Hell is NOT a place to which I am banished because God turns away from me. God can never turn away from me - just as water can never turn away from an eddy - because I am made of God. (Click that word for what I mean when I say “God.”)
Water is all an eddy is when I’m not busy thinking of it as a thing separate from the water.
God is all I am when I’m not busy thinking of myself as something separate from God.
God is everything (including me).
Hell is a state of mind to which I banish myself when I oppose what is, when I turn away from the Truth that all things are one thing and that everything in that oneness is whole, complete and exactly as it should be.
Hell begins when I become convinced that I am separate, that there is some gap that needs filling before I can experience the connected wonder of the universe. But there is nothing to fill because the universe is already full and complete. The connection is already made. There is no division between what constitutes “universe” and what constitutes “me,” between what constitutes “God” and what constitutes “me,” just as there is no division between what constitutes “water” and what constitutes “eddy.”
Eddies are just local moments of concentration in the behavior of the water, just as a person is just a local moment of concentration in the behavior of the universe (as is a leaf or a pebble or a cloud…). It is not separate and it is never incomplete. It simply is.
But, in my mind, I innocently create and perpetuate a fiction of separateness in which I innocently miss the wholeness (and therefore unsurpassable worth) into which I was born and that I can never actually lose. Though I hold within my very being the entirety of the wonders of the universe and connection to everything simultaneously, I become convinced of my separateness, my (and others’) incompleteness, and I spend my mental and emotional energy strategizing ways to connect - or worse, sever - what cannot be cut.
Hell is what comes of this innocent confusion, what comes of the impossible task of chasing after what I already have, trying to become what I already am, or, in despair, trying to separate from what I can never be separate from (i.e. an eddy desperately searching for water, trying to become a “good” eddy or, in despair, trying to separate from the water).
That is hell.
Heaven is the recognition of my eternal completeness and oneness with all of creation.