This past weekend I listened (for the fourth time) to a show about Pastor Carlton Pearson on NPR’s This American Life. Pearson rose to the pinnacle of preaching as a Christian Evangelical bishop, then was declared a heretic and banished from his church when he had an epiphany about hell — that it does not exist except as a condition in the here and now, perpetrated by people on themselves and others.

Today Pearson is the senior pastor of New Dimensions Worship Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he preaches a “Gospel of Inclusion.” If you want to know more about any of this, go to Pearson's website.  And if you want to listen to the riveting radio program, click here.

The reason that I’m writing about this is that I’ve been in and out of hell for a couple of weeks, and listening to Pearson, I realized that I (a spiritual-but-not-religious, former agnostic, sometimes atheist, delinquent meditator with the firm conviction that something that I call “God” exists and that knowing it/being one with it/being a conduit for its energy of Love is the most important thing I have to do) … I’ve lost track of that sentence … the hell with it, I’ll start a new one.

Thanks to the fact that I’ve been in and out of hell a lot recently, I’ve realized that I have a whole lot in common with Evangelical Christians.

Pearson said that the possibility of burning for eternity is the driving force for an awful lot of people. My version of that driving negative force is the nightmare that I might waste my life by not “doing it right,” and therefore I will fail at being human and properly approaching enlightenment. And if I don’t do better, if I don’t meditate, if I don’t, don’t, don’t — the worrying about which, makes me even more delinquent — Need I say more? This is hell. I know it well.

However there is one nice thing about being delinquent (also known as easy-going) about spiritual practices:  my hell doesn’t last long. I feel really bad, then think of something silly and laugh, or go for a walk, or get excited about something, and I forget all about being a failure at life.

The January/February issue of S&H (which ships to subscribers next week) explains my wafts and wanes as “normal” in an amazing article by neuroscientist Peggy La Cerra. Peggy explains what drives us to do anything. (I know this is mean, but I’m not going to tell you what that is. You’ll have to read the article. Believe me, Peggy says it a lot better in a feature than I could in a quick blog, so maybe you’ll thank me for this.)

I’ve been reading a tremendous amount of neuroscience lately. I think Carlton Pearson would love a lot of what I’ve been reading. It gives you a bigger picture of what we can and can’t know, and it’s actually making me less delinquent at meditation. It helps to know what your dendrites are doing when you repeat a mantra. When you know what you’re doing, you can do it better … and you want to do it … and then you take a big leap out of hell.