Hitherby Dragons

[jrtom]

Found on silenceleigh's LJ, a reference to an ongoing...something...called Hitherby Dragons:

Not that," I said. "That's a stupid kind of Hell."

"Oh?" it asked. "What is Hell, then?"

"It's not torture," I said. "Pain is just sensation. I mean, humans are really good at this kind of thing, and demons are even better, and I'm sure that you can always make torture last one day longer and make it one note harder to bear. But pain is just sensation. Torture is just sensation. It's not suffering until it makes you suffer. And Hell is eternal suffering."

"What is suffering?"

"Suffering is when you can't accept the pain," I said. "And it's normally self-limiting, because people automatically accept the pain they're used to. Most humans are so used to walking around at the bottom of an atmosphere that we forget how much it hurts. And we're so used to not having our jaws ripped off every few days that we forget how nice and amazingly cool that never happening is. But sometimes you can't accept the pain. You want to fly. You want to transcend. You want an apple and you can't have one. You want the pain to stop. You want something. You want something that's right, and proper, and something that you can't have. And that's suffering."

"So what is Hell?"

"A place where there's something you can't let go of," I said. "It's a place where there's something so bad that you can't accept it. Where there's something you don't have that's strong enough to cling to forever and ever. It's a place where you can't just close your eyes and let go of the pain and the fear. It's a place where there's something you can't stop wanting."

I don't know how representative the quote is, but I suspect that if it is, at least a couple of my friends will find significance there.

Comments

[hypgnosis.livejournal.com]

And I opened up the box, and put a part of myself inside it, and it contained room after room after room in Borgesian endlessness. I had been told, "There is an infinity of hell dimensions," but had never taken it personally until now.

I tried to run to the end, only to discover that the Duck of Doom had gotten into Mathemagicland, and I was not equal to the task. Reasoning in these terms reminded me that if I was imaginary, so were my problems. So I pulled out my yarrow-sticks, and laid Hexagram 68, one of the forbidden hexagrams of the I Ching, the hexagram of Emptiness.

Faster than one can lick an I-scream koan, I was granted No-Mind. Attachments vanished in a puff of disillusionment, leaving me detached. There was nothing I wanted badly enough to not accept its absence. I was spat out, the trapped piece of me rejoining the fullness.

Now I had the power of thinking, outside the box.