One of the trial games included on the GAMES FOR THE MIND THAT WON’T SHUT THE #@&* UP! page is THE LANGUAGE OF HEAVEN, HELL & PURGATORY. Today, as I was rowing across Richardson Bay, I considered the people who occupy those three states of mind: “Friend, Enemy & Useless.”
When life is Heaven, then everyone who shows up on the landscape must be a Friend, someone arriving to add more joy, more abundance, more laughter, more wonder, more information, more of whatever we are seeking or savoring in that moment. Knowing this, we welcome the people we see and greet them with interest, respect and the expectancy of goodness. That they come in character is not a problem for the Heaven state of mind. We can see people who appear cranky, mean, irascible, or unhelpful like chidren in Halloween costumes. Their outward appearances cannot dissuade us from knowing that we are in Heaven. And that state of mind facilitates the extraction of whatever we desire from the moment. Heaven Mind allows us to always choose our own actions in the interaction. Also, we needn’t change their experience of the moment to get what we desire. They can leave as cranky or mean as they came, while we go our way enjoying the benefit of the encounter.
In Hell Mind, everyone is an Enemy. Hell does not nurture allies, and there is no such thing as a friend. We may be momentarily in a foxhole with someone who also hates the commute or the company we work for, the president or global warming, but sooner or later one of us will say something that reveals us as enemies, too. In Hell, we watch every move everyone makes, knowing in time they will turn against us. Anything said surely has a devious subtext, and we spend a lot more time analyzing for that malicious meaning then remembering what was actually said. And, in order to know when the tables have turned, we keep lists of wrongs, decades’-long lists of what was said or done to us. Through long and sleepless, hellish nights, we scheme about how to balance the scales with our own devious retribution.
Purgatory Mind is the state of no escape, no beneficial change, no growth, and no reprieve. We, ourselves, are helpless and hopeless, so anyone who shows up here is just as helpless, hopeless and, no doubt, useless. In fact, any new person will probably just add to our burden and our grief. Useless people litter the landscape, blocking traffic, screwing up our reservations, losing our luggage, giving us the wrong haircut and generally making a mess of everything. Just the sight of a new face in Purgatory is enough to go catatonic with the expectation of more trouble.
In which realm are you living now? Noticing your perceptions of the people passing by can give you clues to the world you’ve chosen for this moment. Who do you see? Friend, Enemy or just one more useless being.