I described in a recent essay about how the knowledge of good and evil was a Divine punishment for the Biblical characters of Adam and Eve. Rather than interpreting this at the Sunday school level as a story, I suggested this was a description of a change of consciousness for mankind from a singularity to polarity.

The polarised (male / female) view of the universe is both a blessing and a curse, that we will continue to endure for evermore. With the power of discernment, man can break down the world into small pieces in order to understand how it works. Sadly at the same moment we lose the very important holistic understanding of the world in the same way that a child dismantling a clock is unable to put it back together.

The universe, the world, our minds, are, after all, interconnected. Any apparent seperation between opposites is a spectre designed to misguide us.

The concept of Heaven and Hell illustrates this apparition well. We are told that they are completely polar opposite places by the preacher in the pulpit, but in reality they are not.

They are the same.

Let me use a well known parable to illustrate. Imagine a large group of people seated around a long dining table. There is food in front of them into which they have to dip their spoons, but there is a difficulty. The spoons have long handles that extend beyond the width of the table. It is impossible to dip the spoon into the food and direct it into one’s mouth.

This tantalising situation is a kind of hell for the hungry people. If they remain as they are they will shrivel up and die of starvation. Only when an angelic thought enters one of their heads, does this hell morph into heaven.

The idea is simple. Each person uses their spoon to feed whoever is sitting in front of them.

We experience this frequently in our everyday lives, if we only pause to think. There are those who spend their time acquiring benefit only for themselves whether it is money, time, material possessions, opportunities. They might well become ‘rich’, but in reality they can experience great sadness, emptiness, frustration, loneliness. We can all think of examples of people who ‘had everything’ who committed suicide or went to prison or lost their social standing and friends for one reason or another.

As we go through life we are encouraged to be optimistic and happy from early childhood. And yet we know that some terrible experiences may be laying in wait for us; perhaps not now but perhaps in the next year or ten.

The unfortunate people of Ukraine are an present day example of how everything can go horriblly wrong through no fault of your own. One minute families are living content and comfortable lives and then the big bad wolf extends a paw with claws extended.

It sounds like a fairy tale, yes, in the way that we mean ‘fairies don’t exist’. Traditional children’s stories are false, we tell our young ones, but they are not. These are stories about heaven or hell in true life and how unpredictable it can be. That is why children’s ears prick up when they listen to a traditional ‘fairy story’ like Sleeping Beauty. They know or at least suspect things can go horribly wrong in life and that they need to remember the secret that undoes the evil witche’s spell.

In the beginning, the universe was created by God, or ‘consciousness’ if you prefer, and there was no Heaven or Hell. Only the creation of man and woman created these extremes of human experience. Man cannot ‘blame God’ when things go horribly wrong because there is no script and no intention of God to steer good people away from bad things. The Cosmic Mind is merely a Watcher, like the Watchers in the Book of Enoch or the Extra-terrestial Beings who some believe follow, but are forbidden to interfere with, life on our rare planet.

Rewards for ‘good behaviour’ do not exist in adult life although as children we are brought up to believe this will be the case. It is more that good behaviour by oneself sets an example of good character to others. This ‘example’ has the very strong power to change the behaviour of others, like in the story of the spoon, but some people are so fixated on ‘me and mine’ that they see good character as weakness.

I am convinced that task for humans is not to expect Heaven or Hell as a reward for good or bad behaviour. This is completely opposite to the views Bible thumpers of the middle ages and today!

We should not even try to steer others onto a path of a preferred behaviour by making our own judgements of people or situations. Most of the time, we do not know all the facts of a situation and are just as likely to sink the ship as make it sail into a safe harbour.

The path to Hell is paved with good intentions.

The only beneficial direction to travel is any that enables individuals to be of good character and show others the benefits of this. This in itself is a massive task as we know that the freewill we all have to change situations for the better or the worse, is extremely difficult to live with. It is like the snake in Walt Disney’s version of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Jungle Book‘, with it’s hypnotic spiralling eyes and suggestive, enchanting song, created no doubt with a memory of the Jungle as the Garden of Eden. Humans commit the most appalling acts and ‘self-forgiveness’, learning and moving on are, in my view, the only tools available.

Perhaps towards the end of life, a person may be able to sit back with true contentment, on e might say a Heavenly contentment, knowing that they now understand the weakness and power of being human and how quickly we can fall and rise. When you look at the smile of a very old person who has done their share of right and wrong, heaven and hell, you may just glimpse that they understand these ideas are the same place in our souls.

There was, is and always will be, a Unity; one ‘Consciousness’, one God. Take your pick you agnostics and gnostics; they are both the same.