Existence is Hell, and I mean that in a very literal sense.
Hell, purportedly, is our separation from God’s presence.
When we are alive, we necessarily exist separate from God. When we die, and according to certain contingent obligations, we may have a chance to go to Heaven and rejoin God’s presence. At some point before our births we were shed from the unity of God, and we may rejoin after we die, if we are deemed worthy.
But if we are not in Heaven, we are not in God’s presence. And separation from God and His Grace is Hell.
That means that existence is literally Hell.
Hell, in a traditional Dante inspired sense, is fire and burning. Existence is fire and burning. Every atom is a product of atomic fusion in a star. It is quite widely accepted that stars burn – mostly hydrogen, but other elements up to and including iron. Hell is burning, and everything that exists is a product of that inferno. The literal atoms of our existence are the product of a fire that is both subatomic and intergalactic in scale.
Even our bodies are constantly on fire. Metabolism is a process of controlled oxidation – burning. All of our energy, our cellular operation, our entire metabolic processes, are a controlled flame. We are made of the ashes of fire, both as our constituent materials that make up our bodies, and the operation of our bodies themselves demands more fire, more burning, more consumption.
And only when that flame is finally extinguished, and if we are judged worthy, can we rejoin God’s grace in Heaven and truly, finally leave the flames of Hell.
Existence is Hell, and we are all trapped in it. And when you realize that existence is Hell, that begins to explain a lot of the awful things that happen to us, and happen in this world. Demons and devils are real, and they are other people, and we are doing bad things to each other all the time, because we are all trapped in Hell and consumed by its flames.
There are various strategies to escape Hell, explained by different religions around the world. It seems we’re all engaged in an unwitting free form group experiment to see if any of them work.
Welcome to Hell. I hope you find your way out. I’m doing my best to escape too, let me know if you have any tips.