What is hell?
Many people who have had clinical death say that they experienced unearthly bliss, peace, saw a bright light at the end of the tunnel … Based on such evidence, many publications have appeared, claiming that in life after death, paradise awaits a person. But there are many testimonies of people when clinical death showed them a world in which darkness, fire, horror, despair reign.
The famous German artist Kurt Jurgans touched such a world during a complex operation, finding himself in a state of clinical death. “In the operating room, the ceiling turned red-hot, and a rain of fire poured out. I saw disgusting grimacing faces that looked at me from everywhere. Without a doubt, I was in hell itself,”he later wrote.
It turns out that hell still exists. And this, as they say in religious dogmas, is a place where a person in torment and suffering must atone for his earthly sins. As you know, different peoples who lived and live on Earth have practically similar ideas about the value of human life, as well as about life after death. And depending on how a person lived his earthly life, either the bliss of heaven or the torment of hell awaits him. Death itself is the transition of the soul either to the bright paradise world, or to the dark world of hell.
But before being in this or that place of the posthumous world, the human soul goes through judgment. And although in different religions it has its own characteristics, and yet it strikes with significant similarities.
For example, in Ancient Egypt, it was believed that the soul of the deceased is subjected to judgment in the so-called Hall of Truth, where the god of the dead and the guardian of mummies Anubis weighs on the scales all the deeds and actions of the deceased during his earthly life. And depending on how many good and evil deeds a person has done, his soul will receive either eternal bliss, or it will be devoured by an evil monster. The ancient Greeks also believed that after the judgment, the soul falls either to the Champs Elysees - part of the underworld, where the souls of the blessed live, or to the terrible underground possessions of the god Hades. So what is hell?
What is hell? Firstly, in this regard, it should be noted that almost all peoples represent the picture of hell in almost the same way. For example, among the Hindus, these are gigantic flaming pits in which sinners are. From their bodies with red-hot hooks, demons pull out pieces of meat, boil them in boiling resin, and then throw them onto the sharp tops of trees.
In Chinese mythology, hell has the name Diyu, which means "underground court." One of its most important elements is the "mirror of evil", in which sinners see the reflection of their earthly deeds.
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Well, in the Old Testament, hell is a flaming abyss in which rivers of fire flow: in them the souls of sinners must be purified. The horror and despair that reign there, the human mind is not able to imagine.
Hell for the Orthodox is also no less terrible place. “This is not a human world, this is an inhuman world, so any human attempts to reconstruct it will turn out to be extremely poor,” Deacon Andrei Kuraev, professor at the Moscow Theological Academy, says about hell.
And such a description of hell in a collection of poems and studies of the Russian philologist-Slavist and folklorist P. A. Bessonova "Kaliki perekhozhny":
“A place has been prepared for sinners, and there are perverted and variegated men, and harlots will go into eternal fire, and thieves will go into great fear, and murderers will go into a heavy stench, and drunkards into hot tar, and everyone will be given according to his deeds”.
But, probably, more difficult tests for unbelievers fall in hell, which the Catholics describe. Liars and evil-tongues are hung there by their tongues, and women who have an abortion breastfeed poisonous snakes that torment their bodies. Libertines and adulterers burn in the fire day and night, and alcoholics are dipped in the icy waters of an underground lake, then thrown into boiling tar.
The biblical description of hell echoes its image in art. These are flaming sulfur lakes full of sinners, or bottomless abysses in which an underground flame is raging. Fire is the main and integral part of hell. And for this reason it is also called the fire hell.
Here, for example, as the English poet John Milton described hell in the 17th century in the poem "Paradise Lost": only despondency and evil, and sorrow, and pain."
However, it is believed that a brighter description of hell at the beginning of the XIV century was given by the great Italian Dante Alighieri in his "Divine Comedy". Contemporaries considered this work a revelation from above.
Hell in Dante's ideas is a giant funnel that goes to the center of the Earth, and which is divided into 9 circles, also gradually narrowing downward. And since Dante's Hell is a place where universal evil is concentrated, eternal darkness and cold reign there.
“From there came a heavy stench, scraps of all dialects, a great murmur. Words in which pain and anger, and fear, splashing hands and complaints and cries merged into a hum without time for centuries."
Dante took the first circle of Hell to people who did neither good nor evil during their earthly life, that is, they were neither with the devil nor with God. "Through the darkness, no crying could be heard, but only a sigh flew up from all sides."
In the second circle, the vile voluptuous suffer. These sinful people "ran naked, bitten by horseflies, wasps swarming here."
In the third circle there are the gluttons, in the fourth - the misers and wasteful, in the fifth - the evil and insidious. "They beat each other with their hands and head and chest, and with their legs, pulling out pieces of meat with their teeth." In the sixth circle, heretics are subjected to hellish torments. In the seventh - murderers, rapists and sodomites. In the eighth, those who responded to good with evil, who deceived trust, as well as thieves and hypocrites languished. At the very bottom of the hellish abyss is Lucifer's lair - an icy lake in which those who have committed the most terrible sins in their earthly lives suffer. "Blood flowed from their faces between the tears in streams, and an abominable bunch of worms swallowed it right there under their feet."
Of course, many will consider that Dante's poem is nothing more than fiction. But one should not rush to such categorical conclusions. And above all, for the reason that in recent decades, scientists have been trying to understand the structure of the universe, which lies beyond the known physical world. In particular, research in quantum physics, particle physics and astrophysics proves that besides our world, there is another reality, much more perfect than the one we know. This is the world of subtle energies.
Therefore, the assumption sounds quite scientific that our physical reality and what exists outside of it are not two separate worlds, but a single reality that penetrates one another.
In connection with this version, we must constantly come into contact with the so-called other world, although we do not see it. But we do not see it because the level of vibrations of the particles that make up the other world exceeds that of the elements of the earthly world. Therefore, other worlds remain beyond our vision, like the spokes of a rotating wheel.
More recently, astrophysicists have discovered invisible dark matter present in every galaxy. 95 percent of this matter is particles unknown to science, which are also in our Universe, the remaining 5 percent are known to us protons, electrons and neutrons. And this ratio just corresponds to the ideas of ancient scientists, who argued that our material world is only a small part of the invisible area of the universe. Moreover, scientists suggest that dark matter, in turn, consists of two forms: cold and hot. The particles that make up cold matter are heavy and slow, while the particles of hot matter are fast and light.
Who knows, maybe this is the hot and cold hell that all the holy books write about.
In this context, the words of Academician Natalia Bekhtereva will be very appropriate, who said that "science has entered the phase when it confirms, directly or indirectly, a number of the provisions of religion."
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