Does a skilled meditator have any reason to fear hell?
I remember challenging my teacher in theology class at my Catholic high school. I asked him, “If the wafer and wine really is the body and blood of God, and the congregation believed it, wouldn’t they grovel on their hands and knees, even through broken glass and hot coals, just to be in the presence of God, and even more to consume him?” I remember also asking my mother, “Do you think people at church might fear hell more than they love heaven?”
I sometimes ask myself why I don’t go to mass anymore. I think according to Pascal’s wager, if there is only the slightest chance that it is infinitely true, then doesn’t it make rational sense to believe?
But this was before I started to learn of the East, and began to have firsthand experiences of the One and Consciousness and a higher reality that made itself known to me personally. So now I wonder, “Does a skilled meditator have any reason to fear hell?” If we carry on living in our bodies after death and experience hell this way, the same way that we experience pain here on earth, wouldn’t a skilled meditator, given enough time, simply reach nirvana and remove himself from his senses and the pain of hell and never return?