What’s the difference between heaven and hell? That’s another thing I was teaching my kids, because the common understanding is that hell is a place of eternal suffering in darkness, some kind of a maximum security prison for evil souls, and heaven is a place of eternal happiness and light.

What I told them is that heaven and hell started off as identical places, sort of like a monastery and a prison being almost identical in most ways – in both you have people who are removed from the rest of the world and have their individual cells. Also, there are no doors on hell, that prevent exit. So, what is it that keeps the demons and evil souls inside?

An illustration: take two identical rooms. In one you put 10 evil people, who enjoy humiliating others and causing suffering, who hate God, despise spirituality, and feel most at home in the most materialistic existence possible, where God seemingly cannot disturb them in their evil. In the second room you put 10 good people, who enjoy spreading truth and knowledge, who enjoy making others feel good and empowered, who spend their free time meditating and praying for God’s guidance in everything they do, who aspire to always be better, and who see everyone who is better than themselves as a positive challenge, as an example of something they can achieve if they work harder.

Now guess what is going to happen in each room. In the one with evil people, you will get hell, and in the one with good people, you will get heaven. The thing is, the inhabitants of each room will think they are in heaven, and hell is in the other room. To each group, the way of life of the other group is painful and intolerable. Since the doorway between the groups works in such a way that it only lets you through if you truly change your consciousness in such a way as to become a member of the other group, everyone could theoretically leave, but the inhabitants of heaven have no wish to leave, and the inhabitants of hell could leave, but they would have to repent, exhibit sincere remorse, ask God for forgiveness and adopt true goodness. And if you live in hell, it’s difficult to see heaven as a good place. The others tell you that heaven is inhabited by stupid boring sheep who blindly worship God, who is a tyrant that doesn’t allow anyone to have any fun. To them, heaven is a place of restrictions, fear, slavery and weakness, because they wish to be able to ridicule God, tell lies and laugh cruelly at the stupid victims who believe them and are ruined, they wish to be able to humiliate, beat up, torture and murder others. In heaven, you can’t do any of those things, because it’s so restrictive, and only those who are pathetic enough to be subservient to God can live there. So, basically, if you live in hell, you first need to face the hard truth: that you are in hell, that hell is not the other place, but the place where you are. You need to accept the fact that you are evil, that you are vicious slanderous scum, that all the evil that is happening to you is the result of your choices, and that everything you considered to be good is the result of your evil choices, and of the evil company that you kept because you, essentially, are a worthless piece of trash. You also need to accept the fact that your enemies are neither pathetic nor stupid nor evil, that they are and always were right, and that you slandered them because you were evil. You need to accept all those things only to be able to even conceive leaving hell. Hell doesn’t need doors. The fact that the inhabitants can see heaven and are so disgusted by what they see that they feel the need to crawl to the darkest corner of hell in response and re-affirm their choice for evil, is the true reason why hell isn’t empty. The dark souls see the light of heaven as a destructive force, a deadly evil that wants to destroy everything that they are, and they are in fact right – the light of God is destructive to all evil. In order to leave hell and enter the light of God, an evil being needs to basically die, by ceasing to be everything that it is. Accepting that you are evil and that all your former choices were wrong is hard, and the evil ones are weaklings, because all their choices were in fact those of weakness, because it is always easier to destroy than to create, it’s easier to lie than to tell the truth and accept the consequences, it’s easier to use sarcasm and cynicism to ridicule, than to use valid arguments and to explain your position clearly. Essentially, hell is not only full of evil ones, it is also full of weaklings and idiots, and all of them believe they are strong, good and smart. The problem is, when you are a weak evil fool who believes he’s a righteous intellectual powerhouse, you stay where you are because you think it’s the bright center of the Universe. Hell is where the others are. Your prison is that of your nature. There need not be steel bars on doors and windows if you think you inhabit the best of all possible places.

So, that’s how hell works. You can find ample evidence for this on Earth. Most people live in a hell of their own making, imprisoned within the boundary of their own choices and nature. After a while, they become not only unwilling, but unable to leave. But don’t be fooled into thinking that you understand the reason why people stay in heaven. In fact, if an evil being were to experience even a glimpse of heaven, he would run away screaming. Heaven is not some hedonistic paradise where fanatics get to fuck their virgins and where you get to listen to angels playing lyre on cloud nine. Heaven can be painful. You see, when you experience the light of God, the light is so strong that it makes almost every difference from its nature feel dark. Every imperfection within your soul looks like a dark stain, a source of shame and remorse, something you feel the need to deal with immediately, because it’s intolerable to see the difference between your spiritual structure and God’s light. That’s the reason why there is stratification in the spiritual world – in fact, the real, actual world. Not all beings can take it all, and certainly not at once. So, how to explain the motivating factor?

