“If there is no Hell, then are there consequences to one’s actions?”
by Kelvin Chin
Absolutely, yes.
All actions have consequences. But not in the mystical way that many religious and spiritual traditions would like us to believe.
Most of those traditions hold to the belief that either an entity (God or a panel of gods) somehow like Santa Claus is keeping track of who is “naughty and nice.” I think not. What a waste of any mind who might choose to take on that role in the universe. Certainly not a mind I would choose to worship, never mind even respect. A sure sign of a petty mind, in my opinion. A mind that does not believe in the Free Will of each soul.
Or sometimes, the so called non-church or temple-going “spiritual but not religious” seekers might substitute the word “karma” as an inanimate energy force “accounting system,” instead of the entity concept. But it’s the same thing — it’s still the Santa Claus cult belief cloaked in Vedic mythology.
Shankara who was Vyasa in a previous incarnation about 10,000 years ago tells us that he and others created the notion of karma (a Sanskrit word that simply means “action”) as “consequences for one’s actions” to encourage kinder behavior among humanity on Earth. They did not foresee how future generations would eventually distort the concept into today’s mess where people would actually use it as a way to avoid responsibility — where mountains of “bad” karma would cause suffering by allegedly taking millions of lifetimes to undo, or where people would use “it’s your bad karma” as a justification for why they hurt you!
Consequences are real. And they do exist for everything we do. They exist in the minds of all those we have helped…and hurt. And no one ever forgets. No one forgets our kindness nor our cruelty. And therefore, someone somewhere can always remember our past acts and can if they choose to, can deliver us a message — one way or another, accordingly. For eternity.
So I suggest that it’s in each of our best interests to choose to act more wisely. More kindly. More lovingly, meaning with acceptance in others of that which we may not espouse ourselves. Because the alternative is to create a world in which we’re always looking over our shoulders to see who might be delivering not a loving message to us, but the alternative. At some unknown, unspecified moment — for eternity.
Kelvin H. Chin is a Meditation Teacher, Life After Life Expert, and Author of “Overcoming the Fear of Death,” “Marcus Aurelius Updated: 21st Century Meditations On Living Life” and “After the Afterlife: Memories of My Past Lives.” He learned to meditate at age 19, and has been teaching Turning Within Meditation and coaching others in their self-growth for 50 years. He helps people understand their life challenges through their individual belief systems, and helps them find their own solutions. His past life memories reach back many centuries, and he accesses those memories in his teaching and his coaching in the same way all coaches draw on their own available experiences for perspective and effective analogies. He can be reached at www.TurningWithin.org.