What is heaven and what is hell? || Acharya Prashant, on Niralamba Upanishad (2014)

Swarg iti cha satsansargah swargah

Narak iti cha asat sansaar vishay jansansarga eva narakah

– Niralamba Upanishad

{Heaven is the association with the holy.Association with the worldly folk who are unholy, alone is hell.}

Acharya Prashant: ‘Heaven’ and ‘hell’ are obviously not geographies.

What is it that you call as ‘holy’? That which is untainted, uncorrupted. And obviously you call that as ‘holy’ because there is something within you which gives you that definition. There is something within you which demands cleanliness, there is something within you which does not like dirt, corruption and conditioning.

So what you call as ‘holy’ is demanded by something which is of the same ‘holy’ nature and is already present in you. Had you not been holy at all, you could not have demanded the ‘holy’. You would have been satisfied with all the dirt and filth that comes along in life. But we dislike all that. It becomes a load on the mind. We do not like it, we remain dissatisfied. We want something clean, pristine, like this sheet of snow all around.