Our society has conditioned us to believe that individuals should be judged, censured, and punished for their actions that are considered unacceptable by societal norms. However, in the afterlife, there is no place for condemnation or punishment. The following video provides insight into this reality, and you can find the transcript of the video below the video controls.
We assume people must be judged, condemned, and punished if they do things against society’s norms. We place offenders in penitentiaries. The name penitentiary comes from the word “penance.” Doing penance means a person comes to realize the wrong they have done, is sorry for it, and repents. Society locks people up in tiny cells in penitentiaries for years to force them to become penitent. However, becoming penitent is not the real goal of imprisonment today.
Challenging Societal Norms on Punishment in the afterlife and Accountability
The prominent reason for imprisoning people is that punishment for unacceptable actions deters others from performing the offending action. And a less spoken-of reason society locks people into prisons is that the punishment is “payback.” It is retribution for the offenses against society. The thought that someone could do bad things and not be held accountable for them is entirely unacceptable in our culture. In exploring the concept of what happens after death, these societal norms are challenged, prompting a deeper reflection on accountability and justice.
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The Need for Judgment, Condemnation, and Punishment Is Woven into Society
The need for judgment, condemnation, and punishment is woven through the fabric of our society. Schools have time-out punishment very much like a penitentiary. Children are forced to endure the feeling of being separated from others and having their freedoms taken away. They must sit in a corner until they repent. At home, if a child misbehaves, the parent screams “Go to your room! Come out when you can behave.” The child’s room is a penitentiary. They may come out when they are penitent for their transgressions.
There is No Hell
Our society is infused with judgment, condemnation, and punishment. There are hundreds of thousands of officials in facilities costing billions of dollars to judge, condemn, and punish people. There are police, judges, prisons, prison guards, probation officers, and all manner of support infrastructure for dealing with people who violate society’s current norms for behavior. The Prison Policy Initiative found that mass incarceration is costing the United States $182 billion a year. The infrastructure supporting judgment, condemnation, and punishment is pervasive in our culture. However, in contemplating after death what happens, one may question the efficacy and fairness of such systems, prompting a deeper examination of accountability and societal norms.
Exploring Punishment in Christianity
The Christian religion that has so strongly influenced Western society has adopted judgment, condemnation, and punishment as its central tenants. If a person believes Yeshua or Jesus is god, that person is saved. Being saved is the most important action a Christian can take. The first question many Christians ask a new acquaintance is “Are you saved?” The answer to the question results in a judgment about the person. The person is a sheep, which is valued, or a goat, which is removed from the herd. Exploring what happens after death in Christianity unveils intricate beliefs about salvation, redemption, and the afterlife’s ultimate judgment.
But to make the salvation meaningful, the person must be saved from something. So the church developed the hell myth in the first centuries of the first millennium. Judgment, condemnation, and punishment became the foundation of the Christian religion. If you don’t believe Jesus is a god, you’ll be judged, condemned, and punished in a hell of everlasting torment. A 2014 Roper poll revealed that 67 percent of the people still believe the ancient, tribal hell myth, so deeply is it ingrained in our culture’s psyche. But there is no hell. There never was a hell.
And so judgment, condemnation, and punishment are integral to our society. That carries through to people’s common beliefs about the afterlife. There must be judgment, condemnation, and punishment for living wrong lives and doing bad deeds, most people believe.
That is a mistaken belief.
There Is No Judgment, Condemnation, or Punishment in the Afterlife
What we have learned about the afterlife is that there is no judgment, no condemnation, and no punishment for wrong deeds. That doesn’t sit well with people brought up as we have been to expect that there must be punishment in the afterlife for offenses. Invariably people point to Adolph Hitler as an example of someone whose misdeeds cannot go unpunished. How can Hitler get away with his atrocities? He must receive his punishment in the next life.
However, understanding our place in eternity and the growth of every individual into becoming more loving and compassionate requires a different perspective. People are like the ugly duckling in the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. In the story, a mother duck sits on her nest of six eggs until they hatch. Eventually, five cute, fuzzy yellow ducklings are hatched. The sixth egg is slow to hatch and larger than the others. When it hatches, what emerges is a larger, ungainly creature that is dark grey, not pretty duckling yellow. And this creature wobbles when it walks. The ugly duckling is ridiculed and rejected. However, this ugly duckling matures to become a beautiful swan.
The state of being an ugly duckling or a beautiful swan is analogous to a person’s level of spiritual growth. Every person is at some stage of growth toward becoming loving, compassionate, kind, and other-centered. Some people are now antisocial, without a conscience, cruel, self-absorbed, and greedy. They are ugly ducklings. Others are giving, loving, kind, compassionate, and other-centered. They have already grown into beautiful swans. However, the ugly duckling and swan are not different creatures. Both are swans at some stage in their development. We would not judge, condemn, and punish an ugly duckling because of its state of being. All ugly ducklings will eventually become beautiful swans sometime in their eternal growth.
Our Universal Intelligence Is Entirely Loving, with No Judgment, Condemnation, or Punishment
Our Universal Intelligence, the Source, or God is entirely loving, with no judgment, condemnation, or punishment. They are completely absent outside of Earth School. Outside of Earth School, there is only love and compassion. People in near-death experiences consistently describe the profound, overwhelming love that envelopes them when they are separated from the physical realm for a time and are fully present with the Source, God. We know that a central purpose of our lives is to learn to cast off the materialistic, self-absorbed attitudes society taught us and become more like the loving intelligence that is the basis of all creation, without judgment, condemnation, or punishment.
