Home » Games News » Hell is Other People. But Then, So Is Heaven
The ego is a disorganized complexity seeking to extract order out of conceptual chaos. Stress is a psychological fear response of an ego experiencing a lack of control over chaos. We certainly have little control over other people and this is a frightening prospect to an ego, which must predict its actions based on the actions of others.
Hell is other people.
Fear has many symptoms, from mild nervousness to paralyzing panic. It can be so debilitating as to drive ones mood down into a 'nothingness' that we often refer to as major depression. Fear can also manifest as anger and even rage and many bright minds have theorized that, when enraged, even the most mild-mannered are only a thought away from the act of murder. Of course, fear is also manifest as guilt, embarrassment, remorse, regret, etc, and these responses are primarily grounded in direct memory of past actions. In fact, some claim that it is the pressing burden of guilt alone that keeps us locked into the past, unable to break free.
Stress is always related to other people and thus, it is others that we seek to escape from in order to mitigate stress or seek relief from fear responses. It is physical proximity to others that we seek to minimize, because we believe this makes us safe from psychological fear and stress.
Let's face it, if you're alone with nature, you have no fear of judgment, whereas, with me, you may need to be vigilant to the contents of my mind which, though I may not directly disclose, you may feel forced to decipher what is masked and that can be very psychologically stressful. Therefore, it's easy to understand why so many seek the sanctity of solitude and some seek it above all else making it the most sacred of relationships.
This notion of seeking to sequester ones self-concept from other self-concepts, a sort of non-relating relationship, may very well be absurd, since the self-concept is purely abstract and is not in any sense 'real' other then what the mind determines. Yet, protecting your self-concept from "me," certainly reinforces its reality for "you" and sometimes conflict paradoxically makes us feel "alive."
If only you could be free of their judgments, but then this will mean freeing them from your own, because they will reflect back to you the contents of your mind, each and every time.
Judgment is nothing more that superimposing your past upon me as I impose my past upon you. The greatest joy we can ever experience will be in sharing a moment free of such impositions, while the greatest suffering will be imposing a past upon one another. Therefore, we are both heaven and hell to each other and any proverbial enlightenment must be mutually attained or it simply cannot happen.