Angels 101 Pt. III

Heaven and Hell

Welcome to Angels 101 Part #3.

In the end of Part #2, I wrote:

"Next time I will talk about heaven, hell, myth, legend, religion, where the angels come into all this and more about spiritual healing and maturity."

In the constant war for souls being waged by the world's religions the concepts of sin, punishment of evil and acceptance of one religion's version of God over another, has bred the most hysterical, maniacal and tortorous evils ever invented by men.

Those evils that were actually created, from the Iron Maiden to the H-Bomb and those which are only imaginary like Hell and Satan, are still looked upon by most people with shock and dismay. They wonder, Could a loving God have created and approved of such torments as hell, devils, demons, torture for eternity, fiery pits of bubbling sulphur, endless pain and suffering for evil people? Would God create an eternal soul just to make it suffer for the mistakes it made?

Of course some people say yes, to all this. Some say no. I myself am on the no side. The angels on the other hand, laugh at our fears. They laugh because they know that God is not what we humans think God is, and that hell,death, the devil and all those terrible torments do not exist. They cannot exist. For the whole idea of pain, torment, idols, demons and angry gods is nothing more than a myth made up by our ancestors to explain that which they could not explain. That is: Why does God seem separated from Mankind? The answer invariably for most ancient religions was: Because God does not like us! We did something bad along the way and He left us. When He comes back, He will punish us.

Yet, even the most weird supernatural punishment and pain that we can imagine is illusory and man-made. God does not punish us for sins with eternal pain.

Pain is supposed to be a finite indicator of a physical trauma, not an infinite horror imposed on those God supposedly hate. God does not feel hate, anger, jealousy, fear, God is not morbid, sadistic, cruel, heartless or murderous. Ask yourselves, is God so ignorant as to have created something which, like mankind, once out of God's control, had to be punished and tortured? For what could be out of God's control? And if we are to be burned alive forever in Hell, does this not mean God lied about Genesis and that mankind DOES HAVE ETERNAL LIFE!? In Genesis it says that this eternal life is all mankind lacks to be as the "Elohim," (in ancient Hebrew, "The Gods," plural!!!); now that mankind has partaken of the knowledge of good and evil! Yet you cannot punish eternally that which is not eternal. That which burns is consumed and dies to its nature. Yet in this hell, man burns and is tormented eternally along with the angels who fell! Harsh punishment indeed for God's Children, who seem to be eternal and indestructible.
This scenario would show a God consumed with his own inadequecies at handling his own creation. A God frustrated and tormented by his own children. A dysfunctional, rabidly aggressive deity that has no recourse in creation but to drown people, burn them, judge them as sinners and bring them into eternal disfavor. Such a man, who would do such things to his own children, would be called evil. Yet God, this God of the Bible is supposedly the essence of good! Hence a great confusion has ensued and men and women now go about with the exact same dysfunctions,laying blame upon, tormenting and abusing their own children, sometimes to death. And when the children retaliate, sometimes the parents die as well.What an awful world this evil deity has created!

The Angels will tell us, this is not God. This is the shadow of our own human dysfunction which has become an ungodly beast which is called the Devil. The Devil is nothing but a conglomeration of our mistakes, our pains and our misfortunes and dysfunctions. An amoebic, unembodied "thing" that pulses with our hatreds, our rage and our terror. Thoughts become things. And so this Devil was born from our own reasonless fear that God is separate from us.
History shows that the entire idea of "Hell" as a place made by God to cast away evil angels and bad human souls was not even invented until the Hellenistic times. The ancient Hebrews and other Semitic peoples had no such things in their belief system. Death was enough punishment for them. The whole concept of hell really descended from the Etruscans and early Celts who had made up some fairly wretched punishments for those they considered evil. And yet, even in those antique religions, the soul was considered to be immortal. It was in a sad, dreary and sometimes pained state after death, but it was immortal. To the Semetic Peoples the immortal soul was often considered to be "asleep," that is wandering unconscious or sleeping peacefully until the arrival of the Messiah. Still the soul was considered immortal. So there was a distinct difference then,even in ancient times, between the immortal soul and the mortal body.

