 75. Hell |
"If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed, rather than having two hands, to go to hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched."
-Jesus, Mark 9:43 (This statement is not understood correctly.)
Those who do not forsake their evil habits during their earth-life carry those torturing worms of evil tendencies into the astral world and their next incarnation, and are continuously burnt by the inextinguishable fires of ever-increasing evil desires.
-Yogananda
If bodily sensations and sense-pleasures prevent thee from uniting your consciousness with the eternal ever new happiness of meditation. Then cut them off by switching your attention from the sensations. It is better to be united with the eternal happiness found in meditation than to remain conscious of the body constantly burning with the hell-fires of desires born of insatiable love of sense-pleasures. - Yogananda
Jesus is not telling you to cut off your hands or feet or any other organ if they have been the instruments of evil. Or to cast them off. For by doing so, you destroy only the instruments of evil, but not the evil tendencies themselves, which are the real forces which urge your innocent hands and feet to commit evil. Cutting off hands and feet and any other body part may "disable" you from doing "physical evil" but it will not prevent you from doing "mental" evil, which is the source and the real cause of physical evil and the downfall of the soul.
- Yogananda
Yogananda States:
It is better for you to relinquish temporal pleasures for the eternal spiritual bliss and satisfaction of "evolutionary mediation-cultivation" rather than allowing the sense organs and nervous system to be continuously used to "burn" with the insatiable "fire" of physical lust. If you are identified with your sense pleasures, they will inevitably make you aware that sensuality is everlastingly insatiable and productive of fire-like burning misery. "Pluck out" the "impulse" in the optic nerves by disconnecting it by the power of concentration when you are led to see evil or to act according to evil. After doing that forever, destroy the "impulse" of "greed" in your eyes. It is better for you to enter into Christ consciousness (self-realization, Satori, Nirvana, the kingdom of heaven, Brahma, through the use of evolutionary mediation cultivation), by opening the all-seeing eye of wisdom and meditative intuition rather than use your two eyes of "relativity" and sense consciousness and thus remain bound in the misery-making hell-fire of insatiable ego reinforcing sensations. The word "hell" is from the Anglo-Saxon root "Helan;" – "to conceal" The Greek root is Helos, sun or fire therefore the word hellfire is very appropriate to depict the concealed fire of agony which stored-up tendencies can produce in the earthly life.
-Yogananda
There is no such place as hell...hell is the condition of being separated from God.
-Pope, John Paul II; Peter Jennings ABC Evening News (1999?)
Does the Pope mean separation from the church, the body of God? Or did Pope John Paul II have a spiritual revelation which no one else seems to understand?
In the allegory of the cave by Plato, the material realm is the cave, and to KNOW-THY-SELF to be eternal spirit, or spiritual enlightenment is to be out of the cave and in form of virtue, or spirit.
