'Heaven' and 'Hell' are Ways of Describing our Experience of This World, Not the 'Next'. There is no Hell. Our Experience Comes From Our Perceptions From Who we Are Choosing to BE. What Do I Mean by This?
Heaven is our experience of life when we make the decision to come from a place of love, where all our choices are made from love, when we are love. Hell is our experience of this world when we decide to come from a place of fear, when we make all our choices out of fear: Our lives then become 'Hell'.
Our experience has nothing to do with the world outside of us, of people, places, events or things. This is why we can go to bed full of joy (Heaven) and wake up in fear (Hell): Nothing has changed in the world around us. We simply woke up in a place of fear and didn't realise that we could make the choice to come from love before getting out of bed.
As Paulo Coelho wrote “Life moves very fast. It rushes from Heaven to Hell in a matter of seconds.” The great lie, propagated by our own brash ego (our terrified 7-year old self that runs our lives until we become conscious of it and decide to change the way we make choices) is that we don't have a choice as to who we are BEing every day. The ego lies in order to survive. It screams "Don't go that way (the way of love) as you will certainly die!" It is a choice.
Miracles, which are a reality, are simply a shift in perception from fear to love. This Truth has been extolled by artists, scientists, philosophers and psychologists. William Blake, the poet and painter, wrote in his book 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' that “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” This sentence seeped into my consciousness, like wine through water (to use Emily Brontë’s fine metaphor), slowly transforming how I see reality, and therefore my own experience of the world. "Awake! Awake! O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!” (Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion). Let's dive in...
Heaven or hell? Which do you choose? It's your choice
A quote that has stayed with me is that "Religion is for people who don't want to go to hell: Spirituality is for people who have already been there." Religion is man-made and full of judgement. Spirituality is quite simply the journey inwards from the mind to the heart, the location of the soul, and in my experience taking this journey is the only solution to finding joy in the chaos. Darkness and light are the Yin and Yang of living. The world is in chaos. The world will always be in chaos. The nature of the human ego is that it seeks conflict: The ego seeks hell and to destroy its sole source of significance. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote "Hell is other people." Oscar Wilde wrote "We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell." Most people are asleep: Traumatised people traumatising other traumatised people, and no-one seems to be aware of this until they wake up to the Truth.
However, it needn't be this way. Healed people heal people. We can create an inner world of serenity, peace, love and joy: Heaven, or the 'Seat of your soul.' It's like being seated in a beautiful restaurant with all your loved ones. The outer world is the street that you can see through the restaurant window. It's dark outside and it's pouring with rain. It's chaos outside. It's hell. Everyone in the street is fighting. It's your choice whether to remain seated, from a place of love (heaven), or go outside and join the fight (hell). Blaise pascal wrote "All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room." Most people get up and go outside to join the mêlée. They go to hell. They seek conflict, chaos, and pain: They react with their mind and fists, rather than respond from their heart. They get up from the seat of their soul. They leave heaven. They become a suspect rather than remaining an observer.
John Milton wrote “The mind is a universe and can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” We are trained to do this by our parents and by our supposedly civilised society. Lois McMaster Bujold wrote "The principle difference between heaven and hell is the company you keep there." There is a group of us who don't seek conflict, and we are increasing in number by the second. You don't see us because you feel that you are drowning. You are in despair, but it's all of your own making: In the brilliant book 'When Nietzsche Wept' Irvin Yalom wrote “There is no medicine for despair: No doctor for the soul… To cure despair is in itself beyond the reach of medical science… I hope that a time will come where men and women are not tyrannised by each other’s frailties.“ That time has come: If only you could wake up and realise that it's your choice as to who you are BEing. ''Aldous Huxley, the English philosopher and writer, wrote the book 'The Doors of Perception' and this was followed by his essay entitled 'Heaven and Hell'. He wrote "The Self is coming from a state of pure awareness from the state of BEing." The author elucidates that Schizophrenia can be heaven and hell because those who suffer this pathology don't distinguish the inner world (heaven) from the outer world ('hell'). I believe that most people suffer the same inability to distinguish heaven and hell as in this pathology.