Our perspective is very limited to a short sliver of our eternal existence, this brief moment on earth. What we see during this short time is just where everyone is in their development now. All people will continue to grow for millennia, so even the most deplorable individuals will eventually become loving, compassionate people, including Adolph Hitler. Judging, condemning, and punishing the ugly duckling will not force it into becoming the beautiful swan it will eventually become. The maturation must happen in its own time, through its own natural processes, during an eternity of growth in the capacity to love and feel compassion.
But it seems to us that these ugly ducklings are still accountable for their actions. They should make themselves into swans. We feel the antisocial, cruel, violent person should just stop performing egregious acts and love everyone.
Why Don’t People Change to Being Loving and Compassionate?
The reason that doesn’t happen is that while people can make some changes in who they are during their lifetimes, most are unable to diverge from the person they are that was created by society and their families of origin. To have a life change, people must have the encouragement and support of those around them who teach them about the person they could become, help them value becoming that person, and encourage them as they adjust their belief systems, attitudes, and sensitivity to others. Most people have no such support. They are in environments that reward greed, competition, and self-seeking, so they never understand and value the alternative of being loving and compassionate. They live their entire lives being self-absorbed, antisocial, and cruel. But it is only because they are playing out the character they were scripted to be in their early years in Earth School, and now they are rewarded for the behavior by people around them who are also self-absorbed, antisocial, and cruel. They had no control over what they were taught as children and now have no influences to help them change who they are as adults.
Our society creates people who are self-absorbed, greedy, materialist, and insensitive. The significant groups the person belongs to are also self-absorbed, greedy, materialistic, and insensitive, so the groups encourage and perpetuate the attitudes by satisfying the person’s basic needs for security, feeling accepted, being admired, and given stature if the person continues to display the materialistic attitudes and acquire the acquisitions that show they have been successful in promoting themselves and creating a lifestyle that is evidence of their prosperity. They have no model for being loving and compassionate and no incentive for rejecting the lifestyle and maturing to value love over material objects.
Adolph Hitler was the product of his upbringing with a stern, distant, violent alcoholic father who beat him with a cane, switch, or belt. As an adult, he received accolades and worship as a demi-god from 90 percent of the 200 million Germans and from the Catholic church. They believed he had brought an end to the hardships of the Great Depression and humiliations Germany experienced from the first world war. Hitler couldn’t know what it would be like to be loving and compassionate and was given no encouragement to learn it. He was rewarded by the approval of millions for being the person he was.
That chaffs at our belief systems because we want to believe people are responsible for their actions and must be judged, condemned, and punished if they transgress, especially Adolph Hitler. However, in our eternal lives, every person is at some level of development that is as good as that person can be at that moment. The self-absorbed, antisocial, cruel person can no more turn into a kind, compassionate, loving person than the ugly duckling can transform into a swan overnight. Each person’s evolution takes time, learning, growing, and becoming.
Our Universal Intelligence Does Not See Us as Needing Punishment
Our Universal Intelligence, the source of our being, is unconditionally loving, with no judgment or condemnation. There is only love. In Our Universal Intelligence’s view of us there is no place for judgment, condemnation, and punishment. Instead, we are being nurtured and guided into growing to be increasingly loving and compassionate through our eternal lives. Everyone is a swan, on some level of development, even a despot responsible for the suffering and death of millions of people. Eventually, all people will evolve to be loving and compassionate. We will all grow to be beautiful swans.
We Will Continue to Grow to Have More Love and Compassion for All People
We will continue to grow and learn in the life after this life. We go through as many as two life reviews. In the first, we have a review of our lives with a nonemotional perspective. In the second we will relive the important points in our lives with all the joy, frustration, anger, grief, and fear we feel now, at the same depth of feeling. The critical difference is that we also feel the feelings of others involved in the situation as deeply as we feel our own feelings. We live the experiences through their feelings and thoughts as they were when events happened. As we do so, we learn what our actions have done to other people. We become more compassionate and loving because of what we learn about our effects on people. Those are the lessons in the life review. The life review is not judgment, condemnation, or punishment. It is entirely to help us grow. No one judges us. We judge ourselves.
Antisocial, Cruel, Violent People Must Be Judged and Punished in This Life
That isn’t to say we allow people who are antisocial, cruel, and violent to act without consequence during this time in Earth School. People who are as of yet unable to adjust their mental state and activities to be loving and other-centered, who are cruel, sadistic, and without conscience, must receive some sort of admonishment and punishment when they transgress to deter such behavior. Cruel despots, serial killers, child rapists, and all of those in humanity who engage in unspeakable acts must be judged, condemned, and punished during this time on earth. That is part of the Earth School experience. However, judgment and punishment are relevant only to Earth School, not to our lives in eternity.
We Must Learn Not to Judge
What happens immediately after death is a question that has intrigued humanity for centuries. Some believe in an afterlife, while others think that consciousness ceases to exist. Regardless of our individual beliefs, one important life lesson we must learn is to abandon the need to judge, condemn, and punish. Our Universal Intelligence, the source of our being, or God, does not judge. We are loved and accepted unconditionally. How can we who are imperfect judge others for their imperfections? We must not judge. Instead, we must accept people at their level of spiritual, mental, and emotional development and love them for who they are. When we do so, we will realize the joy and fulfillment of not judging and the rewards of accepting people with love and compassion. We then live our lives with all other people in love, peace, and joy.
