Heaven and hell

by Marinus Jan Marijs

Many of the ideas relating to heaven and hell, common nowadays, find their origin in the Egyptian mythology, the Egyptian tuat, the underworld. (see: The Gods of the Egyptians, E.A. Wallis Budge late keeper of the Egyptian and the Assyrian antiquities in the British museum).

Frederick Arthur Bridgman (1847 – 1928)

Frederick Arthur Bridgman (1847 – 1928)

The ancient Egyptians believed in a heaven and a hell. After the divine judgement from Osiris, the righteous entered into a heaven world, however the malignant didn’t go to hell but were destroyed. In the Egyptian hell were pools of fire where the evil spirits live, but not any humans. The Egyptian hell of fire was a concept which was adopted later on by the Hebrews and the Muslims. The Christian concepts of heaven and hell, through its lineage with Judaism, also find their origin in the Egyptian tuat. Another historical reference to a heaven and hell is found in the ancient Greece, in the works of Pindar the greatest lyric poet of ancient Greece (5th century BC):”Expounded in his odes the substance of a spiritualistic Orphic mysticism by attributing a divine origin to the soul, which resides temporarily as a guest in the home of the body and then returns to its source for reward or punishment after death.” Encyclopædia Britannica

When one looks at the development of these concepts it becomes clear that these mythological concepts of heaven and hell are theoretical constructions and not an accurate description of the supernatural worlds.

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One of the central questions in human existence, is whether there is life after death.
A source of evidence relating to this question is in what is called “near-death experiences.” These are experiences of persons who met the criteria for clinical death. They undergo experiences, often seen as experiences of the world that awaits them after death. A large numbers of persons report having had such experiences. A Gallup poll taken in 1982 found that eight million Americans (about five percent of the adult population ) had a near-death experience (NDE). In these out-of-the-body experiences a person views his or her own body “from outside” and perceives its surroundings, sometimes at a considerable distance from the location of the person’s body. The person meets “beings of light” sometimes including friends and relatives who have died previously. NDE’s have been reported throughout recorded history and from all cultures.

If there is a life beyond the physical life, than the question is what the environment will be. Speculation and beliefs about life after death existed through much of human history. Within religion there is the traditional concept of being raised at some day in the future,  meaning that there is a considerable amount of time between the physical death and “being raised”. That interpretation has considerable difficulties. Another interpretation would be that if the souls of the departed are to be fitted out immediately with resurrection bodies, these difficulties are greatly alleviated. The “out of the body” experiences support this last interpretation.

Thomas Talbott in ”Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought”:

“According to a relatively common view in the wider Christian culture, heaven and hell are essentially deserved compensations for the kind of earthly lives we live. Good people go to heaven as a deserved reward for a virtuous life, and bad people go to hell as a just punishment for an immoral life; in that way, the scales of justice are sometimes thought to balance. But virtually all Christian theologians regard such a view, however common it may be in the popular culture, as overly simplistic and unsophisticated; the biblical perspective, as they see it, is far more subtly nuanced than that. When we turn to the theological and philosophical literature in the Christian tradition, we encounter, as we would in any of the other great religious traditions as well, a bewildering variety of different (and often inconsistent) theological views. The views about hell in particular include very different conceptions of divine love, divine justice, and divine grace, very different ideas about free will and its role (if any) in determining a person’s ultimate destiny, very different understandings of moral evil and the purpose of punishment, and very different views about the nature of moral responsibility and the possibility of inherited guilt.”

The traditional concepts of heaven and hell generate some very serious questions relating to the theodicy and goodness of God.

First of all some believe that God will reject unremorseful sinners after a given deadline, normally thought of as the moment of physical death, and will punish them forever after. That would mean that the mistakes humans make in one lifetime will have very negative consequences for eternity. This would be so out of proportion that by any standard it would neither be good or just.

Then there is the question what about those who never commit any evil, such as those who die in infancy or those who, because of severe brain dysfunction or some other factor, never developed properly? These, according to Augustine, deserve to be condemned. Such a point of view is very extreme and wouldn’t point to divine goodness or divine justice.

