So today, I'm going to talk about the concept of Hell. Please feel free to skip over this entry.

There is no Hell. You need to understand that. There is no Hell in the sense of pitchforks and little red demons and sulfur and brimstone. I will revisit the sulfur thing in a few months, but for now, just take it as red that your soul is not going to be condemned to the fiery pit for all eternity.

So what is going to happen? Most religions have some kind of metaphor for the actual event. The christians of course, have Hell, Satan and all his little helpers. The Egyptians have the Devourer of Souls. There are others, but you get the idea.

Near Death Experiencers have reported, pretty much consistently, some kind of review of life (which we talked about the other day) followed by a sudden understanding of where they are going wrong. Most find religion in one form or another on their return.

Tucked away in the center of your brain (this is analagous) is your soul. Your soul gets acted upon by the events of your life. The choices you make. The challenges you overcome. Its kind of like your making a key. A key to the doorway to Heaven, Nirvana, the Temple, whatever you want to call it.

At the end of your life, if the key has been filed down correctly, if you have learned and truly practiced forgiveness and sincerity, if you have truly shown courage in adversity, and loved personally and globally (unconditionally), then your key gets to open the spiritual door and move on.

However, if some of the 'prongs' still have crap on them (because you were too materialistic, selfish or just plain bloody ignorant) then the key does not fit.

This is the 'judgement' phase the dying brain produces for you. The brain interprets what is happening on a natural, automtic level and produces images that fit whatever culture and experiences you have been exposed to in your life. It attempts to make sense of what is happening to you.

I said this was about hell, and it is. Assuming your key doesn't fit, the dodgy bits of you get 'recycled'. Hermes explains this as the de-energization of your negative aspects. The more of you that is filled with this negavity, the less of your own 'identity' there is left to re-enter the material plane. This is an imperfect analogy. Bear with me, I'm doing the best I can. The negative aspects get de-energized. Hurled into the fiery pit in christian terms, eaten by the Devourer of Souls in Egyptian terms. These analogies were used in ancient times to try and explain a natural process in terms that the particular culture would understand. The idea was that by making it sound scary and horrid, people would me more inclined to 'do the right thing'. Unfortunately, the whole thing got corrupted (as often happens with humanity) and the end result was a series of messed up religions demanding money with menaces and threatening people with eternal pain if they eat Fish on Friday.

The good news, however, is that you get to keep intact the pieces of the key you got right. That's not to say you can't screw them up next time around, but you do at least have a good head start.

If you have read this far, I really would be grateful if you would leave a comment and let me know if any of this makes any sense!

That'll do for today, enjoy your Friday :)