By Bob Olson
I have seen no evidence of hell in my investigations of the afterlife. I’ve had hundreds of personal readings with psychic mediums and witnessed hundreds of other people get readings and never have I heard a person in spirit say that they were in hell or that they were aware of such a place.
More and more afterlife experts agree that the only hell that exists is within our own mind. It’s not a place, realm or dimension; it’s a state of mental anguish. Fear is hell. Guilt is hell. Regret is hell. Shame is hell. And these are emotions that we can feel in the afterlife, but only in response to our lives here on the earth plane. In this way, it’s easy to understand why one might interpret the existence of hell. But this is a far stretch from a place of eternal damnation, fire and torture.
While a tiny fraction of people who have had near-death experiences (NDEs) have suggested they experienced some version of what might be interpreted as hell, the evidence of near-death experiences indicates two important factors: 1) That the details of what we experience in an NDE are interpreted by our own points of reference (what we believe as human beings), and 2) That the initial experiences we have of the afterlife during an NDE are in direct relation to our expectations of it.
So if you remember that we can be, do and have anything we want in spirit, then you understand how easily we might create a hell-like experience when we cross over to the other side if that’s what we are expecting. Our beliefs alone might make it so. But it’s not reality.
If you’ve ever been to a hypnosis demonstration, you’ve probably witnessed volunteers from the audience being influenced by suggestion on stage. In almost every show, the hypnotist will put something like a penny in the volunteers’ hands and suggest that it’s getting hotter and hotter. Eventually, all the volunteers on stage drop the penny as if it’s melting the palms of their hands. Yet it isn’t. There is no reality to their experience of being burned by the penny. No hypnotist could afford the lawsuits if their hands were actually injured. Instead, the people experienced what they expected to experience, which was to feel the penny getting hot.
People in spirit who communicate through psychic mediums say there’s no hell. Channelers who channel advanced spirits and group entities agree. Even the majority of people who have had near-death experiences say there’s no hell. But for those few whose near-death experiences led them to believe that there is, the most practical explanation of their stories is that their conscience was so filled with an expectation that hell is where they were going that hell is what they experienced. Little did they know that all they had to do was think of a more pleasant experience, or even cry out for help, and their negative experience would have been over in an instant. In fact, this is exactly what happened for many near-death experiencers.
If you believe in hell and expect that you’re going there, it’s likely that you might experience what you expect. This doesn’t mean that hell exists. What it means is that we can be, do and have anything we can imagine in the spirit world, so if you are imagining and expecting a reality that seems something like what you think hell would be, that might be what you experience, at least on your way to the spirit world. Once in the spirit world—with no chance of you returning to your body—there will be people in spirit there to help you end the experience of your imagined expectations and see the reality of the afterlife, which is just the opposite of what we think of as hell.
This, however, brings me back to what I said about emotions like fear, guilt, regret and shame. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the afterlife or you’re in your physical life right now, if you’re feeling fearful, guilty, regretful or shameful about something, you’re already experiencing a kind of hell. So if you die feeling those feelings, that mental hell that you were experiencing in this life is going to follow you into the afterlife. By this I mean, you will always remember what you experienced in this life—be it good or bad.
So if you currently feel remorse about something you did to someone in this lifetime, you’re going to feel that remorse in the spirit world too. Once we’re in spirit, we know exactly how badly we’ve hurt people, and we can feel what we did to them from their perspective. That’s a heavy burden to carry, but it’s how we learn compassion as spiritual beings. Even though we might not learn it while we’re alive as humans, we can’t escape it once we’ve crossed over to the other side.
Luckily, as mentioned, there are people in spirit who have made it their job to help the recently deceased deal with these sorts of hellish emotions. Any one of us might need the gentle care and counseling of nonjudgmental spirits to help us overcome our own judgments against things we’ve said and done to others. This is how we process our physical lives and how we grow spiritually from them. Eventually, we all learn to forgive ourselves for hurting or taking advantage of others, and our negative emotions turn to positive emotions. So even if you choose to call this experience of emotional transformation hell, it’s temporary and beneficial—all part of our spiritual growth.
© Copyright 2011 Bob Olson & Olson Media Group, LLC, BestPsychicDirectory.com, BestPsychicMediums.com & AfterlifeTV.com All Rights Reserved
Afterlife TV is presented by Afterlife Investigator & Psychic Medium Researcher Bob Olson, who is the author of Answers about the Afterlife: A Private Investigator’s 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death.
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