Eat, Pray, Love

only for a master.
I asked, “So if you go up to heaven in the first meditation, then, in the second meditation
you must go down to... ?”
“Hell,” he finished the statement.
This was interesting. Heaven and hell aren’t ideas I’ve heard discussed very much in
Hinduism. Hindus see the universe in terms of karma, a process of constant circulation, which
is to say that you don’t really “end up” anywhere at the end of your life—not in heaven or
hell—but just get recycled back to the earth again in another form, in order to resolve
whatever relationships or mistakes you left uncompleted last time. When you finally achieve
perfection, you graduate out of the cycle entirely and melt into The Void. The notion of karma
implies that heaven and hell are only to be found here on earth, where we have the capacity
to create them, manufacturing either goodness or evil depending on our destinies and our
characters.
Karma is a notion I’ve always liked. Not so much literally. Not necessarily because I be-
lieve that I used to be Cleopatra’s bartender—but more metaphorically. The karmic philo-
sophy appeals to me on a metaphorical level because even in one lifetime it’s obvious how of-
ten we must repeat our same mistakes, banging our heads against the same old addictions
and compulsions, generating the same old miserable and often catastrophic consequences,
until we can finally stop and fix it. This is the supreme lesson of karma (and also of Western
psychology, by the way)—take care of the problems now, or else you’ll just have to suffer
again later when you screw everything up the next time. And that repetition of suffer-
ing—that’s hell. Moving out of that endless repetition to a new level of understanding—there’s
where you’ll find heaven.
But here Ketut was talking about heaven and hell in a different way, as if they are real
places in the universe which he has actually visited. At least I think that’s what he meant.
Trying to get clear on this, I asked, “You have been to hell, Ketut?”
He smiled. Of course he’s been there.
“What’s it like in hell?”
“Same like heaven,” he said.
He saw my confusion and tried to explain. “Universe is a circle, Liss.”
I still wasn’t sure I understood.
He said. “To up, to down—all same, at end.”
I remembered an old Christian mystic notion: As above, so below. I asked. “Then how can
you tell the difference between heaven and hell?”
“Because of how you go. Heaven, you go up, through seven happy places. Hell, you go
down, through seven sad places. This is why it better for you to go up, Liss.” He laughed.