(Part 4 of a 5-part series)
There is a very good reason why you cannot go to hell no matter what you do during your life here on earth. There is no such place.
We are invited by the Conversations with God writings to explore the possibility that God’s Kingdom is divided into three parts—what we might call the Realm of the Spiritual, the Realm of the Physical, and the Realm of Pure Being. Nowhere is there mentioned a place of eternal torment and damnation.
Of course, other spiritual writings do mention such a place, as we all know. So the question becomes: Which of Earth’s spiritual writings is accurate and true?
The difficulty with approaching such a question is that some religions claim that the question itself is a blasphemy. In some religious communities one can be sentenced to death for posing such an inquiry.
Some religions seek to make it very clear that the writings that support their spiritual understanding were “inspired by God,” and are therefore beyond question. They are to be taken as the Literal Word of God. No questions asked, no doubts permitted.
Yet if even one of the writers of the world’s many sacred scriptures got even one of the major principles upon which an entire religion is based wrong, or misinterpreted anything at all, the world could have been inadvertently misled for hundreds or thousands of years.
On the question of “hell” and “damnation,” Conversations with God tell us this is exactly what has occurred. God is the creator, the source, and the essence of Pure, Unconditional Love, and would never judge and then punish God’s own creations simply because—to use one striking example from ancient and contemporary religious doctrine—different people have come to God by different paths.
Does it really seem that a loving, caring, compassionate and all-wise God would say to a devote and loving, patient and kind, compassionate and generous, caring and forgiving person that because he or she did not belong to a particular religion that he or she was going straight to hell?
Please.
There is no such place as hell. It simply does not exist. There is, however, an “afterlife.” And in that Afterlife every sentient being will experience what is true: that every sentient being has been given Free Will.
It is how we have used that Free Will that has produced the Hell on Earth that so many human beings have experienced—and are continuing to experience on this very day. Yet in the moment that we leave this physical body and return to the Realm of the Spiritual, we will use that Free Will (which will still be ours, by the way) to express and experience our True Nature (which is Divinity) fully. Unless we don’t. If we want or feel the need to experience some sort of “hell”…if we feel we deserve it and ought to go there…we will. (Thus, the testimony of some people who have clinically died, come back to life, and sworn that there was a “hell” on “the other side.”)
Yet in the one-millionth of a nanosecond that we experienced what we, in our imagination, have thought “hell” to be, we would surely say, “I want out of here!”—and with that very thought we would free our Selves, as an experience and expression of Who We Really Are…and that will be “heaven.”
(A remarkable and detailed description of this entire process will be found in the book Home with God.)
Even more amazing, we have the opportunity to express and experience that True Identity right here on Earth. We don’t have to wait for the Afterlife. We can experience our Divinity right here, Right Now. Indeed, all of physical life was created as an opportunity for us to do so. It is what we decide and what we do, both individually and collectively, that determines whether we experience our Divinity.
(Neale Donald Walsch is the author of the Conversations with God series of books. His newest writing, The Only Thing That Matters, releases this week from Hay House. In it he describes how we can all experience our Divinity.)
Leave a Reply