RAINDROPS IN HELL

The stench is very powerful - sickening, overwhelming, all-pervading, unimaginably terrible. It is not the smell of burning flesh and bones and bodies and hair….

…it is a ghastly reek of wretched souls set ablaze for eternity.

Through eons of human existence, we had been warned of the fires; tales of horrendous heat, of boiling oil, of tortured flesh, of wailing minds…

…they were inaccurate warnings. The flesh, bodies and minds do not matter here. The hearts no longer exist. Nothing. Hell is just nothing, nothing but formless realms of Suffering; tortured souls who now Know, but cannot go back with their Knowledge to the time when it would have served better to know. It is the chosen place for those miserable ones who refused to learn through millions of lives and deaths. The lessons of each passing were not enough to teach them, till the end of the very last passage, they held on to that which would not let them rise; and finally they were drawn down into the Inferno.

It is not a place for repentance, for repentance carries hope. It is not a place for realization, for realization defines self.

It is about despair.

We hear of Truth, Beauty, Love – absolutes; definitions, aims, conclusions of Life.

Hell is ruled by Despair, the definite conclusion of absolute hopelessness. All the miseries on earth had a sweetness underlying the bitter, here it is only flame and heat, and suffocation of hope.

The Evil One holds sway over the proceedings here.

When he has subjected a wretch to eternities of despair, choked the last vestiges of hope out of any who would not understand otherwise, this same Evil One conspires with God and commandeers a drop of rain!

Together, They aim the raindrop at the one-who-burns. It travels deep into the fire whose heat is beyond understanding, it falls gently upon the innermost reaches of the tormented soul; and for a fleeting moment, almost illusory, the fire is doused and the pain forgotten!

The Evil One is, perhaps, the most misunderstood and most maligned one in the Scheme of Things. They are brothers-in-arms, these two; the ‘Evil One’ and the ‘Embodiment of All That is Good’!

Nay, they are One! They, are He. Administering together the toughest lesson of them all.

Another drop falls, and another. Are they really raindrops, or are they teardrops from the eye of a loving father who feels the suffering of his child?

And with every cooling drop from on high, the soul learns, at last, to understand blessings; to see them where they were never visible before; to feel the abundance that it chose to question or ignore on earth. As it begins to perceive, the blessings begin to pour…

…a gentle breeze blows, a thousand flowers bloom, their fragrance permeates all… The only way out of hell is a door leading to heaven, from one eternity to the other.

The raindrops are buoys that keep one afloat in the ocean of despair; His reminders of heaven in hell, His promise of the only reality…

…One.