Join me, Reverend Sage Cole, founder of the Helen Keller Spiritual Life Collaborative, each week as I share different doctrinal truths of the New Church — truths that ground my life, that inspired the life of the great Helen Keller, and that create a portal for the new life so many of us long for.

This week: heaven and hell.

I want to talk about heaven and hell from the most practical perspective possible. First off, we have to clear out of the way any idea that heaven and hell are places of reward and punishment — that God is some big, booming authority figure in the sky watching what we do and giving us rewards for good behavior and punishments for bad. God is not Santa Claus.

When I talk about heaven and hell — when we think about heaven and hell in the New Church — really it’s an invitation to consider the different experiences we are able to have while we’re on this human journey. And I’m guessing that when I say the word heaven, and I say the word hell, you can think of times in your life when you’ve experienced both. They really represent two sides of a powerful polarity — a polarity that we as human beings are given full freedom to experience.

On the one side, we have heaven: a feeling of deep connection to all that is. A sense of belonging. A sense that what we are is intricately connected to everything else, where everything we have to offer is received, and everything we need is offered. This is the experience of being one with the universe. Heaven is a free exchange of life, where everything fits together — it’s the epitome of wholeness. When Swedenborg experienced heaven in the spiritual world, he described beautiful portraits of that wholeness: angels working together in different communities, living, loving, caring. That’s the ideal state, and it’s the state that is most real, under the surface of all things.

And yet, when we come into these human bodies, we are given the freedom to experience something very different. It’s quite interesting — Emanuel Swedenborg specifically states that it’s human beings who create hell. Before human consciousness emerged, hell was not a thing. Life was just life, expressing itself in balance, in equilibrium, and changing forms. But when consciousness emerged in human beings — now creatures able to look down and consider ourselves as autonomous and separate, able to imagine the past and the future, and feel a sense of agency — we were then empowered to create hell, to turn away from the natural flow of life we had always been a part of before.

This is the story of leaving the Garden of Eden — the inevitable journey we human beings take away from connection to God and into the experience of separation. The feeling of hell really is that understanding of ourselves as entirely separate from everything else, on our own, unsupported, and finding satisfaction only through very materialistic means: either dominating and controlling others, gathering the most stuff, having the most pleasure, or even sometimes finding pleasure in our pain. All of that really resounds with the experience of hell. This is why some people say that earth itself is a hellish realm — much of our consciousness on this earth is shaped by this sense of separation. We have come to be very materialistic beings who judge the world through the lens of the physical, often unconscious of all the forces at work that are beyond the physical — the forces that ground us in connection, in wholeness, in heaven.

Heaven and hell are not states of eternal reward and punishment, but states of being that we human beings can experience. And hell is that state of limitation we are uniquely crafted to be able to choose. But thank goodness — and perhaps I’ll explore this in next week’s video — the journey of regeneration is the journey of exploring all of the possibilities of hell, all of the possibilities of limitation and isolation, and then remembering, returning to that deeper experience of oneness that is, in fact, more real, and escaping from the illusion that is hell.

Swedenborg tells us these are experiences we have now, and they are realms of being where we continue to live after we die — some souls stepping into a life of heaven and continual expansion unto eternity, some souls stuck in this material illusion, in the sense of separation, and continuing to perpetuate that separation even after they die. There’s a debate in Swedenborg about whether or not hell is an eternal realm. What he does say is that the more we move in one direction or the other, the more energy and life respond to that movement. The more into heaven we get, the more angels we’re attracted to, the more positive experiences continue to build — and vice versa. The more hellish choices we make, the more separation we believe in, the more negative voices we allow in and share with others, the more that kind of state can build. And yet, at the same time, we’re always kept in this equilibrium — this balance between the two. All of us are in that balance.

This is something I love about the Swedenborgian church: this acknowledgment of all of our messy imperfection, that every human being exists in that equilibrium. Nobody is so perfect that they might never struggle with limitation, and nobody is so limited that they might never experience illumination. The truth is, we’re all free, and we’re all connected. And the deep heavenly life that Swedenborg witnessed in his ability to step into and explore both the heavenly and the hellish realm is that the Divine holds it all. The Divine holds it all, and in all of it, it is good — it is freedom. So perhaps all of it is part of this journey of expansion that God is, and is seeking to bring into being.

As difficult as this life can be, with all of the hellish experiences so many of us are privy to, and that sometimes seem to be the only story in town — all of them give us the chance to see what we don’t want to choose anymore, and the Divine forces continue to support us to choose differently next time. I find this helpful in my own life: to understand that these influences are always around, to not beat myself up too much if I’m in a hard place, and to just remember that all experiences are of use.

So wherever you are on the journey — whatever you’re experiencing right now, whether you’re in a time of heavenly expansion or a time of limitation and struggle — know that there is goodness in it, and that you have the freedom to choose, every day, a little bit more, the life of heaven.

Thanks for tuning in. And if any of these truths particularly speak to you, I hope you’ll join us this fall for some larger conversations I want to hold, because I’d love to hear your experience with them. These truths are only true insofar as we live them. I’m so excited to hear about your experience.

Many blessings, friends.

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