"Anyway," I said, "that was quite the rant. I feel better now.
So, let's go back to examining religious symbolism. You'll notice that the religious depiction of heaven and hell are also just symbols for something the soul is deeply aware of, but can't communicate in literal mathematical terms. Heaven is described as joy and peace and love, whereas hell is described as a place of pain and misery. Heaven and hell are both metaphors — not literal places. Here's God explaining it…"
So I don’t have to keep the Ten Commandments in order to get to heaven.
There is no such thing as “getting to heaven.” There is only a knowing that you are already there. There is an accepting, an understanding, not a working for or a striving.
You cannot go to where you already are. To do that, you would have to leave where you are, and that would defeat the whole purpose of the journey. The irony is that most people think they have to leave where they are to get to where they want to be. And so they leave heaven in order to get to heaven — and go through hell.
Enlightenment is understanding that there is nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nobody you have to be except exactly who you’re being right now. You are on a journey to nowhere.
Heaven — as you call it — is nowhere. Let’s just put some space between the w and the h in that word and you’ll see that heaven is now… here.
Everyone says that! Everyone says that! It’s driving me crazy!
If “heaven is now here,” how come I don’t see that? Why don’t I feel that? And why is the world such a mess?
I understand your frustration. It’s almost as frustrating trying to understand all this as it is trying to get someone to understand it.
Whoa! Wait a minute! Are you trying to say that God gets frustrated?
Who do you suppose invented frustration? And do you imagine that you can experience something I cannot?
I tell you this: every experience you have, I have. Do you not see I am experiencing my Self through you? What else do you suppose all this is for? I could not know Myself were it not for You. I created you that I might know Who I Am.
Now I would not shatter all of your illusions about Me in one chapter — so I will tell you that in My most sublime form, which you call God, I do not experience frustration.
Whew! That’s better. You scared me there for a minute.
But that’s not because I can’t. It’s simply because I don’t choose to. You can make the same choice, by the way.
Well, frustrated or not, I still wonder how it can be that heaven is right here, and I don’t experience it.
You cannot experience what you don’t know. And you don’t know you are in “heaven” right now because you have not experienced it. You see, for you it is a vicious circle. You cannot — have not found a way yet to — experience what you do not know, and you do not know what you have not experienced.
What Enlightenment asks you to do is to know something you have not experienced and thus experience it. Knowing opens the door to experience — and you imagine it is the other way around.
[...]
[Hell] is the experience of the worst possible outcome of your choices, decisions, and creations. It is the natural consequence of any thought which denies Me, or says no to Who You Are in relationship to Me.
It is the pain you suffer through wrong thinking. Yet even the term “wrong thinking” is a misnomer, because there is no such thing as that which is wrong.
Hell is the opposite of joy. It is unfulfillment. It is knowing Who and What You Are, and failing to experience that. It is being less. That is hell, and there is none greater for your soul. [...]
I tell you there is no such experience after death as you have constructed in your fear-based theologies. Yet there is an experience of the soul so unhappy, so incomplete, so less than whole, so separated from God’s greatest joy, that to your soul this would be hell. But I tell you I do not send you there, nor do I cause this experience to be visited upon you. You, yourself, create the experience, whenever and however you separate your Self from your own highest thought about you. You, yourself, create the experience, whenever you deny your Self; whenever you reject Who and What You Really Are.
Neale Donald Walsch
"Thus, you see, heaven and hell are simply an internal state of being. Heaven is self-realization, and hell is self-denial. Therefore, heaven is pure love, and hell is pure fear. Does that make sense?"
"Yeah," Zac said. "It does, actually. I've never looked at the Bible that way. I always thought it was a bunch of made-up stories."
"And perhaps it is," I smiled. "I actually haven't studied the Bible, so I don't know much about it. I'm just pointing out a few obvious ideas, and how they are metaphorical representations of an underlying mathematical reality."
"So, if these Bible stories are communicating actual fundamental Truths, does that mean Christianity is actually True? There's a lot of violence and slavery and homophobia and bullshit morals in the Bible. If I accept that Genesis is based on Truth, shouldn't I logically accept that the entire Bible is, too?"
"No. I could say a lot of stupid things to you-"
"That tends to be your default mode, actually," Zac teased. "Usually when you're talking, I just imagine a little monkey in your mind clashing a symbol together and jumping up and down, like in that episode of The Simpsons. I've always wondered what happens inside that brain of yours."
"I just chase a lot of rabbits in there. Anyway, if I say a lot of stupid shit, but then I also say some wise things, do you need to accept all of it as truth?"
"No."
"Exactly. It's your job to filter the information and figure out what is True."
"And how do I do that?"
"God already told you: Listen to your feelings. Listen to your Highest Thoughts. Listen to your experience. Whenever any one of these differ from what you've been told by your teachers, or read in your books, forget the words. Words are the least reliable purveyor of Truth.
Reverse-engineering the universe has been my little intellectual chew toy for the past five years, but I only began focusing on it because my experience of the world differed so drastically from what others told me was true. I went to Catholic and Anglican schools, and so much of the religion taught to me just made no logical sense. But scientists also told me materialism is true, and that didn't make sense either. When you question religious truth, you're blasphemous. When you question scientific truth, you're a silly, uneducated, whimsical, irrational, 'woo woo' hippie girl.
The logical inconsistencies in these worldviews were like a splinter in my mind, driving me mad. I just became so sick of other people trying to tell me the Truth of Who I Am. I've always had an allergic reaction to irrational dogma and blind stupidity masquerading as intelligence. So I thought, 'Fuck it. I'll go figure it out myself.' And here I am. I think I've done a pretty decent job of it."