In the physical world, you have people you admire. When you admire someone, you feel the need to live up to certain standards, in order not to disappoint the one you admire and respect. You are not forced to live up to the standards, but you still do it, because failure to do so would be intolerable – you would feel ashamed and terrible if you made those people feel disappointed in you. However, if you made them feel proud of you, if they react to you with pleasure that you did so well, that is the greatest reward. You earn being in the company of great people by living up to the standards of being a great person yourself. That is the motivation and the ethics of heaven – you don’t want to disappoint God, who is the light in all that is true, brilliant, beautiful and great. You don’t want to disappoint your friends, who worship the same light. You want God’s light to shine brightly in you, and you want your friends to smile at you and feel great joy at your wonderful accomplishment and purity. That’s why you are ready and willing to suffer through all hardships, why you are willing to endure any kind of pain, why saints are willing to endure everything to the point of death and not betray God – because God is all that matters. For the same reason, they are able to resist temptation of lesser pleasures that wish to lead them astray; because God is all that matters. If a great dinner awaits you at home, you will easily resist the temptation of a McDonald’s drive-in on the way. If one is tempted by lesser things, one doesn’t really know God. If one is afraid to do evil because he’s afraid of God’s punishment, he’s a fucking idiot. God is not the one who punishes evil, evil is a choice that leaves you without God.

And that is the tragedy of this place – it’s a trap, that attempts to lure you into accepting the lesser things by blocking your access to God. It’s not an instrument of spiritual evolution, but its opposite – it’s something that wants to lure you into accepting the lesser choices and binding yourself to things other than God. It’s vicious, evil and dangerous almost beyond measure, because it projects mirages upon sand in order to lure you into the desert where you are to die and be consumed by the vultures who control the mirage projector. It offers pleasure and fulfillment from things that are inherently empty. It threatens with dire consequences if you don’t obey, and you don’t know whether its threats are empty. All you have that could offer you any kind of immunity to its lures is memory of God, and your memory was blocked upon entry, so you cannot rely on it. All that remains is your nature, the very structure of your being that guides your choices, and it needs to have great strength in order to offer even mild and moderate guidance. In heaven, it’s relatively easy to choose God, because He is obvious. You will choose against Him if you are outright evil. Here, it’s much harder, because it’s a place designed by God’s enemy, in order to prove some evil, twisted, perverse idea, to destroy as many good souls as possible and to produce as many evil demons as possible, by turning God’s ideas about evolution upside down. The irony is that some of the greatest spiritual teachers are those with the strongest intuitive memory of the actual spiritual world, and their teachings reflect that. On the other hand, the teachings that reflect the nature of this world most correctly, and give the best guidance for success here, are the most spiritually corruptive forms of godless satanism and evil. For instance, if you follow the instructions of Jesus in this world, you’re fucked, but you will fare great after death. On the other hand, if you practice some form of Machiavellian satanism, you’ll do much better here, but you’ll have to make spiritually corruptive choices and your long-term prospects are not good.

But if it comforts you, you can be an angel here. You can be a saint here. You can be a presence of God’s light here. You just have to endure the ridicule of demons, and your flesh is exposed to their weapons. They can do to you everything they wish they could do to God. The choice for goodness here will expose you to much suffering. The real question is, how much is God’s smile worth to you? How much is the pride of other angels in your success and purity worth to you? That’s the crux of the matter.

