Hell is NOT a place to which we are banished because God turns away from us. God can never turn away from us (just as water can never turn away from an eddy) because we are made of God.
Water is all an eddy is when we’re not busy thinking of it as a thing separate from the water.
God is all we are when we’re not busy thinking of ourselves as things separate from God.
God is everything (including us).
Hell is a state of mind to which we banish ourselves when we oppose what is, when we turn away from the Truth that all things are one thing and that everything in that oneness is whole, complete and exactly as it should be.
Hell begins when we become convinced that we are separate, that there is some gap that needs filling before we can experience the connected wonder of the universe. But there is nothing to fill because the universe is already full and complete. The connection is already made. There is no division between what constitutes “universe” and what constitutes “me,” between what constitutes “God” and what constitutes “me,” just as there is no division between what constitutes “water” and what constitutes “eddy.”
Eddies are just local moments of concentration in the behavior of the water, just as a person is just a local moment of concentration in the behavior of the universe (as is a leaf or a pebble or a cloud…). It is not separate and it is never incomplete. It simply is.
But, in our minds, we innocently create and perpetuate a fiction of separateness in which we innocently miss the wholeness (and therefore unsurpassable worth) into which we were born and that we can never actually lose. Though we hold within our very being the entirety of the wonders of the universe and connection to everything simultaneously, we become convinced of our separateness, our (and others’) incompleteness, and we spend our mental and emotional energy strategizing ways to connect - or worse sever - what cannot be cut.
Hell is what comes of this innocent confusion, what comes of the impossible task of chasing after what we already have, trying to become what we already are, or, in despair, trying to separate from what we can never be separate from (i.e. an eddy desperately searching for water, trying to become a “good” eddy or, in despair, trying to separate from the water).
That is hell.
Heaven is the recognition of our eternal completeness and oneness with all of creation.