Those who lived in the darkened forests of early Europe tended to see demons and faeries and gnomes and other creatures under every log and bush. To them these were gods and godlings. Such creatures were called demons by early Christians who wiped out or absorbed these native European cultures. the term "demon" came from the Greek term "Daemon," which meant a spirit who told the soul what course it should take. In other words, a guardian angel! Apparently one man's god is another man's demon. So we begin to see that man has an immortal soul, which is somehow directed by some version of an ancestor, god, daemon, angel, sprite, muse, guide, spirit, ghost, etc. etc. All words for what? For theDivine Message of God, the Creator. The Message is also the messenger. In Greek the messenger is called Angelos, Angels. God has always been trying to tell us something through the Angels. And that something is one word and one breath..."LIVE!"

The Christian concept of Hell we know today is a place made up out of the whole cloth and infested by old, decrepit myths which no longer serve a purpose in mankind's spiritual growth. It was never a true Christian concept, but only added into Christ's words later by a church eager to impose its will upon its parishoners. For if Christ was right and eternal life was to be had by any person who believed in him and his word, then by rights, no man was any longer bound to any other man or insititution or religion. Essentially Christ had released everyone from any moral obligation to any earthly institution. He bid everyone give to the Romans what was Rome's. But he also said, give to God what was God's. And what is God's but all creation and our immortal souls? Really the Romans had nothing but what God allowed them to have. Such a simple statement ripped into the very heart of the Age of Theocracies. It placed the Soul and God above all. And if the soul could be saved for eternity by such a simple belief as accepting Christ, what then of all the theocracies which ruled men's lives? How would they survive!?
They would not. They would crumble. Jesus was a revolutionary spirit in this. In fact he was the head revolutionary. The Macabbees and the Essenes were children bearing arms compared to this new revolutionary mind. Jesus warned the priests, Saducees and Pharisees and rabbis who guided the lives of the Jews that they were a generation of vipers and would not continue burdening people with their religious powers. He was correct. The old Hebrew God, the Temple and its priests failed to protect Jerusalem and their followers. Thirty years after Christ died, the temple was gone and Judaism changed forever, bereft of priests and prelates and left only with the rabbis (teachers) who had to rethink Judaism from the ground up. And the Roman world was now infected with something it would finally have to give into. The anti-theocracy virus had been given to the world. The idea that certain men were gods and should rule all men began to crumble on the day Jesus of Nazareth died. However this did not stop anyone from continuing to try. But each successive Caesar, Emperor, Kaiser, Khan and King simply showed their human frailities and their dysfunctions. The age of those Ordained to Rule by Heaven fell out of favor finally in the late 1800's. Assuredly they were replaced by Political tyrants. But political tyrants can be hired and fired by the masses. Heavenly rule was over. The rule by man over man had begun, but a man can be guiltlessly removed from their post, if they show a failing which the people cannot bear. The age of the Man-God was over. The Age of the God within all Men and Women has begun. Old myths began to fail us. And in truth God was dead. As Neitchze the philosopher noted. The old, angry, jealous, intractable, blood-thirsty father, warrior God of the ancients was indeed dead. Such a being is nothing more than a myth. JHVH, YHWH, Jehova Jira, El, Baal, Zeus, Jupiter, name it what you will. The concept was dead. Such a God will no longer rule mankind's lives. With His death, comes the death of His mythic kingdoms and dungeons, Heaven and Hell have changed considerably since those days of the Terrible, Angry Father God.

How can life have a father and no mother? How can a god be a warrior king without a queen? How can a man have no female counterpart and be whole? We are not speaking here of physical sexuality. But of the spiritual. If God is whole, then it must also encompass Goddess. If God is the Father, God must also be the Mother. If God is everything, then certainly God must encompass everything. If God is not in Hell, then God is not omnipotent or omniscient, nor omnipresent. For God would have to control Hell, view it's torments daily and be there with the tormented, feeling their pain, knowing their abuse was being commited by God. Such a sick representation of that which is called LOVE, does not follow either logically or philisophically.

