Your vision of hell and heaven

[Ian Moone]

Neither is an external location or experience. "Heaven" is a full activation of the Self, achievement of pre-birth goals (see Natal Chart for more) and a mastery of the Inner Space. The reason people place Heaven after Death (the last one) is because it's not a state or condition that can really contain the Ego anymore, hence "Death", particularly the Little Death, being a prerequisite to experience Heaven. It's more like a goal, not some external location/experience. As for "Hell", it too is a personal situation or mind state. Think of it like a psychological paradigm.

I think the balance of Harmony and Disharmony is a great analogue for better understanding. Experiences outside of and consequently "higher than" (to supplement better phrasing) this present experience are necessarily more Harmonious and as such more Heavenly, to help put things into perspective.

To expand briefly, people have this notion that you can exceed the present Body-Soul dynamic and take with you Earthly baggage like the kind of Disharmony I describe. This idea is absurd and inherently counter to the framework of objective Metaphysics. Think about it like this: without intervention, the thing that separates someone who is highly productive from someone who isn't (not in some factory worker capacity, but someone who is very successful in life; relationships, financially and in terms of contentment) is their alignment of Virtue and their ability to exert that Virtue. In the same way, you can't advance Science, as an example, without building all of the right foundations first. If an ethical alignment doesn't comport to your studies, you won't have results that build on earnest inputs and the consequences will spiral out until you deal with the initial complications that caused such a Disharmony.

Further, Morality as a general human concept breaks down outside of the Human experience. If you think you can take pleasantries, reciprocal respect and other socializing behaviors to the next rung up, you're going to get justed and hard. You have to eat what you kill, you only own what you can reasonably defend and concepts like secrecy or fraud aren't exactly accessible. Animal behaviors as a general overview are a great way to understand systems outside the human experience - everything just works and there's no room for explaining why situations aren't agreeable or fair. As explained before, understanding the different versions of Death is important to this wider framework.

 

[LiraTirsoCaduceo]

I don't think much about the characteristics of heaven and hell, but to me an important part is that I don't think they are eternal, maybe some interpretations of heaven could be but defenitely not hell.
Actually, my view of the afterlife aligns well with the Myth of Er from Plato's dialogue The Republic.
Souls come into the afterlife, they are judged and divided on different paths, souls who were wicked are punished, souls who were virtuous are rewarded. Afterwards a new life is given to each soul and they bathe in forgetfulness so they can be born again.
Being tied to the cycle of death and rebirth isn't ideal, but through knowledge souls can stop the cycle.

 

[mesaprotector]

I have the idea that eating the apple of the knowledge of Good and Evil wasn't something that God punished Adam and Eve for, but that simply knowing was such a terrible punishment that they exiled themselves voluntarily, to escape the intense reality of the Garden of Eden that is sometimes called God. I'm sure I'm not the first. The one time I ever took psychedelics, the world began to turn into an endless lattice of meaningless letters of the Latin alphabet, irregular geometric structures-upon-structures, never forming as much as a single comprehensible word or recognizable object beyond that. While it was going on it was the most hideous thing I've ever seen, and I identified it with Hell.

Heaven has never felt like a place to me in the same sense. Heaven loses all meaning if you can ever make it there; heaven is the process, every day, of committing yourself to a path you will never see the end of. It's waking up every day and deciding, yes, again, to do right and to have faith. I agree with some others here that classical visions of heaven sound miserable, but that's because eternity itself is miserable—eternity is Hell, is knowledge and experience beyond what humans were meant to have. Not that Heaven is simply ignorance—if it were, any lower animal or young child would know it. Though plenty of the ancients and many more theologians did think as much, and they were much wiser than I am.

