Just to reiterate points made in the introduction, it is important to stress that the spiritual structure that I present is based on historical channeled information combined with the best information I could find in modern psychical literature. Along with the huge body of literature pertaining to the benign nature of the world of Spirit, there is another that concerns the spirits from the darker domains of the spiritual world. Unfortunately, books on exorcisms and malignant hauntings seem to bear no relationship to the books published by the popular therapeutic and bereavement mediums. The synthesis I present below is simply my best guess about a structure that follows the evidence, and allows both the good and the evil to operate separately while at the same time remaining as a single coherent spiritual whole.
Many famous modern mediums have written books denying that there really are Hellish levels in the spiritual world. Some even question the existence of any form of “structure” at all within the spiritual realm. These are good psychics and honest people. They place their trust in humanity’s “natural goodness” and a benign universe. They reject all dualities including the duality of good and evil.
The definition of “Humanity’s natural goodness” depends upon the social conditioning of the humanity in question. I’m sure the Germans who tortured and slaughtered 6 million Jews and 2 million other undesirables were naturally good people before they became caught up in Nazi ideology. Pol Pot and thousands of Khmer Rouge followers murdered 2 million Cambodians, and Mao Zedong inspired millions of otherwise good Chinese teenagers and young adults to murder as many as 100 million of their fellow citizens. Serial socialist leaders of Russia including Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin along with thousands of their “useful idiots” killed millions more in failed collective farming and industrialization schemes which lead to widespread famine and economic collapse. It’s easy to think of all these people as evil monsters, but they were only following the dictates of the “political correctness” of their day
I’ll admit, it’s difficult to sell Hell, but even for these souls, Hell is not forever. In the end the hells are just the lower planes of the same heaven in which God dwells. The reason evil souls descend to these levels is a matter of spiritual physics. The hells are of their own making and exist for their own benefit. The laws pertaining to the souls in the hells are the same as the spiritual laws that pertain to the souls in the highest plane. The souls there can evolve there in the same way that souls in the highest heavenly planes can evolve. Free will is the key in the hells, the same as it is for those in the planes closest to God. There’s no Judgement in Heaven. There’s no reward or punishment for a soul’s incarnated behavior. There are only NATURAL laws, as immutable as our laws of physics, and which all spirits must obey.
Heaven is a very, very large place. When I speak of Heaven, I do not mean only the parts of the spiritual realm where good spirits dwell. I also include the “Hellish” planes in which evil minded, self-centered spirits reside. This may seem counterintuitive. After all, Heaven and Hell must be different realms run by different management! Actually….No!
Even though these spiritual planes differ drastically in the type of spirits they contain and the environments that the resident spirits experience, the spiritual laws that apply to both the heavens and the hells are identical. The hells are simply the lower reaches of heaven!
The spirits on both the Heavenly and the Hellish planes actually have the same opportunities for advancement. Spirits in both areas can communicate instantly by thought, and travel instantly within their realms by thinking of where they want to go. They all have the same potential to create their spiritual environment through the power of their own imaginations in much the same way that creative living persons first imagine, and then build their own homes. They all have the same potential to evolve.
The difference between the higher and lower planes is produced exclusively by the spiritual qualities and habits possessed by the spirits that reside there. Hell may not seem much like Heaven, but it is, in fact, part of the same spiritual city, in the same way that big cities have wealthy business and tourist centers with nice restaurants and theaters, but also harbor impoverished slums with crime, drugs, prostitution and violence!
We do not know just how large the spiritual world is, or how many actual planes it contains. This is partly because many spiritual experiences appear to be ineffable, and partly because communication from spirits claiming to be from the higher realms tends to be quite inconsistent. “Ineffable” means that the environments and other qualities of these planes lie beyond our ability to sense, and are not describable in human language. Imagine trying to describe the difference between the colors red and blue to a person who has been blind all his life.
Stainton Moses (1839–1892), perhaps the most famous medium of the nineteenth century (and the most skeptical—he was a Baptist minister) was told by Imperator, his main spirit communicator, that there were twenty-one spiritual levels including our material sphere. According to Moses, there are seven levels below the earth sphere (the “spheres of sin”—what we would call hells), seven levels from the earth sphere and above, which he called the spheres of work and probation, and finally another seven above the probationary spheres, called the spheres of contemplation in which formerly earthly souls become more and more like God. According to Stainton Moses, the seven probationary spheres are the only ones from which communication with earthly mediums takes place.
The Universe according to Emanuel Swedenborg and Frederick Myers >>>>>