Because this incompetent male warrior God, with no nurturing qualities at all, was brought into being, it was His children who were also wicked and twisted and rebellious. So came into being the concepts of good angels and bad angels, war in heaven, leaders in that war, and the idea that such a war would be leveled against all mankind eventually. The outriders of that war were Satan's minions. The myth of Satan is long and convoluted. It is too long to go into here. It is all only a reflection of the struggles mankind has always had against itself and which it had with its made up God. Satan was the "Bad Seed" the uncontrollable child, the rebel, the prosecutor of everything God tried to create. He was the original "rebel with out a cause." The original youthful, beautiful child-like angel who turned his back on his parent and began to despise everything this intractably stubborn jealous deity made. In effect it is nothing more than a reflection of what all human youths, girls and boys, go through when rebelling against their parents and seeking a world of their own to create and "rule." Satan is nothing more than a vast representation of teenage angst. This may sound simplistic. But the original Satan was the title of an office. The office of prosecutor, adversary. At what point does the Beautiful Child of the Divinity become the Adversary of God? When it begins to reach puberty, (which is why Satan is so often linked with unrestrained sexuality and perversions), and when it begins to be fully capable of making its own conscious decisions. At teen age. Satan was not such a bad fellow at first, in the Bible. Later mankind made this entity the fall guy for every trouble known to us. When in fact, if one studies the Bible, it is God who says He causes all trouble and is the creator of evilitself. All others are simply his messengers. Hence the arcane and Byzantine mysteries surrounding angels. Where some very good angels, also seem to be very bad at the same time! A story you can read today in any of the well know Angel Dictionaries and Encyclopaedias. Just as with polytheism, when people determined God's messengers (angels) did all of God's work on earth and in the heavens, thousands of angels had to be invented and named.

Before the time of Jesus it was a time when theocracies, (theocracy is rule by religion, over a city, state or nation...), battled one another in promotion of one god over another. When the Canaanites or Philistines defeated the Hebrews, they would replace Hebrew gods with their own. The Hebrews at first called these gods false and useless, less than gods, they were only stone and wooden idols and impotent.Their God was an invisible all knowing presence. They did not have a concept of devils, as devils had not yet been invented. So these gods of the other people were considered to be fallen angels, spirits which had rebelled against God. What we now call Demons, Yet by applying this false idea to the old Philistine gods, they in fact gave them a power they did not formerly have.

Because the human self-esteem level can be lowered by being forced to be slaves for others, the Hebrews began to see these evil gods vying for the throne of the one God. In their hearts they tried to keep the One God sacred, for it set them apart. But they were infected by the cultures of their captors, whether the Egyptians, Assyrians, Hittites, Canaanites, Philistines or others, the gods of these theocracies began to meld and blend with the Hebrew God. The Hebrew God began to take on aspects of Dagon, Osisris, Ra, Moloch, Aphrodite, Isis and other gods. Eventually the One God was not so forgiving, loving or even tempered as once He was. He brought plagues, famines, floods and heartache. He needed placation, sacrifice, sometimes even human sacrifice, and certainly made humans sacrifice their lives and souls to Him. This God, after the time of Moses took on the aspect of a warrior and became a jealous God who would have "No other gods before him!" Now that same God which at first would not allow Abraham to sacrifice his son to Him, demanded entire towns and cultures be utterly slaughtered to the last man, even the last ox! It is safe to say that man himself was coloring his god's temperament and no longer listening to the God which once was One with Everything. Man began to use the concept of an outside God for his own unjustified political ends.

The issue is complex indeed and deserves many years of study. However the bottom line is that once man began to see he could manipulate his God's nature to suit his own purposes, theocracies began to put a stranglehold of tyranny on their people. As long as God could be brutal, manipulative, punishing His enemies and friends alike, as long as people could not trust the deity, without the help of the priesthood they were at the mercy of every mishap that came along. If a stronger nation invaded them and enslaved them it was God's doing. God thought they needed a lesson. If they were rich and proseprous it was because God smiled on them and supported their king. All of this was just an extension of ape-like ego driven power behavior that has nothing to do with God, angels or human evolution.
I go over much of this information in my book, "Speaking of Angels" which is now available. The angels explain our evolution, our split with the God within and our growing dependence on the God from outside. They explain how we stopped depending on our inner vision and self-motivated creativity and forced ourselves into the physical paradigm of "Survival of the Fittest," "Dog eat dog," or the "Top Dog" mentality.

