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I mentioned in part one of this series that this would be a bit unconventional. Based on your feedback so far, It seems I’m hitting that mark. Allow me to briefly retrace our steps so that all comers can share the same framework I’ve been laying out. My goal has been to free ourselves by applying a biblical definition and extracting Hell from 2000 years of church history and that is not an easy task.

1. In part 1, I’ve shown how viewing Hell as a binary is the effect of Hell on how we think, and then I addressed the biblical term Gehenna, and introduced the idea that Hell is ultimately ontological (based in our being) rather than punishing immoral behavior. Ontologically, Hell is like a 3-sided prison with an open wall leading out into freedom from which people do not seek to leave.
2. In part 2, I’ve shown how our cultural preconditioning profoundly shapes our view of Hell and introduces endless mutations into our thinking and assumptions which may lay below the surface but which greatly affect our lives. This preconditioning coincides with a distortion and sometimes corruption of the biblical gospel by institutional religion as it uses Hell for it’s own entropic purposes.
3. In part 3, I illuminated the biblical gospel and showed how the world has conflated it with institutionalized religion. The world in trying to extract itself from religion’s overreach, has only traded one religion for a worse one by throwing the gospel out with religion’s bathwater. I showed how the biblical gospel is exclusively the only power which can liberate anyone from religious Hell and how no religion has ever saved a single soul.

While focusing on these aspects of Hell, some of you are wondering if I’m going to talk about the cosmic afterlife which preachers call “eternal Hell.” I assure you, I will address this in a future episode. However, the knee-jerk reaction and emotional need to go there too quickly proves that I was correct about our cultural preconditions and the binary way in which Hell has been understood. Behind this need is a shadowy self who needs to know who is going to Hell and if this series will validate his or her love and need for unquenchable fire for those whom they deem worthy of eternal torment. So let’s pause for a minute, acknowledge this hellish impulse, and shelf this for an upcoming post.

This makes a great segue to the meat of today’s post…namely that the captivity of Hell is present today in our dispositions toward Otherness and Away. People often wonder if they are going to Hell after they die, but they need not wonder, because these two indicators reveal they are already there. If as I’ve shown, Hell’s captivity is mostly invisible to even the most religious person because it has been juxtaposed solely as the bad place of the afterlife, then what I’m saying is that Hell’s captivity of the living certainly means that death is not going to be the time of sobering realization that our preachers have threatened, and scripture bears this out. Our death will reveal Ultimate Reality on His terms rather than ours, but the delusion of our false self stays with us.

“For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?” (Luke 9:25)

The Greek word for our ontological center or what the Bible calls our “inner self” is Kardia...translated in English as “Heart.” Modern people think the “heart” is the emotional center but that is not the biblical teaching. Everywhere we see the word “heart” in the Bible, change it to “inner self” and watch the Bible explode in its training in finding our true Ontology (center of being). We are hidden in Christ and found in God.

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:21)

I know that’s a lot of set up, but we need this if we truly seek inner freedom. So how does the Hell at the center of our being (ontological Hell) relate to others and away? You better brace for impact…

“Hell is where no one has anything in common with anybody else except the fact tha they all hate one another and cannot get away from one another and from themselves.”– Thomas Merton

These words will whizz right over us like a humming bird until the moment we are graced with eyes to see. The delusion of Hell imposed upon us…“Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false…” (2 Thessalonians 2:11)…emerges from the binary I spoke about in part one. The root of binary thinking allows for “otherness” to sink deep into our being as we go around comparing, judging, and differentiating ourselves from everyone. The presence and effect of Hell in our being is that we see ourselves as distinct from all others. This is the false self or “pseudo” as the bible calls it…falsehood. It’s to take on the identity (ontological mark) of life’s kingdoms and powers (institutions)

“…these worshipers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name.” (Revelation 14:11)

Contrast that with the identity derived from compassion, forgiveness, understanding and of loving one another…

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” (John 13:34)

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself. (ontological) ’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:31)

I must overlay these verses or we will easily miss the connection. Loving others as ourselves is how we give passes to others in the same way we give passes to ourselves. We are able to see how even when we do wrong, we know that the wrong doesn’t represent all of who we are (ontology), so by comparison to all the other stuff that’s not wrong, we excuse ourselves. This commandment is asking we do the same for others. The goal of course is that we realize that though I am not you and you are not me, we are not other than each other. Community is the byproduct of love and oneness is the essential definition of the Kingdom of God. It is divine union, a marriage, a collective of many parts in unison, one accord, unity.