It's all in your mind: Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote "To different minds, the same world is a hell, or a heaven." Byron Katie wrote "The only difference between heaven and hell is believing a thought." It's all about how we perceive the world and who we choose to be as a result. George Bernard Shaw wrote "Oh, the frontier of hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things."
Aldous Huxley wrote "Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul." He continued "Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else’s." Having been a doctor for 25 years in London, having a Master's degree in Philosophy from Cambridge, and a PhD in the Natural Sciences, I would wholeheartedly agree with Aldous Huxley: I didn't receive a single lecture on wisdom. He wrote "Heaven is merely a vantage point from which the divine Ground can be more clearly seen than on the level of ordinary individualised existence." This is the importance of meditation as it allows for expanded consciousness and to see Truth as it really is.
Mahatma Gandhi wrote "Both heaven and hell are within us." Osho echoed "Heaven and hell are not geographical. If you go in search of them you will never find them anywhere. They are within you, they are psychological... Both gates are within you... When you are behaving unconsciously there is the gate of hell; when you become alert and conscious, there is the gate of heaven... The mind is heaven, the mind is hell, and the mind has the capacity to become either. But people go on thinking everything is somewhere outside. We always go on looking for everything outside because to be inwards is very difficult. We are outgoing. If somebody says there is a God, we look at the sky. Somewhere, sitting there, will be the divine person... Once you have started seeing the beauty of life, ugliness starts disappearing. If you start looking at life with joy, sadness starts disappearing. You cannot have heaven and hell together, you can have only one. It is your choice."
I choose love: The Universal golden key that unlocks the door to presence: Shams Tabrizi wrote "Don't search for heaven and hell in the future. Both are now present. Whenever we manage to love without expectations, calculations, negotiations, we are indeed in heaven. Whenever we fight, hate, we are in hell."
Who you are BEing, heaven (love) or hell (fear) leads to your choices, actions and consequences. Hell and hate are a boomerang: They always come back to you. George Harrison wrote "Heaven and hell is right now, right at this moment. You make it heaven or you make it hell by your actions."
Which way would you like to go? Heaven or hell?
Our civilisation is not civilised. Thomas Merton wrote "If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell." Hate sells copy, because we believe that seeing the suffering of others will make us feel better: It won't. John le Carre wrote "In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs."
Wouldn't it be better if we celebrated the good news? Maya Angelou wrote "When a person is going through hell, and she encounters someone who went through hellish hell and survived, then she can say, 'Mine is not so bad as all that. She came through, and so can I.'" Be the light that allows others to be. Voltaire wrote "Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts." William Blake wrote "Love seeketh not itself to please, nor for itself hath any care, but for another gives its ease, and builds a Heaven in Hell's despair." Let your soul be your North Star: As Sting wrote "The compass spins between heaven and hell, let your soul be your pilot, let your soul guide you."
Marianne Williamson wrote "Love has a way of showing you to yourself, whether through satisfaction or humiliation. It hovers over you like a magnifying glass you cannot escape, intensifying the slightest feelings of either delight or shame. No other experience makes so obvious the realities of both heaven and hell." She also wrote "Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of heaven. Fear in your mind produces fear in your life. This is the meaning of hell... Children are happy because they don't yet have a file in their minds called "All the Things That Could Go Wrong." They don't have a mind-set that puts "Things to Fear" before "Things to Love." Unless we can be like little children, we can't enter into the kingdom of heaven; unless we can be like little children, we can't be happy. Children are happy because they don't have all the 'facts' yet." Your soul will show you the way to heaven on Earth. Let my gift be your guide...
Sending you love, light, and blessings.
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Olly Alexander Branford MD, MBBS, MA(Cantab), PhD
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I am very pleased to meet you. Thank you for reading this far. I very much look forward to connecting with the highest version of you, to seeing your highest possibility, and to our conversations. Please do contact me via my website for a free connection call and a free experience of coaching. I am here to serve you.
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Olly Alexander Branford MD, MBBS, MA(Cantab), PhD
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I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have published over 50 peer reviewed scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for four years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.