The Holding Room

December 30, 2018 0 By Lance Kelly

The holding room is the place of the comings and goings of life which enable the whole remarkable system of existence to function. Within the holding room is life waiting to enter existence and the place where life returns at death, having experienced the sensory living process. This is the band of hell. Each new life recurrence passes through hell at birth and is apportioned, according to karma, a segment of the collective past of humanity; this will manifest as the difficulties and challenges to be lived out in future time. But at this phase of existence there’s no suffering – only the feverish anticipation to live as sensual life in the flesh.

Hell was once perceived from the external senses as a fiery cauldron of human suffering and damnation. In today’s lexicon it could be likened more to the first instant of a nuclear explosion or the aftermath of the death of a star. Only self burns in hell. Self is the corrosive energy of the past which consists of emotional negativity in varying degrees of attachment. Hell provides the reflection, either while alive or at death, to be purged of the emotional appetites that went beyond the acceptable thresholds associated with human experience.

For human beings, hell is a place we all know and, if we appear to forget, it’s okay; for when the time comes to become reacquainted, there’s no mistaking where I am or what now must be confronted. The spiritual process intensifies when an individual has reached a stage where they are willing to endure the burning out of their impurities of self. Here, on the periphery of existence in the intensity of space, there can be a sense of despair and utter helplessness. But through the virtue of being consciously in this place, an individual is inwardly prepared for the task.

Pressure at this level of self-annihilation is so extreme that the intensity of emotional pain keeps the mind riveted to the immediacy of now; this continually releases any build-up of resistance. The fear is not the pain which must be valiantly borne, but the giving up of the personal interpretation of the world as a fixed structure that endures. To perceive the truth of this is to grasp the idea that I, alone, am my world; and when it is time for my body to die, the world as a projection in sense disappears and I go on. Whether embodied or disembodied I am my reality, as determined by my knowledge of life.

The energetic body of humanity is a sphere of consciousness which, in sensory perception, is represented by the view of the earth from outer space. The level closest to the surface level of mind consists of the pain and struggle of the experience of life on earth. The deeper level of the psyche is the beginning of what could be called the first heaven and contains the more enlightened energies of humanity. Everyone while alive is either in heaven or in hell – which is a definition of the human condition. The idea of the spiritual life is to purify the inner space of the subconscious by descending through the confusion and wilfulness of the personal self. This is to realise both hell and heaven, the agony and the ecstasy, as a divine state of equilibrium.