Hell
While writing the previous post I was wondering if there was a deeper reason why the worst thing that can happen to you in Sweden is that something could be boring or tedious. I started thinking about when I was in confirmation class and my father told us about Hell. Hell is a metaphor of course, but one basis for the concept is a real place, a valley outside of Jerusalem that was used as a garbage dump and which would sometimes catch on fire. One of the prevalent definitions today is that hell is the absence of God, or hope, a state of loneliness. One interesting point is that in nordic myths hell is a place where it is cold and foggy, whereas in religions originating in the middle east (Judaism, Islam, Christianity) it is portrayed as being extremely hot.
posted by Matt_J @ 9:27 PM
1 Comments:
Joseph Campbell sez that hell is a state of "clinging fiercely to your ego"
That is, it is a state of thinking the temporal world and your position in it is all there is.
That is you get to hell without even dying if you suffer from attachments and don't have the tools to deal with them appropriately.
In a sense, we all get to burn in hell a little bit every day.
In Sweden, apparently, the state of being bored is the worst hell. Makes sense to me because being bored is a form of attachment, of being stuck in the temporal world with no way out.
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