You can create a personal hell

(Last of a 5-part series)

Someone (I forgot who it was, doggone it) mentioned on my Facebook page a few weeks ago that the notion of “hell” is mentioned 88 times in the bible: 64 times as the Hebrew word Sheol in the old testament, 11 times as Hades in the new testament, once as Tartarus, 12 times as Gehenna.

As we have been discussing here in the past several entries, Conversations with God tells us flatly that “hell” does not exist. There is simply no such place.

In the book HOME WITH GOD in a Life That Never Ends, I asked God what, if we believe that God will judge us and might condemn us to everlasting damnation, happens to us after we die. God replied…

Exactly what you expect. As soon as you move through stage one of death and realize that you are no longer living with a body, you will move into stage two and will experience yourself being judged, just exactly as you imagined that you would be, and the judgment will turn out just exactly as you imagined that it would.

If you died thinking that you deserve heaven, you will immediately experience that, and if you think that you deserve hell, you will immediately experience that.

Heaven will be exactly as you imagined it would be, as will hell. If you have no idea about the specifics of either, you will make them up right on the spot, Then, these places will be created for you that way, instantly.

You may remain in these experiences as long as you wish.

“Well, then, I can find myself in hell!” I said, and God replied:

Let us be clear. Hell does not exist. There simply is no such place. Therefore, there is no such place for you to go.

Now…can you create a personal “hell” for yourself if you choose to, or if you believe this is what you “deserve”? Yes. So you can send your self to “hell,” and that “hell” will turn out to be exactly as you imagine or feel a need for it to be—but you will not stay there for one moment longer than you choose to.

“Who would choose to stay there at all?”, I wondered. Said God:

You’d be surprised. A lot of people live within a belief system that says they are sinners and must be punished for their “offenses,” and so they will actually stay in their illusion of “hell”, thinking that this is what they deserve, that this is what they “have coming” to them, that this is what they have to do.

It will not matter, however, because they will not suffer at all. They will simply observe themselves from a detached distance and see what is going on—something like watching an instructional video.

“But if there is no suffering, what is going on?”, I wanted to know.

Suffering, but there will be none, God said.

I’m sorry?

What is going on is that they will appear to be suffering, but the part of them that is watching this will feel nothing. Not even sadness. They will simply be observing.

To use an analogy, it would be a bit like watching your child “play act” some little scene in your kitchen. The child appears to be “suffering,” holding her hand to her head or clutching her stomach, hoping that Mommy will let her stay home from school. Mommy understands perfectly that nothing is really happening. There is no suffering going on.

This is not an exact analogy, but it is close enough to get across the feeling.

So these observers would be watching themselves in this self-created “hell,” but they would know that it is not real. And when they have learned what they feel they need to learn (that is, reminded themselves of what they had forgotten), they will “release” themselves and go on to the third stage of death.

That third stage, God explained, is the complete merging with the Divine. And that is, ultimately, all that happens after what we call “death.” We ultimately merge with Divinity Itself, then to reemerge as an Individuation of the Divine, allowing ourselves to reenter the Realm of the Physical to afford ourselves yet another in an endless string of opportunities to express and experience Who We Really Are.

This is my understanding of what is true about “hell,” from my reading of the Conversations with God material. I hope it has served you for us to join in this exploration together.

(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.)