Because we come into this world and become physically manifested beings we are in many ways, made to bend to its rules. However we are actually here to break those rules and bend them into our own creative uses. But because of our original mistake, which was to see the God Force separate from ourselves and to see ourselves alone and helpless without outside help, we have promoted an extremely slow rate of creative growth. Things that could have been invented and utilized years ago for our betterment, have been held back by the "powers that be" who claim to "know what's best." Hence those who believed man would never fly, are shown to have been very mistaken indeed. Those who thought a building of over four storeys might insult God were also wrong. Those who thought men could not physically stand going over twentyfive miles an hour were ignorant of just how fast man could go. Those who say God will come and judge everyone good or evil and burn the wicked forever while the saints gleefully look on, are also wrong. What good person wounded by another, could bear to watch that person "burn forever?" How long is forever? Would we want to spend the entire time in "heaven" seeing people tortured? Is this what heaven is all about? Of course not. How many of us would want to see our Hindu neighbors tormented by demons because of their beliefs? How many would even want to see a Nazi stripped of his flesh and raked over hot coals, or eaten by Satan and defecated out to have it done all over again as the Catholics used to believe was done to sinners? Even a tortured soul from Auschwitz might only want to watch such a terrible thing only once to see justice served but I doubt it. Such horrors are not pleasant things to bear witness to, no matter how badly we feel we were hurt. The thing is, those who can feel for others and who understand hurt, would not wish such things on others. We seek justice, not torment. We seek reperation, not torture. Those with elevated souls seek their brothers and sisters to be revealed in the truth and to see things as they see them. Can a man be smarter and more just than the God which created him? Hardly. God did not create Hell. We did. Because we are the ignorant ones who don't listen to God Within us. And we continue to promote it in our ignorance. The angels know the only hell is the one in our subconscious mind which was installed there by ignorant men and women seeking to promote low self-esteem and to control people by not allowing them to know God within themselves. Hell and the Bogie-Man are one in the same, tales told to little children to make them eat their peas. Or to make them pay their tithes. If a person does not want to pay their tithes, they might have a good reason. Their church may not be worthy of being supported, depending on its tenants and who runs it. Or a person may just be lazy, and that is their right as well. Forcing anyone to do anything under threat of punishment might make an society or an economy run smoother. But it does not do anything for spiritual growth.

We know now that it is the hurt that people go through as children that often turns them into the inhumane monsters they become as adults. Our need to beat someone for punishment, to spank, to strap, to lock away without food, to abuse verbally or otherwise, comes from not knowing any better and usually it has been done to us previously. Anger and rage come directly from a sense of helplessness and unloveableness. An adult, who feels helpless before a child, is a miserable being indeed!

For millenia mankind has not known any better. Slowly but surely we are learning. Individual by individual.We come now to the idea of reincarnation. Not the Hindu idea of men coming back as animals. People rarely come back as animals, according to the Angels, except for very specific purposes. We speak of reincarnation and karma, which were originally of course, Hindu religious concepts. The words however fit as well as any. The truth is all spirits are re-incarnated and in this way justice occurs. Let us say a man was a Nazi in a previous life. He killed hundreds of people in terrible ways. Hell would be a fit place for him. But where is the justice in that? How does a soul, obviously immortal, learn that he has done wrong? If he can't be killed, is torment the only way? And does it have to last forever? Of course not. Would it not be justice if this man was reincarnated as a Jew in Palastine who now is killed by a Palestinian terrorist, just for being a Jew? Would this now not give him a valuable lesson, once he reaches the other side again? Many ask, how reincarnation works, how simply forgetting a past life and starting a new one would be of benefit? If we were able to always pick and choose the best life for ourselves, it would not be effective. But if we are here to learn things like honesty, integrity, racial equality, harmony among neighbors, etc. etc. Then it would be effective for an ex-nazi to come back as a Jew, harassed and abused for his religion. Surely, this is heresy, to say a Nazi could be a Jew and a Jew a Nazi? But were not Israeli soldiers recently convicted of burying a Palestinian man alive? Was their crime justified because the world has hated Jews for so long? Of course not.

