I do not believe in a physical hell. Torturing people eternally would be a crime worse than anything Hitler did. At least those torments had an end.
When I look at ancient symbols like “hell,” I am searching to find the insights for living that were somehow helpful in an earlier time. I then try to repackage those insights in a way that will help people today. The insight for living is the kernel. The actual image used to symbolize the insight is but a husk.
The symbol “hell” may have developed to express human fears of time itself. Time itself can seem like a cosmic furnace devouring us all. Perhaps the original question was how to pass through the fires of time with our souls intact.
There is a quote attributed to Christian mystic Meister Eckhardt. I love the quote but it may not be authentic. (It may be just be placed in the mouth of Eckhardt in the movie “Jacob’s Ladder.”) Either way, I find the quote very helpful:
“The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won’t let go of your life: your memories, your attachments. They burn ’em all away. But they’re not punishing you,’ he said. ‘They’re freeing your soul. If you’re frightened of dying, and your holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. If you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth.”
There is a sense in which time consumes everything we would hold onto. When we try to possess and control life, it can feel like we are being tortured. Life can feel like hell as every beloved person and object is torn from our clutching fingers one after another.
The Buddha warn against pretending that we live outside of time in his famous “Fire Sermon” (The Adittapariyaya Sutta):
“The mind is burning, ideas are burning, mind-consciousness is burning, mind-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with mind-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion. I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.”
The symbols of religion must teach our hearts that life is a mixture of beauty and pain. They must also affirm that the beauty is worth the pain. We are not being punished by life’s changes. Entering into the fire of time was the pre-condition of our very birth.
Salvation is not escape from the fire. Salvation is realizing that life IS change. Salvation is realizing we ARE the fire, not what is being burned. The creative principle that brings us into being is not an object we can possess, it is more like an eternal cosmic heart we must live out of fearlessly and completely. We must learn to love the fire in all of its ephemeral shapes and know there is one love burning within it all.