Choosing Leads To Hell, Whereas Love Emerges With Choiceless Awareness

Sunday, 17 May 2026, 4:04 pm
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

There’s a scene in the classic Paul Newman western, “Hombre,” in which two men look down from a shack in which they’re trapped upon a woman tied to stake in the desert heat, crying out ever more weakly for help as she slowly dies of thirst.

One of the men asks, “Where is God?” The other man, who happens to be the woman’s greedy, lifeless husband, replies flatly, “There is no God.”

With acid curiosity the first man responds, “And no hell either?” “Oh there’s hell alright,” the husband says as he walks away.

It’s interesting to contrast this philosophical view of hell, which could be called realist, with the worldview at the core of the film, “The Black Swan,” for which Natalie Portman won a well-deserved Oscar.

This muddled thriller is a study in solipsism, the belief that the only thing we can be sure exists, and have any true knowledge of, is the self. Indeed, Black Swan embodies the view that evil is entirely self-made, reflecting the popular notion that darkness can only be understood in the context of the separate self.

Like most truisms, that’s half-true. The true half is that human self-centeredness created hell over countless generations. The false half is that no individual, no matter how vile, is entirely the maker of his or her hell, just another adder in it and to it.

Without giving Black Swan away, the movie turns on the dilemma of a repressed, virginal young ballet dancer, shattered by her struggle to embody both the good, white swan, and the evil, black swan. The movie is a mess, but it manages to push the psychologization of evil to its logical end. In short, the message is, it’s all in your head honey.

To be sure, hell is made by human consciousness, but it can and does manifest beyond the individual. Though the doomed denizens of Auschwitz must have often thought they were having a nightmare, the showers and ovens were a reality not of their making.

Is it possible to find out what, if any, actual meaning hell has, without an element of punishment, or even judgment?

The question seems oxymoronic. How can there be hell without punishment? How can there be hell without judgment?

But I submit that it’s only when we divest ourselves of these psycho-spiritual shadows that we can peer into the bottomless darklands of hell during life, and, if it exists, after life.

I concur with Dostoevsky, who saw hell not as a place of fire and brimstone, but as an internal state of suffering and the inability to love. But I diverge from Dostoevsky in his belief that love is a choice. To my mind and experiencing, love flows into and through one with choiceless awareness of what is.

Hell is a byproduct of evil in human life, a hopeless place full of dead souls here and in the hereafter. It is not an infinite sentence of damnation, a place of eternal punishment. Hell is a manifestation of man’s consciousness, both in life and perhaps in some form, after life.

Though supposedly good people want to see bad people punished forever in an imagined afterlife for the sum of their sins during life, cosmic intelligence has no such calculus.

There is a dimension of immense suffering beyond the individual certainly, but it originates in the many and manifests in the world. So if there is a Hades, it’s a place of continuous suffering and separation, starting from and oozing back into the world.

Indeed, where it used to be said, “War is hell,” it now appears that hell and this world have become a distinction without a difference.

No matter how badly a person has lived however, it’s never too late for the living to avoid going completely to hell. That’s why, without making prisons into places of “cruel and unusual punishment,” and sanctioning state murder, there is reason to simply remove and imprison the most violent and vicious offenders.

I don’t believe cosmic intelligence can release a soul from hell. Only human beings can, through exemplary acts of forgiveness. So the living can free the dead from the perpetual holding pens they’ve put themselves into -- though we first have to forgive and free ourselves from our own internal suffering and hell.

Then, since “reincarnation is a fact but not the truth,” perhaps the denizens of hell can return and begin to atone for the harm they’ve done in previous lives.

It doesn’t really matter whether there’s hell after death anyway, since man, who made hell to begin with, has given rise to it on earth in the 21st century.

My directive when faced with conduits of collective darkness is that the evil that courses through them be dispelled and dissolved, and that the darkness within them be reflected strongly enough to them to keep them in their lanes. Given that intent by a sufficient number of living human beings in this dead land, can America, with its current cacatocracy, be exorcized?

In the end, I think it’s harder to forgive living people that keep doing harm than it is the dead in hell.

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail