Inferno

“Had God designed the world, it would not be, a world so pail and faulty, as we see.” — Lucretius

“Nature is not divine, but demon-like.” — Aristotle

“The world in all respects is certainly bad: aesthetically it looks like a caricature, intellectually like a madhouse, morally like a den of crooks, and in general like a prison.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

“History is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.” — Voltaire

“History is a tissue of base and cruel acts in the midst of which a few drops of purity sparkle at long intervals.” — Simone Weil

“History passes on, from one turmoil, from one catastrophe to the next, with brief intervals of happiness, little islands which it spares for a time, until they too are engulfed. All in all — as Max Weber put it — a road paved by the devil with demolished values. … Once again we are faced with the question is it God or the devil who governs the world? And though we may believe that ultimately the devil is in the service of God, there is no proof of it.” — Karl Jaspers

We are gifted to ourselves in our freedom along with the compass of conscience that shows the Path of truth, freedom, love and beauty. As we observe ourselves and other sentient beings, we discover that it is the same compass that is given to all of us in the same universal form, differs only our ability to see this compass and follow the Path it shows. We can leave it unnoticed, we can ignore it, we can reject it and even choose the opposite path; it is a road sign at every crossroads of our “here and now” that shows the Path that we are free to choose as our own path or to reject as alien, preferring the “do what you please” principle of conscienceless arbitrariness to freedom self-restrained by the call of conscience.

If we look closely, we will see that the call of conscience is essentially suprarational and unconditional, because we do not perceive it indirectly through the arguments of ratio (reason), but directly in the very core of our existence, but we cannot objectify its source, nor can we objectify the source of our freedom, because we hear conscience from the same source from which our free individual existence springs — from Transcendence.

We can rationalize conscience with the rules of ethics and aesthetics, moral laws, commandments, and so on, but all such rationalizations will only be surrogates of conscience, which should not overshadow conscience itself and, by and large, are not necessary for us, because we ourselves, without intermediaries, always stand on the border of transcendental subjectivity, through which Transcendence speaks to us in the language of freedom and conscience.

“Guidance through Transcendence is different from any guidance in the world, for God’s guidance is of only one kind. It is given through freedom itself.” — Karl Jaspers

“The fact that God is insensible in this world means at the same time that man must not give up his freedom in favor of intelligible and comprehensible things, authorities and forces in the world. He must be accountable to himself in the way he makes decisions and finds his way. This is why Kant says: “The incomprehensible wisdom [of God] is as wonderful in what it gives us as in what it denies us. For if in its majesty it were constantly before our eyes, speaking clearly and definitely as a convincing authority in the world, we would be puppets of its will. Yet it wants us to be free.”” — Karl Jaspers

“The Godhead says nothing directly, but it seems that it speaks through this possibility of freedom, namely that it demands that its will, which is incomprehensible to us, be fulfilled, by which it has made man independent, that he should make decisions about himself on his own responsibility, and that in this he should have his true dignity.” — Karl Jaspers

“It is not man who demands freedom from God, but God demands freedom from man and in this freedom sees the dignity of man’s godlikeness.” — Nikolai Berdyaev

It is precisely because of the suprarational and unconditional essense of conscience that all known attempts to create comprehensive rational systems of ethics and aesthetics have failed. And the more rationally elaborated such systems were, the more they obscured the questions of ethics and aesthetics, because they led us away from a clear direct perception of conscience into a labyrinth of rationalizations.

“God does not speak through the commands and revelations of other men but in man’s selfhood and through his freedom, not from without but from within.” — Karl Jaspers

Therefore, if conscience can be rationalized at all, it is by one single rule: listen to your heart and do what is due.

“It is just in this that the moral worth of the character is brought out which is incomparably the highest of all, namely, that he is beneficent, not from inclination, but from duty.” — Immanuel Kant

“The decisive place of freedom is found in moral activity, choice in the realization of self under the guidance of duty.” — Karl Jaspers

Now, if in our God-given freedom and conscience we look at the intersubjectively experienced world, we will see that our freedom is in the chains of this world, we are enslaved to it. But since we were born into slavery and have never been truly free in this world, we have nothing to compare our tragic situation with, and we either do not see these chains, or they do not appear to us as chains, or these chains are so familiar that they are quite tolerable.

We tolerate the chains of our bodies that restrict our freedom, coerce us and manipulate us with demands for air, water, food, sunlight, heat, sleep, cleansing, grooming, emptying, copulation, healing, relief from pain and various irritations, and so on. We tolerate chains of monotonous cyclical processes from which we cannot escape: inhalation and exhalation, wakefulness and sleep, excitation and relaxation, hunger and satiety, filling and emptying, sunrises and sunsets, lunar cycles, changing seasons, and so on. We tolerate the chains of the world external to our bodies that allows them to exist only within the narrow confines of certain conditions — certain air, water, food, pressure, gravity, light, temperature, radiation, and so on. If, in addition, we begin to enumerate the chains that we, in our conscienceless arbitrariness, have created for ourselves, this story of the life of slaves would go on for hundreds of pages.

“The relation between the self and the world is actually not only an interdependence, a bare polarity — like the theoretical subject-object relation — but is characterized by a very definite tension. From the very beginning the external world confronts man as hostile and restricting his free movement.” — Otto F. Bollnow

“We, former concentration camp prisoners, can remember those people who supported other prisoners, shared their last piece of bread with them. They may have been few in number, but they are proof enough that everything can be taken away from a human being, except one thing: the last bit of human freedom — the freedom to choose one’s attitude under any given circumstances, to choose one’s own path.” — Viktor Frankl

The only real freedom this world has left us is the freedom of thought, which allows us to choose one ethical and aesthetic attitude or another. And if we look at the world in terms of ethics and aesthetics, we will see an inferno.

