THE LEFT DOOR

Despite what most of us (including me) have been taught since we were children, there is no such thing as hell. The threat of hell implies a God so vindictive and unforgiving that He could turn His back on us and banish us to an eternity away from Him, and not for one minute is that a God I believe in. The God I believe in, worship, and have committed my life to is all-loving, all-knowing, all-compassionate, and all-forgiving; He would never turn His back on a life He created.

Sadly, we don’t have to spend much time on earth to learn that there are those who choose to turn their backs on God. And “choose,” by the way, excludes anything to do with mental illness or physiological chemical imbalances, which are completely involuntary. I’m talking about people who, given a choice between contributing light to this world or contributing darkness, opt for darkness—the deliberately cruel, amoral, remorseless sociopaths who view the rest of us as props for their amusement, to be used, manipulated, and in some form or other destroyed, either physically, mentally, or emotionally. Darkness can’t exist where there’s light, after all, so the Dark Side, as I call this segment of society, feels perfectly entitled to the destruction it inflicts. Its devotees know right from wrong. They just don’t care. Unlike the misguided or the genuinely lost among us, residents of the Dark Side can’t be rehabilitated—without a conscience to begin with, they have no conscience to be guided back to. They can feign charm, compassion, love, generosity, and often a devout faith in God, not because they mean a word of it, but because they know how seductive those qualities can be, and it’s so much easier to destroy someone whose guard is down.

There’s no such thing as action without consequence, for better or worse, and that’s as true for the Dark Side as it is for the rest of us. Remember, these dark entities have chosen a path that keeps their backs turned squarely away from God, and that arrogant rejection of Him prevents them from experiencing the perfect bliss and love of the Other Side when they die. Instead, they head straight to a nightmare called the Left Door (which my granddaughter Angelia used to refer to as “mean heaven” when she was a child).

The Left Door is the entrance to a joyless, godless world of nothingness, an abyss through which dark spirits briefly pass before heading right back in utero for another incarnation that’s likely to be as destructive as the one they’ve just completed. So when you come across those in this book who’ve gone through the Left Door, know that within a few months of their death they were born again on earth with a whole new identity, a whole new incarnation to live out, with no more of a conscious memory of their past lives than you and I have, and another opportunity to finally choose light over darkness.

And by the way, just as God doesn’t condemn any of His children to an eternity of hell, He also doesn’t condemn any of us to an eternity of recycling through the Left Door and back to earth again and again and again. Sooner or later (which in the context of eternity might mean hundreds of years), the spirits on the Other Side will retrieve a dark soul in that instant before it reaches the Left Door and return it to the healing peace of Home, where God’s unconditional love is always available, even to those who don’t reciprocate.