be hell. My doctoral supervisor told me about his
encounter with death. He had a sudden heart attack while working out. He lay on the floor, afraid
he was dying. He told me he went to the worst hell imaginable, and he was fighting to survive. It
was awful.
In my own life, before I let go of my need to survive, occasionally I would get totally exhausted
and feel the hell of the separate self up against the abyss. I could not let go, because I feared I
would not exist. I felt like those terminally ill patients who sometimes do not want to go to sleep,
because they are afraid they will not wake up. That was hell.
Poeticizing Death
Osho (1999) described a second type of expression of death, that of the poets and the
philosophers:
Death is nothing evil, it is just restful—a great rest, like sleep. This is better than the first.
At least these people have known something beyond the body, they have known
something of the mind. They have not had only food and sex, their whole life has not
been only in eating and reproducing. They have a little sophistication of the soul, they are
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a little more aristocratic, more cultured. They say death is like great rest; one is tired and
one goes into death and rests. It is restful. (p. 13)
People often propound this view at funerals. The departed has gone off to a better place to rest.
The people at the funeral feel better poeticizing the death of the departed.
Total Surrender to Death
Osho (1999) laid out a third category of connection to death:
Those who have known life in its deepest core say that death is God: not only a rest, but a
resurrection, a new life, a new beginning; a new door opens… When a person has known
the transcendental in self, death is nothing but a face of God. Then death has a dance to it.
And unless you become capable of celebrating death itself, remember, you have missed
life. (pp.13-14)
Most people who have a troubled hell experience are caught in the first expression, total
attachment to body, and fighting death. This attachment feels like hell. The only resolution is a
complete surrender of the grasping at survivalhood. What is called for is absolute acceptance of
death.
My Surrender
In my life, the only way out of the hellish realm of death was a total let go of the need for
survival and a let go of the body-mind. This process was not a one-time occurrence but an
ongoing surrender. The poetic approach to death works well in dealing with the reality of
someone else’s death but is flimsy in contemplating one’s own physical death, as the mind can
obsessively fight the death of body-mind, and can go around and around obsessively in nonacceptance. Accepted, death transforms its blackness into a bedazzling light. In death, the
midnight sun of existence is found.
Psychic Hell: Being Doomed Forever
The subjective experience of hell is not limited to the struggle to survive and resist physical
death, when the psychic realm of hell opens up the possibility of fates far worse than physical
death.
Adi Da (1991) described the terrifying, prolonged torment of psychic hell, as signs point to this
hell going on forever, with no escape:
At the level of the psyche, it is not so much a fear of dying, because there is a
presumption of continuousness that is not so strongly present at the physical level. The
fear at the level of the psyche is fear of certain conditions, fear of madness, fear of being
confronted by terrifying phenomena. At the physical level you fear termination of
physical life. At the psychic level you fear madness and confinement by unchanging
terribleness. … In the psyche, you fear being confronted not by pain and mortality, which
are features of fear at the physical level, but by torment, dissociation, horrors of all kinds,
bewilderment, and loss of relations. (p. 87)
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Like the torment Adi Da examined, I too faced loss of relations forever, in the form of eternal
aloneness combined with eternal damnation. I was facing eternal hell. The ardent desire became
not so much to survive, as I was facing being permanently stuck in hell, but the urgency to
escape the predicament. I wanted to get the hell out of hell!
The Paradoxical Releasement from Eternal Hell
Healing from psychic hell came to me through embracing paradox. Karl Renz (2004) wrote
about his predicament of dealing with the prospect of an eternal hell realm. One afternoon, rather
than checking stock-market prices, he was gripped by the unfolding story of Yuddhistra and
Krishna, played out in a TV program. The story centres on the aftermath of a bloody battle and
the death of Yuddhistra. Upon his death, wanting to join his family and friends, Yuddhistra sees
his loved ones burning in hellfire and suffering eternally, and he falls into total despair. Krishna
asks, poignantly, whether Yuddhistra can forever remain in a condition of despair. Could he
remain in hell endlessly? Renz (2004) recalled:
By this time I was so deeply involved in the play and so completely identified with
Yuddhistra that I felt the question was actually addressed to me. He, or I, answered, “I
have no desire to change anything or to avoid pain or suffering. If I must remain in this
condition for the remainder of my existence, so be it.”…At this moment an explosionlike experience tore through the back of my head, filling my perception with pure light.
