Hell Is Other People
“Hell is other people.†Those are the famous closing words of Jean Paul Sartre’s play “No Exit.†And those words just so happen to mean more than even old Mr. Sartre could have articulated within the confines of his philosophy.
The idea that hell is other people is literally true. The more a person sees another as “otherâ€, the more hellish the thoughts and actions toward that person. The ultimate perception of “otherness†is acted out in the hellish act of murder. And a person can even perceive her or his own physical being as being so other that it leads to suicide.
So, otherness works both ways. You can make yourself other or you can see other people as other. Either way, the result is hell. There is no other hell besides that hell.
In opposition to hell, heaven is a complete lack of otherness. So, in our daily lives we get varying degrees of heaven and hell depending on how much otherness we put between ourselves and others. Some of our relationships are more heavenly, others are more hellish, but all are inherently still a state of hell.
Our physical bodies are a testament to otherness. However, they are also the means to communicating and thus dissolving otherness in this world. We can punch a person, hug a person, or run away from a person and thus communicate how much or little otherness we wish to place between us. Our actions of communication are merely a reflection of our thoughts of communication. Total communication is heaven, limited or no communication is hell.
As long as a person looks no further than bodies, that person is facilitating a state of hell. Bodies are states of otherness. And in case you never noticed, bodies eventually pass. And since they pass and don’t really ever combine, they have otherness built into them.
Heaven has nothing to do with bodies or form. Heaven is a mind thing. Heaven is the state where all sense of otherness is dissolved into complete oneness. And in that state, there are no other people, all is one.
If you want heaven then the quickest way to find it is to commit to understanding others through uncompromising forgiveness–which is to say, find the otherness you see in other people in yourself and come to terms with it. Anything less is a commitment to otherness and thus varying degrees of hell. And if you don’t believe it, put it to the test.
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