an enlightened look at hell

Spiritual resource to share: dominion


Perhaps you have heard this modern day parable: A little girl is running away from a big hairy monster. It follows her down streets, across bridges, through the trees. Finally, she is cornered in an alley. Frightened almost to death - she turns to the monster and asked "Wh-wh-what are you going to do?" The monster stops, furrows its brows, thinks for a moment and then says, "I don't know. This is your dream."

I thought about this story after reading an exerpt from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. Page 588 carries the definition of hell:

HELL. Mortal belief; error; lust; remorse; hatred; revenge; sin; sickness; death; suffering and self-destruction; self-imposed agony; effects of sin; that which "worketh abomination or maketh a lie."

The "self-imposed agony" was what got me thinking. Science and Health also uses "self-imposed" in this way:

The human thought must free itself from self-imposed materiality and bondage.
AND
(Written about a person healed in Christian Science) He learned that suffering and disease were the self-imposed beliefs of mortals, and not the facts of being;

Reasoning on this, I asked myself, where does the thought of disease come from? It can only be entertained in thought if I agree to give it access to my thought. The thought of disease doesn't have its own agenda. In that way, I am imposing on myself the thoughts of disease because I allow myself to let those thoughts in and I dwell on them! So this puts me in the driver's seat of my own thinking. I can determine what goes in and out of my thoughts. I can ...

Stand porter at the door of thought. Admitting only such conclusions as you wish realized in bodily results, you will control yourself harmoniously.

Once, when mulling over and over again a disagreement I had with an individual, I realized that I had uncomfortably created for myself a little corner of hell by entertaining less than lovely thoughts about this individual. I realized that these were totally self-imposed! Nothing in my little mental argument had anything to do with the individual as a child of God. I was making up the whole unpleasant disagreement. With that old slap of spiritual reasoning hitting me in the face, it freed me from these "mortal beliefs" and I felt at peace.

Lesson learned: the antidote to hell is a disciplined thought that stops discord, dismay, disease in their tracks! We are the ones who determine whether or not we stay in the dream of material thinking.









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