Master Woo Myung Question and Answer – What Is Heaven and What Is Hell?
In the Bible it says that God and heaven are within you. In the Buddhist sutras it says that your mind is Buddha and that paradise is inside your mind. These sayings seem to have different meanings but they actually mean the same thing. According to Buddhist beliefs Shakyamuni, Buddha, resides in paradise. Christians believe heaven is the kingdom where Christ resides. Christ and Buddha are the real, living existence of Truth. They are not false. When we look at a person we see only his outward appearance but a person who has become Truth sees whether or not the person has become Truth. It is possible to know whether one is either alive or dead by the extent to which he has become Truth. His worth will also be measured in the same way.
Man believes he is living in the world, but the reality is that he is living in the mind world he has made. He is dead because he is not living in the real world. Man does not know whether the world of his mind is the real world or not, because his mind overlaps the real world. From the true world’s perspective man has always lived and will continue to live inside the false picture world made by his false self.
If one dies while living his life inside that false picture world, he will die forever as a false image inside the false world he has made. However, if one completely destroys the false picture world, and returns to the mind of the origin, the source of the Universe, the world that is reborn within that mind of the origin is heaven and paradise.
This true world is heaven. It is wrong to think that there is another world other than this world. When you discard your false self and your false mind, and you also discard all material existences in the Universe, doesn’t the origin become apparent? The land that is reborn as the substance of the origin is heaven and only the master of heaven can accomplish this rebirth.
This land is a living land; an ever-lasting, never-changing land; a true land without death. In this land the self that is comprised of human conceptions and habits does not exist and because one is reborn with the mind of the Universe’s substance, he has no worries or anxieties. It is the land of freedom and liberation; the land of God’s consciousness. The one who becomes Truth while he is living will have God reborn in heaven, in his mind; and therefore God in his mind will live forever, even after his body passes away. Only a person whose mind has become the mind of the origin of the world can enter heaven and only he can live forever.
-Woo Myung-
