Hell

The more I read literature and resources on spirituality, mind, God, universe, morals, good, evil, and other metaphysical and philosophical topics, the more I think that hell, purgatory, heaven, and maybe other such places are real, but real in an out-of-ordinary sense, that most of the population got the idea wrong. The religions are just a metaphorical vehicle of delivering ideas and they failed in pointing out that it is only a metaphor. Perhaps prophets saw them in altered states of consciousness and thought them to be real outside of mental phenomena. These places are all facets of consciousness and of sensing. Some might appear in what would resemble a mental illness, some might appear under the influence of drugs or in various situations prompting chemical reactions in the brain, some are the chemical result of the processes in a dying brain, some are delusions about thoughts and reality. Humans are creatures that need, seek, and create meaning; there is no intrinsic meaning in the universe. This is one of the aspects determining how these places appear to be — each person links meanings of events they are aware of in a different way. So, for example, for some hell might have very different forms, for others hell might be a nonsense that cannot exist and there's something else instead.

"Have you ever traveled, beyond all mere metaphors, to the Mountain of Shame and stayed for a thousand years? I do not recommend it. " — Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, by Sam Harris, 2014, Chapter: The Spiritual Uses of Pharmacology

What if prophets had visions of heaven, hell, purgatory, of moral principles, and of other worlds through a somehow altered consciousness? I think that it doesn't matter whether heaven and hell are objectively physically existing places or whether they exist only in mind, since through mind we perceive everything. Just as time can be perceived differently in altered states of consciousness, I think it is possible that heaven or hell can be perceived for an eternity even though the person processes this in only a short span of physical time, and it is still real, for this is what the person really perceives.

"Long-term meditation practice is also associated with a variety of structural changes in the brain." — Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, by Sam Harris, 2014, Chapter: Chapter 4: Meditation

Maybe this is the way we can liberate ourselves. Buddhism describes existence after this life and how it is affected by this life. Maybe all the perceived existence after this life is just a process of the dying brain and maybe the process can be so subjectively better by changing the way the brain works. As the dying brain loses a large part of the normal consciousness, being at peace and mindful is probably very hard. Perhaps, this can be aided by practice-induced changes in the brain that are much deeper than just the contents of the normal consciousness that are lost in the dying process.