Hell Fire and Hell Rock are aspects of Hell Central at the centre of the earth. The foundation of all these, at the foot of the earth, is Hell Bottom, both the deepest part of hell and the nearest to the way out.
The soul descends a hell of evolutionary forms - gas, stone, vegetable, worm, fish, bird, animal - to the wingless"half-trained but bone fossil armoured" angel that is the human form. This is the form the soul must learn to fly through the heavens. Each terrifyingly subhuman form is experienced here with human consciousness - a recapitulation of one's entire mineral, vegetable and animal ancestry, of one's entire evolution to date - that is what makes it hell. The soul then endures the further hell of having to explain the entire project. Finally the underground train arrives at the end of hell and the angel Abdiel helps the soul along the track and through the stone floor at the bottom of hell, where the sun (Love, God) is rising above the frozen mountains of Antarctica and beckoning it up into the heavens.
Form and technique
OM and Q are Bond movie versions of the primal sound and the quest of the soul to find itself.
There are three sections to Hell Bottom. The first is a ghazal listing the dead forms one has inhabited through evolution (gas, stone, vegetable, worm, fish, bird, animal) and all the sub-human living one has done in human form. This is described as astro-knight training.
The second is a lesson where the soul has to make conscious and make sense of the journey of the soul, to explain Everything - the mystical relationship of the soul (Atma) to the Oversoul (Paramatma) as elaborated in the source books 'God Speaks' and 'The Nothing and The Everything' - in a few sentences and under the pressure of a time limit. To explain in reason what is beyond reason, putting the mind through a set of divining gymnastics. This is a necessary exertion of critical human reason; it (a seeing faith not a lazily blind one) leads to the home-longing howl and into the revelation of the third section
The third section is a vision by the angel Abdiel. But is that a hell in his hello? He changed sides during the civil war in heaven but which way? The mind and heart have to judge this by his actions. He guides the exhausted mind beyond itself (and the hell we have made of Earth) along the underground track down through the back gate/ stone floor of hell and onto the foothills of the frozen underground mountains of Antarctica. A ghazal couplet repeated in increasingly human tones anticipates the lover's further progress ( up a rising musical scale) towards Heaven's Gate, through which shines the Sun/Love.
The allegory
ALL I DO'S WHAT I AM AND ALL I AM'S WHAT I DO AND CAN'T UNDO TO UNBECOME.
This is a hell of explanation. Explanation depends on that development of our animal instincts of self-interest (the survival instinct) and unselfish care of our young - into human reason, which has a much more complex and conflicted sense of self (and other). Love enters and complicates the equation. This is partly wonder and partly torture. Poetry like all the arts is a highly developed craft for speculation beyond mere survival and self-interest, but to try as genuine poetry does to make conscious all the conflicting aspects of self and other and resolve them into a coherent human vision (an eternal value adapting to changing times) is a severe test. But it is how we reach the stone floor/back gate of hell and the impossible task of getting through it, how we honestly acknowledge all our limits and the love alone that will get us beyond them.
27 years in classrooms explaining language and literature to the next generation still give me occasional nightmares about the difficulty of making even such relatively settled matters clear. Here at the bottom of hell - its entire foundation -the human mind itself is wrestled with, manipulating it and exercising and exorcising it it beyond endurance until it is ready to serve the quest of following the heart's soaring, not indeed as a sedated defeated passenger but as an active continually straining consciousness, an alert companion.
Reason at its height gets you out of hell. It does so by giving you a vision of heaven's gate. Dante suggested as much by making the pagan humanist Virgil his guide through hell and purgatory to the edge of heaven (where he faltered and had to be replaced as a guide by Beatrice.) You certainly don't get out of hell without reason. To get through the gates of heaven requires more than reason - a lover's leap of love of faith. Nevertheless once you know that's where you need to go, reason can still tell you how to get there.
lyrics
OM calls Q, ‘This hopeless Solo Bond, this drop out from Ocean,
Make his homeless-bound vessel the Ark of Evolution.
God’s original design meets my final solution.
I’m a shocked shell of trench gas, a bubble of poison.
Here all dreams and desires, finest feelings and great thoughts
Turn to stone in unendingly spine-chilling boredom.
Here my mettle is tested, it endures a fatigue
That would crack up a spacecraft of sun-tempered tungsten.
Cauliflowering growths turn me, root over brain-stem,
To the scream of a vegetable torn from its Eden.
