INTRODUCTION

✨ In this teaching, Master Woo Myung explains that people have long wondered about the existence and location of heaven and hell. Yet the true answer lies not in an external afterlife, but within the mind world we create.

From birth, humans copy everything they see, hear, and experience into an inner world of images. This illusionary mind world becomes the place where they liveβ€”and, after death, the place they continue to dwell. This inner world, filled with attachments, karma, and false images, is hell.

Heaven, on the other hand, is not elsewhere. Heaven is this very world when the false mind disappears. To eliminate the mind worldβ€”one’s hellβ€”and be reborn into the real world of Truth is to live in the heaven that already exists. 🌿

ORIGINAL WRITING BY MASTER WOO MYUNG

Do Heaven and Hell Truly Exist?

Many people are curious about heaven and hell – about where they are and whether or not they truly exist.

What happens when man dies? Everyone has thought about it at least once, but there are no clear answers. People have vague ideas that they will go to heaven if they have faith in their religion, if they get rid of their karma and sins, or if they do good deeds.

Man lives in hell – a non-existent picture world – from the moment he is born. Through his eyes, nose, ears, mouth and body he copies into his mind world everything in the world – all that he has seen, heard, smelled, spoken and sensed with his body as well as everything he has experienced. He puts the world and all that belongs to the world in his mind, and he believes that he is living in the real world because his mind world overlaps the real world. In the same way a video is produced, the human mind duplicates the world and everything that belongs to the world into his mind and lives within it. This is the reason man is a sinner; why he lives with karma.

When one dies after living in this world of false images, he goes to this picture world. This is hell. It is said in Buddhism that when a person dies, he will follow his karma and karmic ties. This means that he goes to the illusionary world that he himself has made; he ends up dying because this world is false and not true. This is what hell is.

The dreams that we dream at night do not exist, but yet they do. Likewise, hell also does not exist from the standpoint of the real world but it exists in the way dreams do. One must eliminate this hell – his mind world and his self – for then, it is heaven.

The world God created is already complete and it is already enlightened. What this means is the world is completion itself and is thus, everlastingly alive. But man is trapped within his own mind of karma and sin and he is not born in the world. Therefore, the way for man to go to heaven is to get rid of his sins and karma while he is living and be reborn in the world of heaven where there is no death. Hell is one’s mind world, the illusionary picture world, and it is a world that does not exist in the real world. Heaven is this world, which is Truth.

– Woo Myung

REFLECT AT SANTA CLARA MEDITATION

At Santa Clara Meditation, practitioners learn to discard the picture world of the mind, where karma and illusion reside. 🌠
By cleansing the false self and being reborn into the real world, one discovers that heaven already exists here, in the world of Truth.