How to Survive Life In Hell
Author: Ken Homer Issue: 2025-02-05
How to Survive Life In Hell
by Ken Homer
“What fresh Hell is this?” ~Dorothy Parker
“Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” Sign over the gates of Hell in The Divine Comedy. ~Dante Alighieri
“When you find yourself going through Hell, keep going.” ~Winston Churchill
“The biggest challenge that humans face is learning to keep our hearts open in Hell.” ~Stephen Levine
Turn on any news media and you can see Hellscapes everywhere every day.
No longer is Hell somewhere else–Gaza or Kiev or Bangladesh. Nope, Hell is now front and center right here in the good ole USA. Last fall the face of Hell appeared in Asheville, NC. And, nearly four months later, things are still tough going for residents of the area. It will take years to fully recover, if a full recovery is even possible in today’s world.
More recently we saw Los Angeles turned into Hell – literally! An inferno driven by near hurricane force winds engulfed vast swathes of the city reducing posh neighborhoods – that until recently looked like postcards of the American Dream – to ash and rubble in what will surely be the most costly and damaging fire in our nation’s history – to date.
I read that among the wealthier people who lost their homes, some are paying up to $25,000 a month for rent in temporary quarters while those of more modest means are living in tents, shelters, their cars or worse. Seems that some property owners whose houses were spared have taken a page from Uber’s playbook and instituted “surge pricing,” aka, charge whatever the market will bear. The problem with that of course, is that in a country with large income disparities, the market will bear huge prices for the few who can afford them, while the rest are consigned to wander around Hell and survive as best they can.
Speaking of wealth and money, in Washington DC another kind of Hellscape is taking shape. The MAGA-dominated faction of the government of The United States of America is raising Hell by calling for democratic-leaning California to offer up concessions in order for Congress to free up Federal disaster money to alleviate the suffering of people of all political persuasions. It seems the billionaires, who now enjoy a level of power not seen since The Gilded Age, don’t want to let this crisis go to waste. The message is stark, if your state didn’t vote red, you can drop dead. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. As things stand now, it sure looks like we can expect a lot more Hell to come.
I could go on listing examples of how us-humans – including a large number of self-identified Christians whose mission is supposed to be the creation of Heaven on Earth – are actively creating Hell on Earth. But if you are even vaguely aware of what’s unfolding these days, you already know that things are bad. As Lily Tomlin once said, things are going to get worse before they get worse. And now we see how right she was.
All this brings me to the quotes that appear at the start of this post.
**What fresh Hell is this? ** IMO, the question is better stated as: what old Hell is gaining new ground? Answer: greed, hatred, and delusion – which are The Three Poisons of the mind that The Buddha identified some 2,600 years ago. While the forms have changed, the essence remains the same. Those with some Buddhist background will recognize the validity of the teaching that form is not other than emptiness and emptiness is not other than form.
**Abandon all hope ye who enter here. ** I couple this with an anecdote from either Band of Brothers or Ken Burns’ The War. A year after the Normandy Invasion, new troops were coming to the front. A battle-hardened vet told a newbie something along the lines of, if you want to survive, you have to assume you are already dead. Otherwise, your fear will overwhelm you and surely cost you your sanity and likely your life. There is wisdom in abandoning hope while holding fast to the faith that what you do matters; that’ll help you access to your resources when you need them.
As we enter the second half of the second decade of the Third Millenium, we all have to assume a similar mindset; we have already lost so much of what we hold dear that the only way to stay connected to our sources of courage is to love life as fiercely as possible.
***When you find yourself going through Hell, keep going. *** There is nothing on the horizon that looks like a rescue party headed our way. We live in a nobody-in-charge world. The likelihood of a deity or an alien intelligence or a great leader arising to save our collective asses is infinitesimally small and cannot be counted on. We can’t allow ourselves the luxury of believing that someone or something else will come along and resolve the many interlocking messes in which us-humas are currently embedded. Us-humans made these messes; us-humans have to unmake them. Notice that there are no “others” in the collective of “us-humans”, so we best stop all our othering and get to figuring out how to live in what remains of the world as it is before it’s too late.
***The biggest challenge that us-humans face is keeping our hearts open in Hell. *** As more and more of our lovely planet is turned into active Hellscapes, anger, outrage, and despair are natural responses. To secure a future worth living into, us-humans will have to find it within ourselves to look with compassion at those we are inclined to see as responsible for the destruction and devastation rising around us. We need to identify and speak to their suffering lest we amplify the trauma from which they are operating. We’ll need access to the better angels of our nature in order to act, as Abraham Lincoln so eloquently put it, “with malice toward none and charity for all.”
The work of making a world where all can thrive is possible. But to get there us-humans have to traverse and unmake the Hell we’ve created. If you see the current situation as impossible, then necessity dictates that us-humans have no choice but to do the impossible. Collectively learning to slow down and reverse an extinction event by the species responsible for it is now an evolutionary imperative for Homo Sapiens Sapiens. We must become Homo Sapiens Sapiens Sapiens or thrice knowing primates.
That’s a tall order… Gonna be Hell getting there. So, let’s each of us undertake the practice of being the reason that someone else has the courage to keep their heart open in Hell.
Ken Homer • February 2025
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