I am crawling with maggots, alive with arachnids,
From my pelvis’s pain-crack I mother a python.
Now my brain twists to tentacles, squirming in shelled dread
Making jelly of heroes, my mouth fanging open.
If I dream I’m a beak flying out of this world,
I am clawed back, like carrion, my catches unsung.
Am an animal, tortured to hurt beyond hide, heart, howl
Or the jaw-grip of reason, to chew Love’s conundrum.
Man’s petrified mightbes, ands, buts – there’s no truth here:
Just a brain in a flood-tank, a drop in an ocean.
Wingless Angel, you’re half-trained but bone-fossil-armoured:
Agent Who-do Do-be do-be isn’t you, so have done.
"My Hell is having to explain something. I'm in a room. I've got everything to say, and I don't know how to say it. Though the whole room has been set up by me to say the OM sound....which is my cue for the lines I have, explaining what OM is. Then I suddenly realise that not only have I not got those lines in front of me, or in my head, but I haven't even written them. But I will try. In the beginning, a divine Whim surged through the ocean of Unconsciousness. It created bubbles, infinite numbers of bubbles, on the surface of the Ocean. Now those bubbles are the individual souls inside them is endless suffering and little joy, all of it illusory, because when the bubbles burst, they all return to the Ocean they never really left, only this time, consciously, infinitely conscious of the Ocean.
Hello! I'm Abdiel, the rebel angel, the only angel to change sides during the civil war in heaven. You're probably wondering where you are. You're in devil's bottom, the bowels of hell, the empty frozen heart of the earth. Not the centre of the earth, that was the hell fire you passed through earlier, but its bottom line, its fundamental basis, its cold hard stone foundation. You're at the very bottom of hell in earth, the terminus, you need to get off here and walk along the track. Don't forget to leave all your belongings. This is the end of nothing, you have reached the lowest point of your sub-humanity, through six degrees of separation from God and each other. On your right are the Somme/Auschwitz/Hiroshma wastelands; on your left is what you have made of the earthly Paradise; in your nostrils is the poison fartgas of the most anally retentive control freaks of all time. Below you is the stone floor of hell, a planet thick, the solidified might of all you have ever done or been. But have hope. This floor is the back gate of hell, the way out. Just as hell mouth is an anus, its gate a hopeless trap, so its anus is a real end, a honest mouth for the Word. You have touched your baseness, plumbed your hell depths, the apparent foundation of your being. To enter heaven you now have only to do the impossible, to break through this titanic floor. Only Love has the energy to do this. Love is the one verb that does not petrify, the one action that does not add another layer to all this solidified might, the one predicate not fossilised by its subject 'I'.
All I do's what I am and all am's what I do and can't undo to unbecome.
But how in hell do you love? How on earth do you break through this vicious circle, these hell layers of Ego, your ancestral mineral, vegetable and animal past lingering on and consolidated through ages of (sub) human action. You do what you were and are what you did, forever. Well luckily heaven is with you too. (A deeply buried memory.)
Oh Love, your morning is so bright, 'I love you loses its "I'
And you in long nights of longing, my blazed eye leading the blind.
Beneath the foundation of your frozen sub humanity is your still deeper real self. Keep drilling down until you emerge from the frozen sub-terrain out onto the purgatorial foothills of Mount Eden on the other side of the world. There as you will now experience, the deeper you go the higher you fly. You are climbing up and above the frozen mountains of Antarctica and towards the Sun.
Oh Love, your morning is so bright, 'I love you loses its "I'
And 'you' in long nights of longing, my blazed eye leading the blind.
Welcome to Heaven. Seven levels of divining human being, even more human than the last, but please drive carefully. Your inner spacecrafts are powerful beyond your wildest dreams and the heavens so enchanting you can get lost in them forever. Keep your eye on the destination. Only the seventh heaven is real.
Oh Love, your morning is so bright, 'I love you loses its "I'
And 'you' in long nights of longing, my blazed eye leading the blind.
Next stop, Heaven's Gate. All change.
credits
from Dr Who Am I and the Zen Trails of Hafiz (album),
released July 10, 2021
Abdiel: literally servant of God, appears in Milton's Paradise Lost as the only member of Lucifer's legions who remains faithful to God. He stands alone against the multitude, but with God. He speaks in the root accent of my West Country childhood, not just because it reminds me of the Sunday School I attended but because life was a lot simpler then, at any rate for me.
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