 “…that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us,…” (John 17:21)

In C.S. Lewis’s work “The Great Divorce” he gets at this idea. His powerful writing depicts Hell as the endless sprawl of houses moving further and further away for ever. As soon a neighbor moves in, Hell is the immediate relocation of our house farther away still. Hell is the exact opposite of the second greatest commandment in all of life.

“…and the second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:39)

The prevalence of Hell within us is so strong. Unless our hearts (inner self) are changed, we are at best only selective lovers of others, but at worst, we deeply don’t like others and we see ourselves not in others, but in distinction to them. This is the sin of pride and the hallmark of Hell’s reach. This is such a present reality, that otherness and away drive our politics, our HOA’s, our pursuits, and what we ultimately do with our resources of power and wealth.

But otherness is an illusion. It is the delusion.

In fact, we are actually interdependent. We can escape to an Island if we can afford it, but without others, our paradise will soon become a desperate survival. We can go off the grid but even in a cataclysmic demise, without others our survival is anything but survival. We can escape the mad, hectic world for a hermitage, but the solitude we seek is not out there, up there or over there. In the quiet and stillness we’ll discover how we’ve brought it all with us.

Away is the illusion of a false self.

Other is the delusion of a false self... especially the religious false self.

The trajectory of spiritual maturity (liberty) is oneness, unity, all nations, tribes, tongues, all gathered together as one, all found in God. Hell is the illusion of isolation. Hell is Away. Hell is the false self we insist on being when we reject the invitation is to come in and join the party.

“But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him…” (Luke 15:28)

Long before we will know the so-called “eternal hell” of our preachers, we must recognize the present Hell of otherness and away. Death is not going to suddenly shock us into seeing this reality. You and I and everyone else can see it just fine right here. Our choice for away and for the other is Hell’s grasp on us today. People wonder all the time if they are going to Hell when they die. Most do not need to wonder because we are already there now. Before Hell ever becomes some afterlife destination, we have practiced living from it for a lifetime, and death is not sober us up and cause us to change our minds as our preachers have told us.

In Luke 16 Jesus tells a parable about Hell as the contrast between a rich man and a poor beggar named Lazarus. In the after life, Lazarus was in Abrahams bosom, and the rich man in torment. Then these words are spoken to the rich man in verse 26:  “And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.’”. The barrier which is depicted as an unsurmountable geological chasm, is illuminating the chasm which is fixed existed first and foremost prior to death. The rich man’s otherness was the Hell he lived from during his life, and it’s the Hell he insist on forever with his request to “send Lazarus” to serve him there.

Torment did not help him see his own delusion. When he tries to save his family from the same fate, he is told: ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’” (Luke 16:31) Hell is first here and now, and death changes our ontological state very little.

The Hell preachers, movies, and books have given us is a warm fluffy puppy compared to the hard reality that lives with us in traffic, at the office, waiting in endless lines, or dealing with “those people.” We all know the right thing to do yet we each have the inability to do it. Welcome to Hell. Clutch the bars, weep and wail, there is no one to blame but ourselves and Hell is our refusal to do so.

But wait…

What’s that? It’s a still small voice coming from behind us, within us, beyond us, from everywhere. Behold, our prison has three walls and the gospel beckons us to trust love and “come forth” naked leaving our dirty our grave clothes in exchange for a clean white robe. All we have to do to possess it all, is drop our charade, die to our false self, and we will immediately find our true name, hidden in plain sight, hidden in Christ and found within God and others, written in the Book of life from the foundations of the earth. Humility allows us to see who we truly are...the Beloved.

“Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades. (Revelation 1:17-18)

But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false (falsehood), but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life. (Revelation 21:17)

This sets us up for next week as we discover the nature and purpose of the unquenchable all consuming Fire.

I hope you’ll come back.