This is not going to help. Why don’t you become a sannyasin? Then there will be no need to bother about nirvana because you will enter it immediately. Then it will not be a question of tomorrow. You can look at my sannyasins. Nobody is worried about nirvana – they are already in it. To be a sannyasin means to be in nirvana. A sannyasin does not need to enter into nirvana; nirvana enters into him. Hence wherever he is nirvana is. You can throw him into hell, but he will be in nirvana; it will not make any difference at all. If your nirvana depends upon certain conditions it is not much of a nirvana.

Nirvana is a state of unconditional acceptance. Wherever you are, if you can accept your life with totality, with joy, with gratitude, if you can see your life as a gift, then nirvana is never a problem. The problem arises only because you don’t accept your life, you reject life. And the moment you reject life you start looking for some other life and you become worried about whether it is going to be better than this life or not. It may be worse. That’s what hell is: the fear of a worse life than this. And that is nirvana: the greed for a better life than this. But there is no other life; there is no hell, no heaven. Only fools are interested in such things.

But you being an Indian are brought up with the idea of a geographical concept of heaven somewhere above and hell somewhere below. In fact, there is no below and no above. Existence is unlimited, unbounded; there is no bottom to it and no roof either. Something can be above the roof of Buddha Hall – for example, this plane passing by; this is “above” the roof. You are below the roof and the ground, the floor, is below you and the earth is below the floor. But existence has no roof, no bottom; it is unbounded on all sides.

What Indian scriptures say about hell is nothing but talk about America! If right now you dig a hole wherever you are sitting here and go on digging you will reach to America, because the earth is round. But the Americans also think in the same geographical way, that hell is below. If they look into the hole, you will be in hell. You will think they are in hell and they will think you are in hell. And only my sannyasins will laugh at the whole affair. Who is above and who is below?

These heaven/hell concepts have nothing to do with geography or space, and they don’t have anything to do with time either. So it is not a question of tomorrows, not a question of something after death; it is a question of understanding, it is a question of meditation, it is question of becoming utterly silent, herenow. There is no other space than the here and no other time than the now. These two words contain the whole existence: now, here.

Swami Rama Teertha used to tell a beautiful parable:

There was a great philosopher; he was an absolute atheist, continuously arguing against God. Twenty-four hours a day he was concerned with destroying the idea of God. Whosoever came to him he would try to convince.