Heaven and Hell

This is a quote by Ken Wilber from the forward to Caroline Myss' book, Entering the Castle:

"Hell is identification with the outer self. Hell is not a place; hell is not somewhere that we go when we are dead; hell is not punishment handed out to us by something or someone else -- it is rather our contracting, sinning, separating activity of choosing the wrong self to identify with. We identify with that which we are not, we identify merely and only with the empirical ego, the self that can be seen; and that puny, finite temporal, limited, and lacerating identity is nothing other than hell. Hell is a horrendous case or mistaken identity. We have forgotten who and what we are, a transcendental self plugged straight into spirit, speaking with the words of God and shining with the radiance of the Goddess. But we identify only with the finite self, the objective self, the self that can be seen, and not the self that is the seer, divine and infinite and eternal.

Heaven is the discovery and realization of the inner divine self, the supreme identity. The mystics East and West have long proclaimed that the Kingdom of Heaven is within -- because the simple fact is that I AMness is Christ Consciousness, spirit itself, the Godhead in me and as me. The true self in each and every one of us is the true self that Jesus of Nazareth realized -- "I and the Father are one" -- and that realization, quite simply, transformed him from a temporal Jesus into an eternal Christ, a transformation that he asks us to remember and repeat ourselves.

Of course, this does not mean that my empirical ego is Christ, or that my personal self is Christ. To believe that is, indeed, a schizophrenic delusion. Nobody is saying that my personal self is spirit, but rather that the transcendental witness of that personal self is one with spirit in all beings. Your transcendental self is Christ; your personal self is you."