If you want to keep living in hell, treat other people the way you would never want to be treated.
Judge, abuse and criticise them and wait for the same energy to return to you.
If you want to keep living in hell, hold yourself in light and righteousness and keep your fellows at an arm’s length in darkness and condemnation.
If you want to keep living in hell, keep chasing and clinging to things, objects, people, experiences and ideas, to temporarily fill the void which you refuse to acknowledge is even there.
Keep pushing away the things, objects, people, experiences and ideas that threaten your creations.
Stay attached to clinging or rejecting.
If you want to stay in hell, never stop running.
Insist that slowing down to rest must mean that life has defeated you and therefore exhaustion must be a sign of weakness.
If you want to stay in hell, hold fast to your grievances and your stubborn beliefs.
Keep fighting what you have always fought to strengthen the enmity and hatred, never apologise, never forgive, and never, ever let go of your right to feel victimised and offended.
If you want to stay in hell, keep insisting that the world ought to conform to your ideas about how everything should change, and how you know what is best and that if only everyone did exactly as you wanted, then everything would fall neatly into place.
If you want to stay in hell, never accept yourself and your fellows for who they are.
Do not honour what you have been given, and do not honour the right of others to choose.
Fight to become more than what you are – better, stronger, more pure, more noble, more worthy.
If you want to stay in hell, give your authority away, anywhere, but only give it away where it does not threaten to touch you.
Give it to your thoughts, your family, your religion, your government.
If you want to stay in hell, insist on this game of the ever-turning wheel.
Submit to being ever thrown up and ever cast down, bound by chains of sin and chains of virtue.
Never step off this wheel on pain of disappearing into stillness and absence of definition.
*
Simon P. Murphy is the author of His Master’s Wretched Organ.
