The Misunderstood Hell

How much of your life has been consumed by considering what's actions you're about to do that are right or wrong, or beating yourself up for things you believe are bad or wrong?

What would you say if I told you that the Ancient Hebrews had no concept of good and evil. These are the people from whom Judaism, Christianity, and Islam get their beliefs from, and yet all of them have tons of shame involved in them regarding good and bad, right and wrong.

Again, how does the enemy control us? Shame.

The concept of good and bad actually came about after 585 B.C. from Western philosophy. As mentioned before, prior to that time, the entire world was Eastern philosophy, including the Ancient Hebrews, and right and wrong was not a concept included in that philosophy. That doesn't exclude the idea of people shaming their self for actions they've taken. People can shame their self without a general moral standard of good and bad held by the world at large, but it's harder to do.

For the Ancient Hebrews, it wasn't about good and bad, right and wrong. Instead, it was about functionality and dysfunctionality, and there were no judgments of good and bad on those words.

The Ancient Hebrews were nomadic, and a person's dysfunctions, if great enough, could get several people in the tribe killed, or the entire Tribe killed or enslaved. Foreign tribes or nature itself can be unkind and unrelenting.

In Eastern philosophy, the belief is that everyone has function and dysfunction within them. It is a natural part of being human. So why would a judgment be placed on those things?

Sit and think for a minute what it would be like if you had never known there was such a thing as good or bad in regard to actions you or others have done. Can you imagine actions that harm others having no judgment on them? Sit with that for a minute.

Can you see how the judgment doesn't actually have to be there?

Can you see how you obviously know if an action is helpful or hurtful without there being a judgment on it of good or bad?

Can you imagine how it would feel not to heap shame on yourself for the hurtful actions you've done in the past, but instead to simply say, "I realize my actions harmed someone else, and I don't want to do that again, so I'll learn from this and try to make it right with the person I harmed."

Imagine how much you'd learn that way and how much of a better place the world would be if we all looked at our actions like that.

We haven't done that in the past. Instead, we heap shame on ourselves which we repress with dysfunctional behaviors ("sin"), which causes us to heap more shame on ourselves, which makes us progressively feel worse...which means we sin more and more to counteract the worse feelings. You can see how this would eventually put us down and out emotionally, right?

But if we remove the shame, we feel a ton better. When we feel better, we treat others better and we have less reason to sin to escape the uncomfortable feelings since they're lessened quite a bit.

Don't forget--sin is just an attempt to feel better because we don't accept the way we feel at that moment. So if you already feel better, you have less incentive to sin to feel better. Sin can also be an attempt to avoid feeling worse or having to do things we don't want to do that will make us feel worse. But I'll just keep it simple for the purposes of this book.

Truth helps a ton, as well. Conditioning one's self to accept his or her feelings no matter how pleasant or painful they are is paramount to removing the desire to sin to feel better. If we sit with our uncomfortable feelings and love them, we eventually enjoy them! We place no judgment on them. They're just emotions--they're not going to kill us. There's nothing inherently bad about any of them. In fact, their function is to help you understand life and yourself better so you can learn and grow and navigate life better. That's a very helpful thing. The problem is that we've been avoiding them for so long that our hearts are hard now so we're not feeling too terribly great. Sitting with what we feel instead of distracting from it conditions our heart to feel again. The result is that we feel our painful emotions better, rather than avoiding them, but it also means we feel our positive emotions a lot better, too. I remember the first time I started to feel my emotions properly. It was amazing! Like a new dimension to life. I could feel my emotions running throughout my body. It was exhilarating! That would mainly happen when I'd watch a good movie or listen to Great music or read a powerful scene in a book.