If, from day one of a soul's creation, they are caused first of all to forget their status as eternal spirits which are not able to be killed or harmed, they will fall into the illusion of death and pain. In this illusory process a person will cling to life because this one life, they believe, is all they have. They will feel sickness, weakness, pain and misery. However thay will also feel power, health, strength, and well-being. By feeling the negative state, they will become more and more aware that the positive is a better state of being.
Even Buddha was kept from seeing human suffering. When he saw it, he realized there was a reason for it and sought to unveil that reason. He sought that unveiling by suffering himself. By being a beggar and an ascetic. He punished himself, starved himself, denied himself all pleasure. He needed to see the bad by comparing it with the good. To a starving man a bowl of rice is a banquet. To an obese, overfed man, a banquet can be garbage. We all know these things in our souls. We know them because each and everyone of us has been through it. We have been abused and we have been abusers. We have been revolutionaries and we have been tyrants. We have been priests and unbelievers. Justice comes in the balance we finally come to understand. That to hurt another is to hurt ourselves. To separate a person from their lives is to destroy our own. To steal from one is to steal from one's self. If we are greedy in this life, the next life will have nothing in it.In this way we learn how to manifest in our lives what God is.

Without enlightened souls this grinding wheel of karma would be as bad as any hell. We would be suffering endlessly. One time a king and full of ourselves, but lonely and hated, next a poor beggar who discovers a wealth of friendship and love in his neighbors, yet to die, just as the king, without being able to tell if he had done right or wrong. However, our souls bear the pains and rememberances of all of our lives! So that when we come into a new one, certain important things are carried over and we grow spiritually. We begin to remember who we are and why we are here. We are able to change our paths. A king can abdicate his throne and marry whom he loves. A monk can find the love of a good woman. A woman may become a priest and a man might even become a woman. The so-called rules of our lives can be broken. We can dream we can fly and we can make it happen. We can build pyramids or sky-scrapers or space shuttles. We can cure disease, stop suffering, feed the hungry. But only when we begin to see that we are more than just physical entites trapped in a dog-eat dog world. We must abandon our feelings of distrust of self and abandon our concept of a God which hates us to be creative. We must believe and cleave to the simple idea that God wants us to live, to create, to grow. That we are the Children of this God, and as such contain God's force and power and being within us. You are the child of your physical parents. You contain both of their physical beings within you! You cannot rid yourself one or the other or either. If you killed yourself to rid yourself of the "taint" of your parents, you would go to the dust and become the ground and the ground would become the grass and the grass food for a bird or a mouse and that animal would become food for a larger animal, let us say, a deer. A man might kill and eat the deer and so now your substance is in that man. That man passes his substance onto a woman and she bears a child which also now has your substance, your parent's, their parents!!! So you never escaped. You are all still ONE. Even if you do not believe in God at all! You are still in some way, alive and living and percieving! Life goes on and on forever. Even in physicality. But what animates the physical?? Energy. And what animates the energy?? Spirit! And what animates the Spirit? We call that initial creator God. That which animates all things. So even if you don't believe in some insane, jealous tormenting sky-god...God, that which is the first and the last, is still a part of you. Why not accept it. Why not accept the love and the flow of energy and the desire to live, and why not wake up to the awareness that you will NEVER DIE, because God can never die?

