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There is no heaven and there is no hell. They are not geographical, they are part of your psychology. They are psychological.

To live a life of spontaneity, truth, love and beauty is to live in heaven. To live a life of hypocrisy, lies and compromises, to live according to others, is to live in hell. To live in freedom is heaven, and to live in bondage is hell.

You can decorate your prison cell beautifully, but that makes no difference, it is still a prison cell. And that’s what people have been doing, they go on decorating their prison cell. They give it beautiful names, they go on painting it, putting new pictures on the walls, arranging the furniture in new ways, purchasing more and more things – but they live in prisons.

Your marriage is a prison, your church is a prison, your nationality is a prison. How many prisons you have created! You are not living in one prison, your prisons are like Chinese boxes: a box within a box within a box within a box, it goes on. You are like an onion: peel it, another layer; peel that, another layer. Destroy one prison and you find another inside. This is what hell is.

To reach the very core of the onion, where all layers have been dropped and there is only nothingness in your hands, that is freedom, nirvana, bodhichitta. The consciousness of a buddha, the pure consciousness of a buddha, that is heaven.

And my idea of heaven is not something far away, a heaven in the sky where only angels live. Do you know that angels don’t perspire? They don’t need any deodorants. And do you know, in heaven there are no pubs, because pubs are not needed. There are rivers of wine, so you can jump into the rivers and drink to your heart’s content. And there are beautiful women who never grow old, who are stuck at the age of eighteen. Centuries and centuries have passed, but they are stuck at the age of eighteen. They have golden bodies. Just think of it! It looks more like a nightmare. Golden bodies? With eyes of sapphire?

No, that is not my idea of heaven. In that way, I am an old Jew.

The minister said to his friend, “Rabbi, I dreamed of a Jewish heaven the other night. It was very lifelike, and it seemed to me to suit the Jewish ideal very well. It was a crowded tenement district with Jewish people everywhere. There were clothes on lines from every window, women on every stoop, pushcart peddlers on every corner, children playing stick-ball on every street. The noise and confusion were so great that I woke up.”

The rabbi said, “By a strange coincidence, Father Williams, I dreamed the other night of an Episcopalian heaven. It was very lifelike, and it seemed to me just the ideal of Episcopalians. It was a neat suburb, with well-spaced English Tudor and manor houses, with beautiful lawns, each with its own flowerbed, with clean wide tree-lined streets, and all was suffused in warm sunshine.” The vicar smiled. “And the people?” “Oh,” murmured the rabbi, “there were no people.”

My idea of heaven is not unearthly. Heaven is here – you just have to know how to live it. And hell too is here, and you know perfectly well how to live it. It is only a question of changing your perspective, your approach toward life.

The earth is beautiful. If you start living its beauty, enjoying its joys with no guilt in your heart, you are in paradise. If you condemn everything, every small joy, if you become a condemner, a poisoner, then the same earth turns into a hell – but only for you. It depends on you where you live, it is a question of your own inner transformation. It is not a change of place, it is a change of inner space.

Live joyously, guiltlessly, live totally, live intensely. Then heaven is no longer a metaphysical concept, it is your own experience.

Enough for today.