I had a very interesting private conversation recently, about what happens to the sinful souls that would be expected to end up in hell. I’m going to share the conversation here because it’s universally relevant:

Honestly, your description of hell as ceasing to exist actually sounds pretty good. I mean what’s so good about existence anyway? If all these souls commit all sorts of evil actions and their only punishment is non existence, that sounds like peace and cessation of suffering, while all the good souls are kept alive to suffer and be tortured. It doesn’t make much sense.

It’s funny that it always does sound good to people, but it’s really not. It must be a matter of semantics, or direct insight.

The death of the soul feels like that worst emotional pain you can feel here, but caused by the direct realisation of how completely you fucked up, committing the worst offence, making the worst choices that resulted in terrible suffering of others, basically knowing that you were the instrument of Satan that made this world a hell. Emotional suffering of this karmic actualisation is unbearable and causes the soul to break apart into multiple components, that either continue to break apart or form a stable remainder that is always of a significantly lower “mass” than the original soul, basically it’s comparable to a degradation from a human-type soul to a cockroach-type soul, and it’s not the end of existence, it’s just the end of continuity of existence. It’s like watching your friends graduate, get married, have successful careers, while you are lobotomised and degraded into being someone’s chicken; losing all the connections you had in a long spiritual lifetime, and hoping to eventually evolve, in untold eons, to where you’ve already been, and where you fucked up.
No, it’s not good. It’s worse than any imaginable kind of loss, with more ability to perceive the extent of it all.

Now that you put it that way, it does sound pretty shitty 🙂 Thanks for clarifying, I was thinking it would feel like taking a general anaesthetic or something, just go blank, but that sounds horrible.

There’s another thing. The way I actually observed it working is different from what I described. I described the internal mechanism – karmaśayas break, it destabilises the karmic structure, it loses cohesion and breaks apart. From this description, one would expect a soul to suffer from some kind of agony of conscience that eventually kills it. I never saw anything like that happen. What does happen, in my experience, is that the worst sinners have absolutely no problems with conscience. Especially after they discarnate, they feel completely blissed out, living their best life, and sin, that’s a formality, they are never bothered with something that would reduce their personal happiness (which is probably why they happened to be such terrible humans). Also, Sanat Kumar is an excellent example, because he did absolutely horrible things for a very long time, and he had absolutely no issues with conscience or karmaśayas decaying naturally. So, what kills them isn’t some internal physics of karma, but a result of an external judgment. In 100% of perceived cases, an authorised judge evaluated them and made a verdict which was instantly actualised. Apparently, a lot about karma is very vague until someone looks at it and makes a determination, basically opening the Schroedinger cat’s box. Once the verdict has been made, everything is instant, or almost instant; it happens so quickly that my human brain is really an obstacle in perceiving things that take place so quickly. One moment, you have an evil soul that’s completely blissed out in its self-absorption because it’s now in the astral plane and everything is wonderful, then the verdict is made, and instantly that soul no longer exists, but when I seek out remainders, there usually is something, much smaller, a vague sense of existence, and it’s a painful one, some kind of an agony and deep humiliation and a nasty environment, because apparently conscience and realisation of sin works much better once judgment of God is passed. I feel there is much more to it than that, though. When I try to slow memories down and take a very careful look at it, it seems that the verdict closes the horizon of perception and time, which normally seems to leave things open and undetermined; this verdict creates determination of karmic consequence, which matures and actualises instantly, unlike what happens with encapsulated trauma (aka “larva”), which is wholly dependent on your subjective perception. In this case, it’s about objective judgment of action and its transformation from undetermined into determined form, similar to how the wave function collapses from probability into certainty at the time of detection. When karma becomes determined and actualises, I think only then does my description of what happens become relevant – the cohesive forces that bind soul-particles into soul are overpowered by the repulsive forces, similar to what happens in an explosion, and only if a part of the soul is unaffected by the verdict, ie. not sinful, does it continue existence in some way, but it doesn’t look like a happy kind of existence, more like a nightmarish hell, where one is incredibly diminished, cast out of heaven, and feels spiritual pain for probably all kinds of reasons – remorse (because that part of the soul is healthy enough to actually have conscience that would hurt when showed one’s sinfulness), loss, and so on. So, unlike what the religions imagine, where a soul remains whole but is cast into hell, either eternally or temporarily, it seems that the soul first “explodes” and all of its “fatally unhealthy” parts are completely disintegrated to kalapa level, and only parts that are healthy enough to retain cohesion survive the event, but it’s not a happy kind of survival, because the context of their existence was some kind of a hellish nightmare in every instance I perceived.