The Truth about Heaven and Hell
What happens when a person either can't or won't shoulder responsibility for their lifewhen they fail to grow into their potential to manifest divine Presence
, and die this way?
Jesus' response was that this life isn't the end of the story. There will follow a resurrection, and then what he called the "judgment."
The resurrection is spiritual, not material. St. Paul makes this abundantly clear in the 15th chapter of his letter to the people of Corinth. In resurrection, transformation happens. The world is transformed by and into the divine Presence that has always been our core.
Let me attempt to make sense of this term "resurrection" for a moment, based on some ideas I learned, at least partially, from the scholar Marjorie Suchocki years ago in her bookGod, Christ, Church.
In this life, we live in a sort of stretched-out manner. Our childhood is past, our teen years are passing or already gone. Maybe our young adult and middle years are over too. Wherever we are in the journey of life, one thing is certain: in our presentform we exist only in the present moment.
But in God the whole of a person's life is sort of "gathered up," spoken of symbolically in Scripture in terms of our deeds being "written in a book," and the book then being "opened." The metaphorical language is saying that for God, the past is as real as the present. This is resurrection, which has nothing to do with resuscitating a corpse.
What about the judgment? It occurs as part of the resurrection process and has several stages. First, there is a composite "gathering" of the personality, so that the totality of the person is known for what they were in their egoic state, in contrast to what theycould have been in their essential being.
Everything we have ever done in our egoic, pain-ridden state is present in God and brought back to our awareness as if were happening now.
When this occurs, we are experiencing the onset of judgment.
The first phase of judgment is that we shall come to "know as we are known." The divine Presence at the heart of reality, which happens to be at the heart of each of us too, begins to reveal to us how we were experienced and known throughout life.
This is where we get to know ourselves for the first time, as our egoic sense of ourselves is shown for what it really isa sham that has been painful for us to endure and the cause of our inflicting pain on each other.
In this phase of the judgment, self-knowledge will involve not just whatkind of person we were throughout our life, but also an understanding ofwhy we became the person we didin other words, of all the things that were done to us that warped our humanity.
Judgment is supposed to send people either to heaven or hell, as if heaven and hell were actual places. This is to fail utterly to understand the way the Scriptures are written in metaphorical language.
For instance, the book of Revelation describes heaven in terms of a city whose streets are paved with gold, whose walls are 144 miles long, and whose gates are made of pearls. Of course, gold and pearls have value only in the world of humans, 144 is the sum of 12 X 12 which is the number of the tribes of Israel, and eternal Presence needs no walls or gates, nor streets to walk on.
What we have here is imagery stretched to its limits so that it can serve as a symbol to convey that which no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor mind ever been able to imagine.
To be in heaven isn't to live in a place with streets of gold and gates of pearls, but to be raised up into the life of divine Presence.
God is heaven, and heaven is God. It's the state of total Presence, the full experience of divine consciousness.
While those who have come to know their true self as divine Presence in this life, whose ego has been exposed, experience the divine Presence as heavenly, those who have done evilthat is, those who live from their ego and what Eckhart Tolle calls their "pain-body"are also raised up, but they are raised up into judgment.
Not damnation, as some translations wrongly render the Greek, but judgment.
And judgment is a movement from injustice toward justicea "setting right," which is a process of transformation that is a revealing of the divine Presence that constitutes our true being and always has.
Resurrection is a rebirth of ourselves in God, which can happen now, in this life. We have been "raised up" with Christ, said St. Paul. Judgment produces this experience of Presence for those who haven't experienced it in this life.
We enter into the divine consciousness in a movement from the edges of God to the depths of God. Whether this is experienced as joyous or as terrifying depends on just how trapped in ego and our pain-body we are.
For those who are already moving closer toward the divine harmony, they experience judgment as completion of the divine nature that has already begun to take shape in them. The process of transformation is but a completing of the transformation already begun in this life. Because they are accustomed to transformation already, judgment will feel like a growing sense of authenticity.
Even as God is heaven, so alsoGod is hell.
Yes, I am saying that God is both heavenand hell.
The divine Presence is spoken of in Scripture as a consuming fire, and as a refiner's fire. A person who hasn't begun the metamorphosis that we are all invited to experience will first have to experience the loss of the false self theythink they are, so their real self can be uncovered from beneath this facade. This is a death experiencea loss of all they have imagined themselves to be.
Encountering their real self, which is grounded in divine Presence, will seem to many to be the opposite of everything they think of themselves asand that will feel like torture.
To get a feel for what this will be like, picture an able-bodied individual who all his life has been a hypochondriac and has therefore torpedoed job interviews in order to live on public assistance. For such a person to begin to discover himself as a creative person capable of a fulfilling life that serves his fellow humans will feel like a nightmare at first. It will be pure hell!
Or think of the person who has a fear of going outside, and who therefore stays in the whole of her life. As she is drawn out of herself and into involvement with the rest of us, it will at first be terrifying. It too will be hell.
At the other extreme, the person epitomized by Dallas' J. R., whose energies have been consumed with amassing wealth without regard for who got trampled on along the way, will be horrified to encounter a Presence that feels the deprivation of those who are dying of hunger, are homeless, or struggle to make ends meet. It will be as if God were personally suffering such deprivation, since the person is a manifestation of the divine. Greed is the antithesis of the divine nature, the essential self hidden at the heart of all of us which is ever seeking to reach out in love.
By learning to be motivated by caring rather than greed, by becoming connected instead of isolated, and by using their talents rather than being a leach, all that such people have known themselves to be will be seared away by the fire of God's love.
This is what the book of Revelation speaks of as the "second death, the lake of fire." As Scripture says, "OurGod is a consuming fire." Presence consumes all the anxiety-ridden, painful, hurtful ways of living that are the product of our unconscious state.
There will be a death of the greedy person, the selfish person, the irresponsible person, the dependent person, the deceitful person, the abusive person, the rage-filled personand, concomitant with this death, the gradual rebirth of the essential being of the individual as a loving, caring, sharing manifestation of the divine. This is resurrectionnot of a corpse, but of the essence of the person, the true self.
Insofar as we have begun to experience the divine Presence in our life, we will experience our movement toward the full realization of our oneness with God as a wonderful thing, as we increasingly become more conscious and therefore more authentic.
God to us will be like the light of the sun, bringing life.
But to those who have not known themselves at all, who have been totally trapped in ego and the pain-body, the same sun that brings life can also scorch and burneventually burning up the ego and the pain-body in their totality, which is "the second death."
What to one isheaven is to anotherhell. It all depends on how much Presence has yet come alive in us.
This is why the word "eternal" is associated with judgment. In Hebrew and Greek, in which the texts were written, the words "eternal" or "everlasting" don't mean forever and ever in the sense of length of time. They are qualitative rather than quantitative terms. They mean that what is happening is inevitable, inescapablesuch as when Jonah, swallowed by a great fish in the mythical story, was said to be in its belly "forever." There was no way out, until its work was done. But it wasn't the end of him.
The Bible describes the divine Presence to one who is egoic as unquenchable fire. No one can put it outno one can stop the transformative process from doing its work.
Insofar as our lives are in conformity with the nature of God that is our true self, we will experience God as heaven. Insofar as our lives are against this inner nature of God, we will experience God as hell.
In the end, God will ultimately be what the Scriptures speak of as "all in all"that is, fully expressed in every human being who has ever lived. Consciousness and Presence will be a universal reality.
The Truth about Heaven and Hell
By: David Robert Ord
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