According to Osho, hell is not a geographical place but a psychological state born of fear and its twin, greed—tools priests used to control people. Anger, hatred, and anxiety are hell; love is heaven. Both are within you each moment. True religion transcends both—moksha: freedom from fear, greed, and mind.
Hell isn’t a place you go; it’s how you feel when fear and anger rule you—and you can choose differently.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, what is hell? Is there really such a place?
If you have intelligence, awareness, even in hell you can manage to air-condition it. That's what I am doing. Can't you see the hell all around? But somehow I have got a few people banded together and we are trying to create a small heaven of our own. What to do? People have decided to live in hell, they are not ready to listen, then the only wise choice is: we can create our own heaven. And if we can create our own heaven, that will become an example, a model, that this way also one can live. When people come for the first time to our commune they are surprised. Just the other day a young priest wrote a letter to me, a Catholic priest, who now has become interested in me, and wants to get married, and wants to get rid of the Catholic church. He has written…
Does hell really exist?
Praying to Christ -- and for seven days he had not slept, thinking the whole night, thinking the whole day -- he fell asleep before the statue of Christ and he had a dream. In the dream he saw a train ready to leave for heaven. He jumped in. He said, "This is perfectly right. Why shouldn't I go there and see with my own eyes? If I see Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, Tamburlaine, in heaven, then the question is solved. Or if I see Socrates, who did not believe in God but was one of the most virtuous of men, if I see Gautama the Buddha, who did not believe in God but was one of the most godly persons who ever walked on the earth, then the question is solved." He rushed into the train and the train left. He reached heaven. He was a little surprised, puzzled,…
Is there really a hell?
Heaven and hell are only two sides of your mind. The religions that were born outside India have remained with these two ideas, heaven and hell. They could not rise above them. Judaism, Christianity, Islam -- all the three religions born outside India, have no idea of something transcendental. In India we have a third word MOKSHA, NIRVANA. Hell is a wrong psychology, ill, abnormal, neurotic, pathological; heaven is a right psychology, normal, healthy. But there is a beyond where you are no more a mind, when both sides of the mind have been dropped, where you are a no-mind, where you are neither negative nor positive, where you are neither dark nor light, where you are neither this nor that -- where you are just a witness to all, to misery and bliss, to all, just a witness, where you are not identified with either misery OR bliss, where…
Beloved Osho, the scientists went into space and reached different planets, but they are not yet able to locate heaven and hell. Could you tell me, where is heaven and where is hell?
They will never locate heaven and hell anywhere. They are fictions, lies told to humanity to keep it enslaved, to console it in its suffering and torture, to prevent it from any revolution that could change the whole scene on the earth. But in a certain sense, those words are significant. They are usable but only for your psychology, not for your geography. And you know perfectly well where they are. Everybody knows moments when he is in hell and moments when he is in heaven. These are states of the mind. Most of the time you are in hell. Once in a while, on the weekend, perhaps you have a little bit of heaven too. That little bit of heaven is dangerous. It keeps you in hell, hoping for that little bit of heaven: "Tomorrow it will be coming. So it is only a question of somehow passing today,…
Your religion has to be not out of fear, but out of love. Don't be afraid of hell -- there is no hell, there never has been. It is a fiction created by the priests to exploit humanity, and they have exploited humanity for centuries. And there is no heaven either. It is the other side of hell; the other side of the fiction, That is to exploit your greed, Greed and fear are not different phenomena but two sides of the same coin; the fearful person is always greedy, the greedy person is always fearful. In fact they are not two energies at all but two poles of the same energy. Just like negative and positive poles of electricity, inseparably together. There is no heaven either. Yes, there is a certain kind of hell and heaven, but that is psychological, within you.