There is only two factors which tend to keep people from skirting the experience of total enlightenment. Fear and guilt. Fear and guilt built Hell and the Devil. When one burns one's finger, what could be a worse thought than to wonder what it mightbe like to feel such pain forever! Horrible thought! But, in order to get you to eat your peas or do as a parent says, someone might say to you...Eat those peas or the Devil will take you to hell where you will burn forever! Oh, my! How fast those peas will be shoveled into the mouth. Yet as we mature, we begin to rebel...Let the devil come and take me! I won't eat peas! We say. And we find that the devil doesn't come and take us. So we become bolder and bolder. The authority figure retaliates by telling us, the devil will not come now, he'll come when you die and it is your immortal soul that will roast! God will let him! Why? because you rebelled, just like the Devil rebelled! So he will take you to burn with him in hell! And so we go back to eating our peas, cosmically disgruntled but filled with fear and guilt and morbid thoughts. For what do we know of death? we have forgotten it. And we also have forgotten that it is our right given by God to experience a life without eating peas, if we so choose. It is a better lesson to let a child eschew the peas and eat several dishes of icecream, until his belly is aching, in order to show that there can be even too much of a good thing. And also it is important for a parent to realize that taste changes as we mature and someday we will ask for peas, because they are good. But if we do not, it is no matter. A parent's fear that a child will not grow up correctly is only a sponsoring thought that will keep them from growing up properly! A child's guilt at not eating peas is only a hidden discruntledness over not being allowed to freely choose. Too much of this fear and guilt promotes the worst things in mankind. We say a man "desires" to kill, or hurt others or lord it over others, and we say they are evil, greedy, misanthropic animals. Yet everything that "evil" person is, was caused by guilt and fear. His real desire has been twisted and tortured into an enormous rage. The rage must and will find a way out. Stuffing our emotions leads to a festering of negativity that eventually must be released. Often it is released on innocent members of society. So that our society seems somehow infected by unnatural emotions and desires for perversity and death and violence. And we all weep, what is wrong!!?? Why does God not fix this? God will not do a thing WITHOUT YOUR HELP, for God is working through you!

Just reading these words can help. Just seeking for the truth can be a blessing. Know this. God is the Angels, the Angels are God. We become the Angels and always were the Angels and the Angels are us. And we are God. All of us, every one. No matter how much you want to separate us one from another, the good and bad, ugly and beautiful, perverse and holy, silly and intelligent, all are manifestations of what God is and is Not. To have God in your life, simply manifest what you think God is. If you believe God to be all loving, all knowing, all healing, all comforting. This is the God you shall have. If you believe God is an enormously unhappy being with a long white beard in the sky, who is going to take you to task for every fault in you. And who will send you to hell. That is the God which you will find in your life. It will seem real to you. But it is only an illusion. Because God cannot be what God is not. You will live with the illusion until you die. Then, you will have the truth. Unless you allow fear to bind your consciouness and control your thoughts. Then you might experience being a ghost, lonely and angry or afraid...for awhile. You might be in the hell you fear...for awhile. You might think you are outside of God's world entirely...for awhile. But eventually your mind will seek to create the bliss you truly desire inside and then it will come to you, instantly and you will meet God face to face. And like the Prodigal Son, God will welcome you to your own kingdom of bliss and abundance. For this was always your first desire. Your first belief. Your first choice.

That is why the Angels are here to help us, in whatever form you see or experience them. They are versions of our higher selves. Experienced, enlightened conscious beings who know their truth and their bliss and their harmony and their God Selves. Beings who let God flow through them endlessly and at such a high vibratory rate that they seem to us to be invisible. But they are right here with us now. They will constantly tell you to be unafraid, to be at peace, that God Loves you and cares for you. That all will be well. Because in essence, that is the truth. Do you want to know the Ultimate Truth? Then pull away your veil of guilt and anxiety, live in a world of fearlessness and faith. The moment you do so, in that moment, God speaks to you and the Truth is revealed. All things are God. All things are blessed. And the time of fear and guilt and violence and terror is over forever because it never existed. You will see exactly why it never existed. You will KNOW TRUTH. But until you accomplish this act of being knowingness, and embodying truth, you may still feel doubtful, ill at ease, scared, guilty and given to morbid thoughts and vague anxieties. It is again, your choice. And the Angels are here to facilitate that choice. They are not here for any other reason, but to facilitate God's First Choice, when God first breathed into a breathless world of matter...into a clay-like lump of dust in the figure of what man would become...when God said to us..."LIVE!"

Namaste'

David T. St. Albans and Annex