Hell has been defined as living without love. It is to be alone. In a way, then, I choose love, or I choose hell. I’m fond of writing that in order to experience love, we don’t need to do anything, that love is our natural inheritance when we stop trying to find it or figure it out, since those acts just push it away. I’m about to contradict myself.

In a way, this life is a proving ground. I need to work for happiness here. Why? Because if I’m not happy here and now, I’ll never be happy there and then, after death. That’s why heaven is here.

Yet since my default on earth seems to be suffering, I need to change something in order to experience that instantly accessible moment, that nirvana of here and now.

In most moments, I’m in fear, thinking or feeling something negative, and this pushes my natural state of joy out of awareness. That joy is heaven, in each moment from each moment to each moment.

When I die, I don’t go to another place. I tend to inherit the state of mind I perpetuated in my life before death. Simply because the body dies does not mean that my consciousness radically changes. It may be that the state of mind – the content of my thoughts – which I entertained before death will perpetuate after death.

The work here, then, is to change our minds while we still have choice. For without bodies, we don’t know whether we can choose. And this may be why there is an ‘eternal’ return. We may need to keep returning in human form. To be human is to choose. To live in a body is to live in time, and to have time is to be able choose again. This life, then, becomes a field in which we relinquish past thoughts and actions with negative content in order to select thoughts of love, which sponsor loving acts, that we may awaken to paradise here and now. Then, we may release ourselves from the cycle of hell in which most of us, to one degree or another, find ourselves.

© 2021 by Michael C. Just