Hi Diana,

You've lost the familiar sight and touch of your son, but he isn't gone. You know how it was when he was in the house but in a different room from you. You didn't have contact, but you knew he was there. He's still with you, just as certainly, just as imminently.

We who are still here are in a dream. Your son has awakened. He's in the real life, and everyone you have ever loved is with him. You're still dreaming. We know that without doubt because people communicate often and commonly with those who are not using bodies any more. We're even able to induce after-death communications now (go to www.induced-adc.com).

You have a different relationship with your son, but you still have a relationship. The more you know that, the more you can enjoy it. The more you focus on the past, the more despondent you'll feel. The past is gone. He's part of your future. You'll still feel desperately sad during those special days when you can't speak to him and hold him. But know that he hasn't left you and you can still speak to him and listen for him to speak to you.

You asked about hell. You can only have vengeance, retribution, and punishment if the condemner has anger and hate. If someone has unconditional love, then that person has no anger and hate. Someone with unconditional love has no conditions, and therefore does not judge. How could we believe that the Divine is love if we believe the Divine will condemn anyone. The condemning, angry, hateful thinking gives people the justification to kill and destroy. The history of the monotheistic religions is filled with terror and cruelty, and we're feeling its effects even today. That is the legacy of judging and condemning.

If we suggest that certainly a hundred people throughout time, including Hitler, should be condemned to an eternity of misery, what about the billions of others who have sinned, and how great does the sin have to be to justify hell? If there's a hell as the Christian church portrays it, then all the little Muslim and Jewish children will be thrown into it by Jesus. That's the legacy of judging, anger, and hate.

But surely Hitler deserves to be in hell, right? Adolph Schicklgruber (Hitler's real name) had a father who was a drunkard, violent, and abusive to Adolph and his mother. At one point, he beat Adolph to near death. Hitler did badly in school and was, for all intents, a failure in childhood. He was full of dreams, but his poor education and rage from his abused childhood caused him to fail repeatedly in life as well.

That doesn't excuse his behavior, but how could we expect a God who loves unconditionally to condemn someone to eternal torment because his father was drunken and abusive? In other words, we humans are stopped by the limit of our vision, by being abhorred by his cruelty. An omniscient God sees his father's abuse, and the abuse his father probably received from his father, and all the influences that could ever have made him into the monster he was. We could never understand that, but an omniscient God does.

At the base of consciousness, the real person we are, is love. We learn that more and more as time goes on. We hear that from people who have nearly died and come back to life; we hear that from the spirits of those who are with us, but not in body. At the base of life is love. If someone has become so warped that the love doesn't shine through to help the person live a loving life, then it's because of some influence from the physical realm. God doesn't make cruel people; the physical realm makes cruel people. And God knows all the influences that keep the person from letting the love through. How could God, who loves without condition, condemn someone for having grown into what he is because of what the physical realm has done to him?

He can't.

As soon as we start putting conditions on love—that anyone's cruelty deserves hate, anger, retribution, and torment—then we have lost unconditional love and we can start condemning people for about anything we believe is abhorrent, from not believing in our (God, Allah, Yahweh, Krishna) to having sex out of wedlock. Where does the judging stop?

But look at it this way. Punishing someone physically won't make them feel sorry for what they did! It will make them hate all the more. In other words, condemning someone to suffer makes them into more of a hateful, angry monster than ever. God would be taking monsters in life, keeping them in eternity as monsters, and making them even more virulent eternal monsters. What a strange action by a loving God!

Instead, everything we've learned from ADCs, induced ADCs, NDEs, and mediums is that people who have been cruel have to experience all the pain and misery they caused in other people. They go through a life review in which they not only see what they did with spiritual eyes that have dropped the anger and hatred they may have had in life so the compassion for those they hurt makes them incredibly remorseful and sad, they also actually feel the feelings those around them felt when those cruel acts were being performed. Hitler will feel the pain of every Jew killed in every concentration camp, in a moment by moment review, and the pain of every young German man and women he sent into the front lines to be killed.

But then, the spirit or soul that temporarily was embodied as Adolph Hitler will have the chance to try it again and atone for those cruel acts. That soul that was in the little boy nearly beaten to death by his father will have the chance to be compassionate and loving as a result of what he learned.

Wouldn't you expect an unconditionally loving God, instead of creating deeper hate and anger for eternity, would teach that little soul by forcing it to feel the pain he caused so he might have a chance to grow into feeling and giving the love that is at the basis of every soul's existence? What a mighty, wise, loving God that God is. That is the God I know.

Love and peace, Craig