 

[LiraTirsoCaduceo]

I have the idea that eating the apple of the knowledge of Good and Evil wasn't something that God punished Adam and Eve for, but that simply knowing was such a terrible punishment that they exiled themselves voluntarily, to escape the intense reality of the Garden of Eden that is sometimes called God. I'm sure I'm not the first. The one time I ever took psychedelics, the world began to turn into an endless lattice of meaningless letters of the Latin alphabet, irregular geometric structures-upon-structures, never forming as much as a single comprehensible word or recognizable object beyond that. While it was going on it was the most hideous thing I've ever seen, and I identified it with Hell.

Heaven has never felt like a place to me in the same sense. Heaven loses all meaning if you can ever make it there; heaven is the process, every day, of committing yourself to a path you will never see the end of. It's waking up every day and deciding, yes, again, to do right and to have faith. I agree with some others here that classical visions of heaven sound miserable, but that's because eternity itself is miserable—eternity is Hell, is knowledge and experience beyond what humans were meant to have. Not that Heaven is simply ignorance—if it were, any lower animal or young child would know it. Though plenty of the ancients and many more theologians did think as much, and they were much wiser than I am.

What you say reminds me of Buddhism, at least to me it seems like an inversion of what Zen schools think of enlightenment.
In a sense we are so caught so strongly in a world of delusions we forget that we are already enlightened. Every being is already enlightenend, you can access it right here and now as you read it. But in a sense we have to unlearn all sorts of previous attatchments, but as we do we gain true knowledge.
It sounds quite a lot like what you are saying here, but in this case ignorance of one's buddha-nature is the source of "hell", and "heaven" would be achieved by regaining the knowledge on truth.

This also reminds me of the Allegory of the Cave, and Plotinus' concept of the undescended soul.

 

[ECHETLAEUS]

You dont need to intellectualize too much, just feel every day how your body feels, theres an everyday 24/7 microcosmic war within us, angels and demons, how the light shines and gets an expendable just to shine again tomorow. I feel like life is an everyday war of choices, we choose GOD or the devil, every single moment matters, ego is an illusion its the devil and also can become a swich that disable the spirit.

 

[15horses]

I do believe in the after-life, but I also believe in the interpretation of heaven and hell being what you make out of your daily life on earth. To make your life already heavenly on earth, by taking for granted the innocent joys of life, loving others and yourself, forgiving and helping, while being accountable of your mistakes no matter what, you know, just being a nice person in general. Meanwhile, in contrast, living a hellish life would be pursuing hedonistic pleasures and addictions, trying to manipulate and take advantage out of others, having resentment from what "they have done to you", feeling extremely guilt from yourself out of things you have done while not really doing anything to fix things or getting better (self-sabotaging), and essentially just being a son of a bitch, then of course your life is going to feel like daily suffering.
But now actually talking about post-life heaven and hell, it's hard to say anything really. I believe most of the descriptions, be on religion or just art in general like Dante's Inferno, are more meant to be taken more abstractly, since they're describing something that is not presently material and doesn't belong to our realm of reality, something that we as sinful imperfect humans cannot fully comprehend, but that exists, and we should at least be aware of it, even if in an imaginative and artistic way, otherwise too bad for you. Kinda like trying to discuss "what happens inside a black hole" or "what a four dimensions geometrical looks like" really, we can try to talk about it, imagine and theorize it in a multitude of ways, but we can't really be so sure since we have to admit that absolutely none of us can truly comprehend it, and it's not like any of the dead is here to directly tell us.

 

[Hypatia]

I had a dream that I went to Heaven or New Jerusalem.



Except, it was like a dead mall. The halls were empty, the heavenly choirs were playing on repeat from fuzzing and breaking overhead speakers in mono. Water was dripping from the ceiling and the angels were trying putting out buckets and mopping the floors. Anything I touched was damp and moist, anything you could pick up had the texture of gelatine. The light of god was flickering overheard.

 

[Obake]

Heaven: Me and every anime waifu, infinite stamina, and fountains flowing with lubricant.

Hell: You and the fat bastard from every hentai imaginable, with infinite stamina and not even a single drop of lubricant.