What is your hell like?

[Insanus]

Like everyone else here has alluded to, it's difficult for to try and pick one particular setting or experience to describe what Hell is like, as it is more so a state of mind. I think Hell for me is a state where emotions and experiences involving fear and guilt and failure are brought to the forefront, with all the archetypal symbolism and personal traumas acting as agents to invoke as intense experience as they can.

Dreams are where they hit me the hardest as well. I think dreams are such a potent place for these things to occur because your psyche is in a much more vulnerable state than when you're awake, and it gives your ego a chance to throw all the dark parts of your subconsciousness against you in an effort to maintain its control. I guess it could be said then that Hell is the festering ground for the ego's attempt at self preservation.

Something that has been on my mind lately is that it seems sometimes that the further I progress along my own path that the more intense my Hell can become when it manifests. I've come to look at this as that the process of transcendence requires letting go, and in the process of chipping away at the smaller parts of you're ego you're eventually lead you to the center of the darkest and most resistant parts of your nature (like your own Dantean Devil that's frozen you in place now that I think about it ). Has anyone else experienced similar things? What have/did you take away from it?

I wouldn't take anything away from it, but rather work on intensifying the negative freedom because that negative & resistant nature is not wrong or bad by itself, and when "resistance resists itself" (e.g. nothing is resisted) the polar opposites (which both are negative: repelling each other) collapse into the spiritual disintegration of creation & life. I think it's something like this why "Nothing is Not" instead of "Something is". Negativity is creativity when it's not attached to shape & it's the occult sublimation process of ego, at least in my mind.

Bodhisattvas leave some desires in themselves, because higher desires help in destroying lower desires. As my oath is to Satan as well as to the bodhisattva ideal, I'd think about spiritual pride & despair as a path towards enlightenment: ego as it's own tool to get rid of itself. Anticosmic desires under love & will equals hating God & the union of lower ego with the higher trinity.

Hell is a place of intense selfishness, but the consciousness of that selfishness wants to get rid of it's own seed sort of & therefore sublimate itself or "carry the weight of the world".

[Kenaz]

Excellent responses so far. Originally when I posted my response, I had been focusing at the idea of Hell primarily as the cremation ground where one has to let go and sacrifice parts of their lower nature, but as I have had time to contemplate what I said as well as reading your responses, I was reminded of how much can be gained while being there as well.

Bodhisattvas leave some desires in themselves, because higher desires help in destroying lower desires. As my oath is to Satan as well as to the bodhisattva ideal, I'd think about spiritual pride & despair as a path towards enlightenment: ego as it's own tool to get rid of itself

And I think that ultimately leads to the recognition of the eternal paradox that the occult presents its practitioners throughout life: the greatest and most valuable tool to transcend one's ego is by using and understanding it. And it is because of this that Hell will continue to arise throughout one's journey. Even though it is a flawed thing, the ego acts as a mediator to transport us to where we seek to go, and trying to deny it completely would leave us without a sense of direction.

Limbus - endless meaningless waiting - can be worse than Hell, and hellfire can be used to get things up and running again.

Perhaps this could also be looked at as a result of trying to abandon the ego entirely instead of using it as a tool to free the self. Hell is where the lower nature is destroyed to elevate the higher parts more attuned to the Absolute, and so you feel the light of illumination as well as a fire of crucifixion, and the nature of Hell often processes the latter before the former. Trying to detach from the dual nature of that experience and only focusing on its destructive aspect destroys progress and leaves you in the stagnation of Limbo without a sense of self until its fragments can be recollected and the descent is ready to be undertaken again.

Which brings the next paradox when looking at the occult from a Satanic point of view: That the crucifixion of Christ is arguably the most potent illustration of destroying one's lower nature while elevating/releasing your higher nature simultaneously, and thus harmoniously.