I don’t believe that one should not explain religion to children and instead wait for them to grow up and “make up their own mind”. It’s as stupid as saying one should not teach them maths or science and should instead let them grow up ignorant and uneducated and then, when they’re 18, they can make up their own mind about how much 2+2 is. However, I don’t believe in filling their heads with dogma, either. What I do is wait until they are old enough to understand the real explanations, the real theology, and then teach them as I would adults. The thing is, religion is demanding, much more so than science. I could explain forces and vectors to my kids at a very early age; I could teach them how to code in Logo almost as soon as they could read and write. But religion requires a much more advanced and mature ability for abstract thinking, and although you can fill children’s heads with formulaic explanations, in my opinion that would be worse than useless. As a result, I had to start by giving them a very good foundation of rational thinking, problem solving and, essentially, breaking down complexity into solvable parts. At the age of 13, with my older kid, I’m still not sure whether he quite gets is, but I did explain quite a lot about Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism, in the sense that I explained how they approach similar issues from different standpoints and provide valid answers, and how different theologies can produce essentially identical ethics. Also, I try to strip down the superficial and get to the core issues; for instance, I explained Christianity as a top-down approach, of a revelation of deep truths from God’s perspective, that’s essentially identical to what was later revealed in the near-death testimonies. Buddhism, on the other hand, is the bottom-up approach by a man who figured out the fundamental problems and worked out ways of solving them, figuring out some of the most sophisticated spiritual truths in the process. Hinduism, however, is a mixture of both top-down revelations through scriptures and bottom-up processes of Yoga, and isn’t as much a religion as a set of religious paths wrapped together by common culture and civilization. Judaism is a history of one tribe’s process of figuring out transcendence, with varying degrees of success; if not for the magnificent phenomenon of Jesus, which required knowledge of the backstory and context of his teachings, it would be historically irrelevant and nobody would care about it; transformed and reshaped by Christianity, it reaches great sophistication and value, although most parts of the traditional Judaism are useful primarily as examples of the things people tried, before Jesus, and failed. But not all religions are good. Islam, for instance, is a product of a deranged mind of a madman, who heard a few things here and there about Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, it all got mixed up in his head and spewed forth in form of psychotic hallucinations. Unlike good religions, Islam is spiritually worthless and exists only for ill. If Satan ever created his own ideal religion, it’s Islam. It makes people dumb, unquestioning, deluded and violent. Essentially, it’s a false religion, trash that needs to disappear. It’s a spiritual virus that reduces everything it touches to shit.

At one point, I tried to explain the concept of prayer, and you might find my explanation interesting, so I’ll repeat it here.

Prayer is often misunderstood, by stupid people who aren’t trained in abstract thought, as a wish-list one recites in the direction of God, expecting him to deliver. However, that’s not how intelligent people understand it. To them, prayer is not about asking God to produce material benefits to the believer, it’s not even about talking. In fact, it’s the process of focused and directed listening. In the process of prayer, you attempt to focus your mind on the best available approximation of God you can reach towards, with the highest, most sophisticated parts of your spirit, and trying to sense what it’s telling you. It’s like sensing a magnetic field with a compass; you watch the needle move and it helps you sense the lines of magnetic force, and thus you scan the topology of the magnetic field. In the process of prayer, you learn about God; where He is, where He is not, what do you need to be in order to feel harmony with That which is Out There. You learn how to feel alignment, and you learn how to feel discrepancy. You learn to live in such a way that you feel approval from that direction, you feel you’re doing the right thing. You do talk, but you talk in order to feel out the direction, you feel which words align with it the best, which thoughts align with it the best, and later, which actions align with it the best. Even learning science and maths, or poetry and literature, can be a form of prayer, if it helps you extend your mind’s reach, make it more flexible and powerful, allow you to think clearly, to feel clearly and remove confusion. Prayer can be a sophisticated and subtle thing. Of course, it can be an act of brainwashing yourself by mindlessly repeating phrases which you don’t even understand. Different people, according to their level of comprehension, understand prayer differently, but that is so with everything; people also understand gravity differently, according to their intellectual prowess.

So yeah, that’s how I teach children about religion. 🙂

People have strange ideas about sin, and usually the accompanying imagery is sexual. I assure you, the concept has nothing to do with sex, and it is far from being trivial or arbitrary. But let me explain.

When you don’t know what is right, and you stumble around trying to figure it out, it’s a process of learning. You always make mistakes. It’s the normal process of figuring things out, of breaking through the wall of your limitations.

When you know what is right, you decide to do it, but you occasionally fail, it’s called a lapse. It’s not hypocrisy to know what is right and still occasionally fail to do it. It’s called imperfection. Only God is free of those. The rest of us fuck up, fix the mess, pick ourselves up and try to do better next time.

When you know what is right, and you decide tu bury this feeling, change it and change your concept of right and wrong in order to justify a different course, it’s called sin.

As you can see, sin has nothing to do with mistakes, errors or lapses. It’s a completely different phenomenon. Mortal sin is the kind you refuse to let go until you are destroyed; the kind that makes you stubbornly go the wrong way, defend the wrong choices, until there’s nothing left of your soul to redeem.

You can make mistakes and be free of sin. You can make occasional lapses and be free of sin. You can be deceived or deluded and still be free of sin. It’s not difficult to be free of sin, it’s not something only Jesus could do. It’s as easy as recognizing God, choosing the direction that leads to Him, and be forever loyal, choosing repeatedly, over and over again, the path of renunciation of all that is worldly, illusory and binding, the path of choosing truth over lies, of having your mind’s eye unclouded by desires and deceptions, of being always ready to let go of your life in order to follow God wherever He leads you. And it’s not even difficult, because God is such a great and wonderful prize, that casting everything else aside is no sacrifice. The only sacrifice is enduring this life, being delayed in joining God.