We can sing together “What a wonderful world!”, but that won’t make disappear the laws of the wilderness, which force some to kill and devour others in order to survive, or the torturous climatic conditions, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, typhoons, tornadoes, tsunamis, floods, landslides, avalanches, fires, hunger, pain, injuries, diseases, epidemics, parasites, filth, ugliness, pus, shit, stench and other not-so-wonderful things. Combined with the bloody history of demonic arbitrariness of those of us who have rejected the call of conscience, all this can seem wonderful only to the totally blind.

“And to this world, to this scene of tormented and agonised beings, who only continue to exist by devouring each other, in which, therefore, every ravenous beast is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of painful deaths; and in which the capacity for feeling pain increases with knowledge, and therefore reaches its highest degree in man, a degree which is the higher the more intelligent the man is; to this world it has been sought to apply the system of optimism, and demonstrate to us that it is the best of all possible worlds. The absurdity is glaring!” — Arthur Schopenhauer

“The world is like hell, in which men are tortured souls on the one hand and devils on the other.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” — William Shakespeare

The infernal essense of this world was clearly recognized by our ancestors, who saw it as a hell of misery into which we are banished by the mythical “Lord” for the misdeeds of the mythical “Adam” and “Eve”. Others have struggled for centuries to invent arguments for theodicy, an advocacy engaged in justifying the mythical “Creator” for his terrible creation. If the world were not infernal, there would be no need for theodicy. Over time, however, as our lives have become more comfortable, we have accepted this world. We have accepted it because most people are not clearly aware of their God-given freedom and conscience, and therefore do not have the optics that would help them to see themselves and this infernal world soberly and honestly. However, if we take a closer look at the people around us, we will find that no one wants to see themselves and the world soberly and honestly, no one wants to prevent themselves and others from living “normally” in this ignorance — living in unwillingness to know.

“Did you forget that repose and even death are dearer to man than free choice in the knowledge of good and evil?” — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Those of us who do wish to know will have to ask themselves:

Why is there a radical contradiction between our God-given freedom and conscience and this infernal world?

Why is it that so many people who have had mystical/transpersonal experiences of the divine Light cannot recall anything but absolute truth, freedom, love and beauty about it, while our world is so full of their horrible opposites?

Why are we given such an infernal world when, according to the reports of psychonauts (e.g. volunteers in Prof. Strassmann’s experiments), there are far more beautiful worlds?

Why do many people who have had near-death experiences (NDE) say that what happened to them was like waking up from a deep and dark sleep to what they perceived as their original state of freedom and authenticity, while returning to this world was for them akin to returning to prison?

What is this infernal world and why are we trapped in it?

“Oh, my God, how can it be so in this poor old world! You are so great, but no one notices You; Your voice is so loud, but no one hears it; You are so close, but no one feels You; You give Yourself to everyone, but no one knows Your name. People run from You and yet say they cannot find You; they turn their backs on You and yet say they cannot hear You.” — Hans Denk

“The idea of hell is ontologically linked to freedom and personhood, not to justice and retribution. Paradoxically, hell is the moral postulate of the freedom of the human spirit. Hell is necessary not for justice to prevail and the wicked to receive retribution, but for man not to be raped by good and forced into paradise, i.e. in a sense man has a moral right for hell, the right to freely prefer hell to paradise. In this lies the whole moral dialectics about hell.” — Nikolai Berdyaev

“Men are not in hell because God is angry with them; they are in wrath and darkness because they have done to the Light, which infinitely flows forth from God, as that man does to the light of the sun, who puts out his own eyes.” — William Law

“The cognizances that [appear as] the pleasant realms, the miserable realms, and the deaths, transitions, and births [in those realms] are the various forms of existence in saṃsāra, which arise from the appropriation of the [karmic] seeds [of transcendental consciousness (ālayavijñāna)] that are the latent tendencies of the links of existence.” — Vasubandhu

“According to Vasubandhu, the experiences of the denizens of hell are purely mental phenomena, like dreams. However, he says, the experiences of the multitude of beings in the hell realms are not purely private. They are private in the sense that the experiences are not experiences of anything outside the mind streams of the individuals that experience them, but they are public, too, in the sense that the experiences of the beings who “dream” their torments are correlated with each other. The things that the hell beings experience are determined in some fashion by their karma and their acquired dispositions (vāsanās).” — Thomas E. Wood

In time there is no other will of God than our freedom and conscience. There is no other grace and wrath of God in time but our fate. To each their own world. Karma.

It is time to let go of all illusions about this world and our situation in it.

“Can we live in this world, where historical occurrence is nothing but an unending concatenation of illusory progress and bitter disappointment?” — Edmund Husserl

“Progress is pure illusion. It affects only the sphere of matter, while the spirit is inexorably degenerating. What our contemporaries pass off as achievements are in fact shameful vices — rejection of religion as a prejudice, amoralism as an overcoming of complexes, contempt for the past as arrogant ignorance, stupidity elevated to a norm. Reality becomes ghostly. Aristocratic ideals oppose the false ideals of liberalism; they are replaced by the lowbrow tastes of the crowds — the market and entertainment, social conformism and intellectual anarchy. Rationalism, criticalism, relativism and all such mutilated trends carry a profane element that has completely permeated the modern world.
The end of the modern world is but the end of illusion.” — René Guénon

“Whoever believes that he lives for the sake of his descendants is deceiving himself. It is a false statement. The path mankind has travelled is not the path of progress. Progress is only imaginary. Only a few of the sons of men have really progressed. Circle is not progress. We must break the circle, or we will achieve nothing. Those who think that life begins with birth and ends with death do not see the circle. How can they break it!” — Gustav Meyrinck

Long is the way and hard, that out of hell leads up to Light.

— John Milton