Thousands of people around the world experience clinical death every year, but today the resuscitation of the dead due to the high level of medicine has become a routine procedure.
In recent years, scientists have collected many testimonies of patients returned from another world, who claim that life continues outside the body. Someone sees light of unusual beauty and tenderness and experiences incomparable peace and happiness … But there are also many cases when people find themselves in a completely different world - a world in which darkness, fire, horror and despair reign …
Nine circles
According to religious beliefs, hell is a place of posthumous torture for sinners, and almost all religions have similar descriptions of it.
So, in Ancient Egypt they believed that the soul of the deceased was judged in the hall of truth, where the god Anubis weighs all his actions on the scales. After that, the souls of the righteous were blessed, and the souls of sinners were devoured by an evil monster.
Among the ancient Greeks, after the sentence was passed, the soul went either to the happy Champs Elysees, or to the dark underworld of the god Hades - Tartarus.
The Hindus are sure that the most notorious sinners burn in huge blazing pits, but they have no rest here either: demons tear them apart with hot tongs, boil them in oil and throw them on pointed trees.
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In Islamic tradition, hell is called jahannam. Immediately after death, a difficult test awaits the soul of the deceased: crossing to the other side through a deep seething stream along a bridge as thin as a sword. The righteous can easily cope with this task, but the sinners fall down, where they will meet with the devil himself …
But, perhaps, the most sophisticated torture in hell is with Catholics. Slanderers are hung up by their tongues, women who have killed a child in their womb breastfeed stinging snakes, harlots are licked by fire day and night, and drunks are either immersed in boiling tar or frozen into an icy lake …
However, Catholics are sure that there are very few absolute sinners, like absolute righteous people, on Earth. And therefore, before entering heaven, their souls in any case must burn for some time in the cleansing fire of purgatory.
According to the texts of the Old Testament, hell is a fiery abyss, where rivers of flame flow to cleanse the souls of sinners. There is a despair that knows no boundaries.
It is believed that hell is located in the center of the earth and has the shape of a cone. The underworld is divided into nine circles, and the lower the circle (a kind of "floor"), the more excruciating the suffering. The ancients also believed that volcanic eruptions were direct evidence of the existence of a hellish flame raging underground. And craters are the real gates leading to hell.
It is curious that the images of hell in Western European art are either a burning lake of sulfur, full of sinners, or an endless abyss of underground flame. That is, fire is an integral part of hell, which is also often called "fiery hell."
In the "Apocalypse" of John, condemned sinners are promised eternal torment that does not stop day or night. The main weapon of the hellish execution was also fire. But, besides fire, there is ice in hell, and fierce winds, torrential rains, terrible monsters and thousands and thousands of other types of torment.
But hell is not only a place of physical suffering. Hell is also a place of eternal loneliness, utter despair and unbearable grief. Demons, demons and evil spirits constantly torment the souls of sinners, and all this will last forever - there is no way out of hell.
I was there
All religions claim that man is more than a physical body. Each of us has a soul, which at the time of death leaves its owner and continues to exist in another world. And death (depending on what kind of life a person lived, what deeds he did) is the transition of the soul to either a bright paradise or a dark underworld.
In the archives of the Catholic Church there are diaries of St. Faustina Kowalska, where she describes how, led by an angel. visited the abyss of hell: “This is a place of great torture, its space is so terrible! These are the types of suffering that I have seen: The first torment that constitutes hell is the loss of God; second - constant reproaches of conscience; third - the inability to change your fate; the fourth torment is a fire that will penetrate the soul, but will not destroy it. Let the sinner know that with what passion he is possessed, he will be tormented by this passion for eternity …"
In the early 1950s, the famous German artist Kurt Jurgans described in his autobiographical book an incident that happened to him during a serious surgical operation, when he was in a state of clinical death for some time: “The ceiling of the operating room turned red-hot, a fiery rain burst … I saw disgusting, grimacing faces looking at me from everywhere. Surely I was in hell itself!"
In the fall of 1982, the wife of a Soviet officer, Valentina Romanova, was driving her car along the Simferopol highway and collided head-on with a car that suddenly drove into the oncoming lane. Being in a state of clinical death, she saw different areas of the other world. This is what she says about hell: “I flew down, I was enveloped in a fiery heat. There, in the gray haze, in a stone pit, hot lava boiled. People were cooking in it - a huge number of people. For a moment, the head popped to the surface to gasp for air and scream, and immediately disappeared into the merciless hell. I mentally asked: "Who are they and why did they get here?" And then I heard the answer: “Perverts, adulterers and child molesters. They got what they deserved."
What's inside of us?
It is no secret that especially sensitive people are able to see the inhabitants of the lower strata of the subtle world. (Fantastic monsters and freaks, as in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.) Many saints could also see the inhabitants of the other world. Thus, St. John of Kronstadt said more than once: "If people saw who is around them, many would go mad."
It is no secret that alcoholics in a state of delirium tremens and drug addicts, having taken a "dose", see devils, snakes, creepy spiders and many other evil spirits. Perhaps these are not hallucinations, and they really come into contact with the inhabitants of the lower strata of the subtle world.
In mysticism, there is a phenomenon known as exteriorization - the separation of the soul from the body. Under the influence of a large amount of alcohol or drugs, the soul is to some extent separated from the body and is able to look into the reality that vibrates at the level of its own energy. That is, she looks into the world to which she corresponds. Therefore, most theologians agree that "hell is a state of mind, not a place."
And the famous Tibetan book of the dead says that all visions, all images are products of our consciousness, our inner world.
Real space or a product of consciousness?
In recent decades, there have been attempts at scientific knowledge of the world, which lies beyond physical reality. Numerous discoveries in the field of quantum physics, particle physics and astrophysics indicate that man and the Universe are much more complex than we imagined. Today more and more scientists declare that, besides ours, there is another, more perfect non-material reality.
Albert Einstein's famous formula E = mcl proves that everything in the universe is energy. Rigid bodies, people, thoughts - all these are energies of varying degrees of subtlety. It has also been mathematically proven that outside the physical world there is an even more complexly organized wave world, which consists of energy much more subtle than the physical one. Therefore, it is quite possible that worlds that we do not even suspect are hidden outside the limits of the perception of our feelings …
In every galaxy there is invisible dark matter, consisting of particles unknown to science, and our Universe consists of 95% of them, and only 5% of the Universe is made up of matter available to us from protons, electrons and neutrons. So, maybe hellish spaces are in the worlds of black matter?
In the end, it is probably not so important what hell is: a product of our consciousness or the real space of the other world. The main thing is that it exists, and your own business is how to perceive it - as a religious dogma or as a deep philosophical image. Academician Natalya Bekhtereva has repeatedly emphasized that science has entered the phase when it manages to confirm, directly or indirectly, a number of the provisions of religion. But since hell is not a human world, but on the contrary, an inhuman world, any human attempts to reconstruct hell will turn out to be extremely poor today.