Many of those people who have been in a state of clinical death saw a bright and gentle light and experienced incomparable bliss and peace. Based on these testimonies, many publications have appeared in which it is argued that after the death of a person, paradise awaits. However, there are many testimonies of people who, during clinical death, found themselves in a world in which darkness, fire, horror, despair reign.
The famous German artist Kurt Jurgans came into contact with such a world during a complex operation, when he was in a state of clinical death. “The ceiling of the operating room turned red-hot, and a rain of fire broke out. I saw disgusting, grimacing faces looking at me from everywhere. Undoubtedly, I was in hell itself,”he later wrote.
Hence, hell does exist. And this, according to religious dogmas, is a place where a person in torment and suffering must atone for his earthly sins.
It is known that various peoples living and living on Earth have practically similar ideas about the value of human life, as well as about posthumous existence.
And depending on how a person lived in the earthly world, either the bliss of heaven or the suffering of hell awaits him. Death itself is the transition of the soul to either light, heavenly, or dark, underworld places.
But before being in this or that place of the posthumous world, a person's soul must go through a judgment. And although it has its own characteristics in different religions, nevertheless it amazes 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 all the deeds and actions of the deceased during his earthly life. And depending on how many good and evil deeds a person committed, his soul received eternal bliss, or it was 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 domain of the god Hades. So what is hell?
First, in this regard, it should be said at once that practically 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 in boiling resin, and then hurl them onto the sharp tops of trees.
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In Chinese mythology, hell is called 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.
But 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 cannot even imagine.
For the Orthodox, hell is 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 here is the description of hell in a collection of poems and studies of the Russian Slavic philologist 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 the 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 perhaps the hardest trials for unbelievers are in the hell that 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. It can be either burning sulfur lakes full of sinners, or a bottomless abyss in which an underground flame is raging. In general, fire is the main and integral component of hell. For this reason, it is sometimes even called fiery hell.
Here, for example, as the English poet John Milton described hell in the 17th century in the poem "Paradise Lost": despondency and evil, and sorrow, and pain."
However, it is believed that the brightest 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.
In Dante's view, Hell is a giant funnel extending to the center of the Earth, which is divided into nine 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 gave the first circle of Hell to people who in earthly life did not do either good or evil, that is, they were not with the devil or with God. "Through the darkness, no crying could be heard, but only a sigh flew up from all sides."
In the second circle, vile voluptuous people suffered. This sinful people "ran naked, bitten by horseflies, wasps swarming here."
In the third circle were 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 were 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."
Many, of course, will consider that Dante's poem is nothing more than fiction. But one should not rush to such categorical conclusions.
And first of all, because in recent decades, scientists have been trying to understand the structure of the universe, which lies outside the known physical world.
In particular, research in quantum physics, elementary particle physics and astrophysics prove 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 be in 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 particles that make up another 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 that is present in every galaxy. 95% of this matter is particles unknown to science, which are also in our Universe, the remaining 5% are known to us protons, electrons and neutrons. And this ratio exactly corresponds to the ideas of the ancient scientists, who declared that our material world is only a small part of the invisible area of the universe.
Moreover, scientists have suggested 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 Natalya Bekhtereva, who said that "science has entered the phase when it confirms, directly or indirectly, a number of provisions of religion," would be very appropriate.