At this moment, there was an absolute acceptance of being. Time stopped, ... and the
world disappeared, and a kind of pure Is-ness in a glaring light appeared. It was a
pulsating silence, and absolute aliveness that was perfect in itself—and I was that. (p. xxi)
Beautiful! Similar to Yuddhistra and Renz’s predicament, I had been seeking for a way out of
my psychic hell experience in existence, trying to find some sanctuary. But like Renz, I came to
see that there was no escape, that we are part of existence forever. There was no place to go!
This fact, at first blush, seems like an awful fate, but if one lets in that there is no escape from
existence, then one can accept that there is no way out of this predicament. In one way or
another, we are in existence forever. Seeing that nothing can be done, a person relaxes. And this
was my experience. I accepted that there was no escape and relaxed, because if there was no
escape, there was nothing I could do. Instantly, the eternal radiant light of existence shone
through in a completely bedazzling way. Such a benediction! As I let go of escaping, a new
realization emerged. I saw that it was not the situation per se that was so awful, but my intense
struggle to escape. Like Renz, I faced the question, “Was I willing to be in hell forever?” The
answer was yes.
Reflecting on this transformational acceptance, it appeared obvious to me that this hell was just
the ordinariness of existence, absolute presence, and eternal aloneness. My exhaustion and desire
to escape had only magnified the so-called hell experience. Through acceptance of no escape,
one’s eternal misery turns into an eternal mystery. When one accepts the dark-side-of-the-moon
experience, a blissful light reveals itself, a bedazzling mystery. It is like finding the midnight sun
in the worst hell imaginable. There is total freedom, as our worst fate has already been
experienced and accepted.
Now, let us consider a third aspect: dropping the hierarchy of heaven and hell altogether.
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Embracing Inner Silence in Hell
In the hell of no escape and eternal banishment, one can feel stuck in his or her predicament
forever. I would be remiss if I left the discussion of hell at that. Existence is manifold, levels
upon levels, and one can also experience hell as a very low-frequency area, where existence is
reduced to its most base element and beings play out existence at that level. Trungpa (1992)
called this the bardo realm of hell: a claustrophobic realm of total aggression where there is no
spaciousness. In a hell experience, we may be vibrating at the most base level of existence—the
most aggressive, primal, punitive frequency—where beings are lost in an instinctual grasping at
survival. A bad drug trip, a scary near-death experience, exhaustion, or crashing into a dark
episode can reduce a person to this level, where a key theme is a desperate hanging on to
survival, no matter what. This desperation is an invitation to be impeccable in your own energy
and inner silence, as there may be demonic forces and beings at bay. As Carlos Castaneda (1998)
wrote about the power of inner silence in dealing with dangerous, inorganic beings called flyers,
who had the power to take over one’s mind:
The grand trick of those sorcerers of ancient times was to burden the flyer’s mind with
discipline. They found out if they taxed the flyer’s mind with inner silence, the foreign
installation would flee, giving to any one of the practitioners involved in this manoeuvre
the total certainty of the mind’s foreign origin. The foreign installation comes back, I
assure you, but not as strong, and a process begins in which the fleeing of the flyer’s
mind becomes routine, until one day it flees permanently. (p. 225)
In my own hell experience of exhaustedly grasping onto my own separate-self survival, because
there were apparent, non-embodied dark beings bothering me, I had to be impeccable in my
energy. I needed to be resolute in my inner silence and not attend to the foreign mind at all, and
the non-physical being went away all by itself. To really set myself up for freedom, I had the
insight, cosmically, that there is nobody in charge, just beings all the way up and all the way
down. I will discuss this in the next section.
Taking the Trauma out of Hell: Realizing There Is Nobody in Charge
To bring greater clarity to healing dark hellish experiences within the psyche, one just has to reremember that there is no ultimate goal in existence. There is nowhere to go and nothing to be
done. Now, if we look closely, we can see that having a goal of obtaining heaven sets up a
division between the virtuous and the sinners, between heaven and hell. Creating the goal creates
the division of those bound for heaven and those bound for hell. With no goal, the ground of all
of this disappears. One is not going anywhere. There is nowhere to go and nobody to go. All is
always right here and has always been available.
In his Zen series Take it Easy, Osho (1978) explained how religion depends on a single
phenomenon: disobedience. If you obey, you are going to heaven, and if you disobey, you are
going to hell. But if we can see that there is no goal, then we also can see that there is nobody to
command, and there is no one to obey. All of the hierarchical structure falls away, the prison of
hell and heaven falls away, and we are left with the suchness of existence.
