Hell has been conventionally portrayed as a place, a location, to which that part of the personality which survives death is consigned if the life led on earth was bad. It is presumably the mind-soul complex that would survive physical death, and since this has interwoven into it all our memories and emotional responses from earthly life, it would, logically, find itself in the psychic environment where it was most immediately at home. However, this view of the soul's departure is inadequate, and the picture of heaven and hell as places in the hereafter is far too simplistic. When Jakob Boehme was asked by a disciple where the soul went after death, he threw the question back by commenting: "It is not necessary for the soul to go anywhere." Indeed, the soul is in eternal communion with God through the spirit within it, and, depending on how fully the spirit reveals itself in the life of a person, so his soul will know heaven and hell.

Martin Israel