And those who have unknowingly violated a divine command?—and if so, to what extent are they responsible for their wrong doings? Some theologians have said that one cannot be responsible for what one doesn’t know. This could be correct but leads to the absurdity that if people sin unknowingly they can go to heaven, and that if people sin knowingly they can go to hell, then bringing knowledge relating to morality and good behaviour leads to the situation that there go more people to hell?!

There is also the question of the so called original sin, the whole idea of inherited guilt: “That it was due to Adam’s yielding to temptation in eating of the forbidden fruit and has been inherited by his descendants; Adam is recognized by some as having brought death into the world by his disobedience. Because of his sin, the majority, however, do not hold Adam responsible for the sins of humanity. The doctrine of “inherited sin” is not found in most of mainstream Judaism. The concept of inherited sin is also not found in any real form in Islam. Some interpretations of original sin are rejected by other Christian theologies.” (Wikipedia)

However this story about Adam and Eve in paradise is obviously a mythological story. The Garden of Eden symbolizes a transcendental reality where the soul and the spirit reside. The idea is that it does not relate to a physical world, but to a higher non-physical subtle reality. (The story of the Garden of Eden is not to be understood as a historical event but as a mythical representation of the human condition). If one takes this story literally, then this means the end of the theodicy, if two people thousands of years ago did eat from a fruit and because of this humanity is damned for all time, then God is by any standard neither just nor good.

Some believe that one needs to be baptised to go to heaven. Being baptised symbolically means to purify ones soul. If one takes this idea literally and one holds that someone who is baptised goes to heaven, and someone who is not baptised goes to hell, this will lead to absurd conclusions. Let’s take the following hypothetical situation: Two children are born and die within halve an hour after birth. One was born in the same street as a priest and is baptised and goes to heaven, the other child lives many miles away from a priest or dies in such a way that its body cannot be recovered and for that reason dies before it is baptised and goes to hell. One sees the absurdity.

The traditional concepts of heaven and hell leads to the following question: “How could any sin that a finite being commits in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and illusion deserve an infinite penalty as a just recompense?”

Some say that justice requires punishment, other religious writers insist that justice requires something very different, namely reconciliation and restoration.

Now one might draw a number of faulty conclusions because we humans tend to think of irreparable harm within the context of a very limited time-frame, a person’s life on earth and one could argue:

“that God, if he exists, would deal with a much larger picture and a much longer time-frame than that with which we humans are immediately concerned.”

Then there is also the Universalist Rejection of Everlasting Separation which states that an almighty God will triumph in the end and successfully reconcile to himself each and every human being.

The phenomenology of the transcendent worlds

The concept of heaven and hell (free from theological speculation), finds its origin in the out of the body experiences.

The idea is that the development that a person who had several hundreds out of the body experiences during the physical life, can serve as an example for the development of someone who has died, after a considerable amount of time. Although there may be variations in the span of time in which this development takes place. After death there is a purification process in which habitual processes which are emotionally loaded are being eliminated as becomes clear from out of the body experiences and mystical development during ones physical existence. The first area what one usually enters is what is called the astral realm.

Whiteman J.H.M. a professor of mathematics who had about 550 out of the body experiences, wrote about this level:

“This is an experience in which there is a considerable degree of rational reflection and precise observation on the part of the separated observer. But phenomena are somewhat disagreeable, or apparently irrational, and atoned for only by their intellectual interest and the remarkable bodily freedom typical of separations. We have hardly any power to improve conditions or become liberated to higher ones. In brief there is rational reflection, but no rational control over unharmonized influences”.

Emotional conditioned responses can hold someone temporarily in a lower area, but if these conditioned responses are worked out, one goes automatically to a higher area. That someone would stay for ever in a lower area, is certainly not the impression one has if one has had a great number of out of the body experiences. The regulating influences on the higher levels are eventually stronger than the after-effect of lower emotions. It is more or less a kind of self-recuperation of the soul. The idea is that someone who is highly developed will stay several hours or days on a lower, so called astral level, and others perhaps years before they go to the higher worlds. The accessibility of the higher worlds, is in some regards comparable with the accessibility of the higher mental abilities. Someone who is dominated by emotions will have great difficulties to think clear, and someone who thinks in habitual patterns, will have difficulties to function intuitively.