Without the formal hierarchy of heaven and hell, one notices that existence has multitudinous
levels of vibrational frequencies. Nobody is officially in charge. So if you are hanging out in
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hell, you are there of your own volition. There is no point hanging out at a very primal hell
aggression level. As far as growth is concerned, little can happen at a frequency where only the
play of dark beings, compacted aggressiveness, and no space exist. Deconstructing hell points
out the realities of participating in existence at a very low level of vibrational intensity. It is not a
very good gig.
Integrating Hell and Black Hatred
We can integrate all levels of existence, but we do not necessarily want to get stuck in any one
place. For example, through hell realm experiences, a necessary, brute level of aggression can be
integrated. Aggression is part of existence and is sometimes useful. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis
needed to be met with brute aggression in World War II. As an allied soldier, my wife’s father
ran like a madman and escaped a Nazi prison camp. If you are attacked by a grizzly bear hiking,
you are very quickly going to have to embrace animal aggressiveness. The point is that we may
need to access this level of vibration; we just we don’t want to get stuck there—we simply need
to be aware that existence can play out at this vibrational level of brute aggressiveness.
Rather than separating from this brute aggressiveness of hell, one can make it workable. An
important transformational key is the realization that we can integrate qualities of total blackness,
what could be called the beast, by not projecting them outside ourselves, but finding them within,
through our own black hatred and accompanying cold destructiveness, as laid out by Almaas
(1998):
When you allow the black hatred is when you feel yourself become the devil—a giant,
black and powerful demon with tremendous pride and destructive hatred. You might
tower over the city, looking at it and laughing. You might be filled with a powerful,
destructive, cold, calm, and calculating hatred. (p. 50)
The paradox is that, if this hatred can be felt with acceptance, it can transform all by itself to
essential power. And with that, one feels at home and relaxed in existence.
When working with people who are experiencing black hatred, the invitation is to let them
express deep hatred openly, rather than repressing or denying it. I at times have thoroughly
enjoyed expressing this black hatred energy myself, letting black hatred and rage fill the room,
and feeling it transform all by itself. In the non-dual groups that I facilitate, when it has often
come up, I have encouraged group members to express their deep hatred, not only to absent
family members but to the group as a whole, or group members, or to me personally. I remember
one time, an addictions counsellor group member, Kevin, dropped into hatred towards me in
reaction to my intervention with another group member, and I encouraged him to let me have his
hatred full throttle. He went at me hard, with an over-the-top intensity, screaming loudly about
how much he hated my guts. I remember looking over at him while he was screaming at me,
seeing his wild, dark black eyes as if they were in the middle of a wild black storm. He kept at it
for about ten minutes. I did not react; I did nothing. After the storm abated, I asked him how he
was doing. “I feel great,” he said, “so empowered.” And then a few moments later he said a
funny thing to me: “I love you.” I smiled to myself. In wildly expressing his hatred, he had found
essential being. Essential blackness, when accepted, transformed into love. Very nice!
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Hell Is Nowhere to Be Found
Thus, we can see the so-called hell experience can be deconstructed by accepting no escape and
integrating our own repressed, primal aggressiveness and hatred. We see that there is no
objective hell, as we relax into the light within the darkness and find “hell” is nowhere to be
found. As with so much of darkness transformational work, an important insight is that trying to
survive no matter what perpetuates apparent hell. Since I have moved to embrace the art of dying
and accepting death in each moment, knowing paradoxically that there is no escape, “hell” has
disappeared. Letting go, I can relax and enjoy the translucent energy of existence in each
moment. The other side of this is letting go of the need to escape. I can embrace the eternity of
existence right here, right now.
Thus, the invitation is just a total relaxation into vast no-selfhood. It is clear that “hell” can’t be
found anywhere. Hell was a self-created, illusionary nightmare. All actually is just a play of
existence in the brilliant light of what is.
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References
Adi Da (1991). Easy death (2nd ed.). Clearlake, CA: Dawn Horse Press.
Almaas, A.H. (1998). The facets of unity: The enneagram of holy ideas. Berkeley, CA: Diamond
Books.
Castaneda, C. (1998). The active side of infinity. New York: Harper Collins.
Osho (1979). Take it easy (vol. 1). Pune, India: Osho Foundation International.
Osho (1999). The art of dying (2nd ed.). Pune, India: Osho International Foundation.
Renz, Karl (2004). The myth of enlightenment. Carlsbad, CA: Inner Direction.
Trungpa, C. (1992). Transcending madness: The experience of the six bardos. Boston:
Shambhala.