Hi, this is Michelle Medrano.
Welcome to another episode of ‘Contemplate This’ where we contemplate you questions
and spiritual issues.
Today’s episode is entitled ‘What the Hell?’
And I love this title.
I didn’t make it up, my friend, Bobby who is filming this; it was his idea.
So, thank you Bobby.
And I love this idea because so many of us struggle with hell.
With the concept of hell and the afterlife and with the feeling that we are afraid we
might end up there and with the feeling of life just being kind of hellish at times.
So, what is this all about?
And I love what our founder, Ernest Holmes, had to say about this.
Dr. Holmes said that heaven and hell are states of mind.
And they’re states of mind that we can experience at any point in our journey of living here
and in the next life.
Heaven is any state of mind where we feel connected.
Where we feel that feeling of awe and awesome connection to the universal life that is pouring
through us and where we’re seeing life through that lens - through that beautiful, open hearted
space of being-ness, that’s heaven.
And, conversely, hell is a state of mind where we are seeing the opposite, where we’re
feeling disconnected, separate, disenfranchised.
We don’t feel that connection within us or around us.
And so, in these definitions then, I suspect that everyone of us in this life have experienced
heaven and have experienced hell.
You may be experiencing on or the other right this very moment.
And so, what we honor and recognize is that when we’re going through hell, and we all
will in this lifetime, have those moments of disconnect that Terry Cole-Whittaker said
“If you’re walking through the valley of the shadow of death, don’t pitch a tent.”
So it’s an understanding that if we’re going through hell to remember that we’re
moving through it, that its a state of mind that is a feeling state, and that we continue
to work with ourselves and work with our ideas and work with our thoughts and work with our
emotions and stay present to it such that we can shift our awareness because then something
beautiful happens; and i’ve seen this many times in my life and the life of other people:
they’re going through hell, the conditions are hellish but they’re experiencing heaven.
I think that people have talked about this who’ve gone through some of the worst scenarios
we could imagine.
Being in a concentration camp but recognizing that no one could take away the freedom of
mind and thought to think beautiful and expansive thoughts; to be in hell, but to chose heaven.
That, really then, becomes on of the greatest, sometimes joyful, sometimes puzzling challenges
of being human.
And we don’t believe there is a place called ‘Hell’ where people go after they die.
There may or may not be these states available to us after we die.
But in this teaching, in this belief and in many of the mystical teachings throughout
the ages, we believe and accept that there is a loving, unconditionally loving God that
embraces all of us all the time.
Let yourself be embraced by heaven today.
And if you’re going through hell, my prayers are with you.
Thanks so much for joining us today, we’d love to hear your comments, your questions
you can post this video and thanks for tuning in.