To be able to go to a higher plane of existence one has to activate higher energies within oneself, because similar energies attract each other, resonate with each other. And different energies push each other away.

This last is the central subtle energetic process that is active here. Because similar subtle (non-physical) energies attract each other, resonate with each other, someone who is in an out of the body state, be it temporarily or permanent after death, will attract the same kind of energies. So a person full of compassion and sympathy will create a positive environment in the higher ontological worlds. And someone who is full of negative emotions such as hatred and anger will attract the same kind of energies and therefore create a negative environment in the higher ontological worlds.

But if one rejects theological approaches as speculative and empirical data from Out of the Body Experiences as not universally accessible, there is a logical approach possible:   

 

Relevant to this subject could be Henri Bergson’s and William James “Filter theory”:

Bergson’s “filter theory” of consciousness, according to which experiential content enters consciousness already focused, filtered, and thus reduced from a much larger realm of potential unconscious material.

Marjorie Woollacott:
“William James, considered the father of psychology, made a bold proposal about this function of the brain at the turn of the 19th century, saying that the brain filters our access to a vast consciousness, which extends beyond the limits of neural activity. James proposed that the brain acts as a partial barrier and gives us only the surface of what is possible for us to perceive. The process James described so many years ago is, of course, the filter theory, and he said that what the brain filters out is consciousness itself—a supremely expanded consciousness.”

Consciousness however is not a by-product of  the brain, the brain mediates consciousness  rather than produces it.
That gives us a whole different perspective.

Consciousness is primary as now even  many theoretical physicists  acknowledge.
Max Planck: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

Erwin Schrödinger: “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”

The brain  actually mediates consciousness, enacts as a kind of filter.
This could partly explain why the Out of the Body Experiences are so intense, this because the filter function of the brain is not active within the Out of the Body Experiences, and so also not active after death.
This would mean that positive, as well as negative emotions will be experienced much more stronger  than within a physical existence.
The Filter theory of the brain can explain the heaven and hell theories about life after death, because of the much intense feeling of emotions, who are no longer filtered by the brain, and why consciousness is so much clearer and sharper in an out of the body state.
This means that one has to eliminate all negative emotions. 

This was the origin of the concept of heaven and hell, which is not only a Christian concept but is also to be found in other cultures and traditions. See for example Plutarch’s “De sera numinis vindicta”. Within parapsychology the out of the body experiences that are described are mostly very positive. But a small amount, about 3 to 10 %, reports a negative out of the body experience. But striking instance of this is the minimal role played by judgment and damnation in modern NDE’s.

The concept of a personal God who condemns people to hell for eternity has no basis in reality. It is the mental activity of humans which generates their own environment in the afterlife, with no involvement of the Divine whatsoever. Is it really a serious proposition that a kosmic force that billions of years ago generated the Big Bang, would even be involved in punishing, without compassion human individuals? The widespread theological view, which states that billions of people will eventually be lost forever, is a travesty, an absurd grotesque misrepresentation and an insult to the Divine.

Perhaps because one wanted to change human behaviour and society, this idea of eternal (that is to say everlasting) condemnation, this overstatement, was used in the hope that people would change for the better. But this has had a very negative effect: Many decent human beings lived in fear because of this theological fiction.

That leaves us with the question that if there are negative afterlife experiences than how long will they last? Suppose someone has a very negative state of mind and therefore creates a negative environment. When this person changes this into a positive state of mind of compassion, sympathy and so on, this will change the energy quality of the environment in a very positive way. Because old habits die hard, one can fall back but eventually one will succeed in functioning permanently on a higher level. To quote C. S. Lewis: “The gates of hell are locked from the inside.”

The theory put forward here solves the main problems many theologians struggled with, and is of course related to the theodicy. Furthermore there is a lot of supporting evidence: 10 % of the world population has had one or more out of the body experiences (of which about 5 % are near death experience). This makes it possible to do cross-cultural research in this matter.

There are several ontological levels of existence (traditionally called heavens) so this transformation from one level to a higher level repeats itself on higher levels.

             Gustave Doré    (Strasburg, 6 January 1832 – Paris, 23 January 1883)