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What exactly does purgatory look like?
So being a 12 year old Catholic, I go to religion school (it didn't start yet for this year though) and we learned when you die you get judged then your taken to heaven, a place of eternal reward, hell, a place of eternal punishment, and then there's purgatory, a place in between, where you can, idk, holy yourself and save your soul? But it confuses me because if you've lived a bad life you go to hell. How could you end up in purgatory and get a second chance? And what does it look like? I always imagined it as a waiting room where sad and angry spirits sat in chairs until they could leave. But that's just my imagining. Any opinions?
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Catholic and Roman Catholics seem to be the few who believe in Purgatory. The idea behind it is that they haven't done anything bad enough to end up in Hell but are still not clean enough to enter Heaven. Its supposed to be a place where in essense souls can get clean, a Holy showers of sorts I suppose.
The problem with all teachings about what happens after death is that no matter if one beleives only in one life and has never been there before, or whether a person believes in reincarnation and yet we're all born with no memory of the spiritual plane after we are born into our next mortal body, no one can really know what it is like other than people who have died and come back to life in the hospital and have their stories to share.
I have also read books by people who have gone for hypnosis and had memories come to them from before their current life, like the time in between their last life and current one. Of all those stories I've read, most all have the same similarities...too many for them (in my mind) to be really off and wrong. One young boy died and his angel took him to show him many things, like heaven but also a place called Hell and told him that Hell was not created by God but created by the collective minds of souls who believed the Christians heaven and hell story while on earth. Those who believed they didnt deserve to go to heaven, ended up going there of their own free will. God doesnt send anyone there. And there is an Angel called the Angel of death only because it watches over the dead in Hell until one awakens and says it no longer wants to be there and then the angel takes the soul back to Heaven.
I have also read stories of those who died who told stories of what happens to soul immediately after dying. Here is where the stories of a purgatory may have come from. As you can see, I do give lots of credence to so many stories from different people who all say pretty much the same things. And one is that when a soul has left its earthly body that it isn't in shape/health yet for living a period of time in heaven before going back to another life or living for good in heaven. The reason being that all of us as souls have experienced our own stresses and horrors on earth, being abused, beaten, stolen from, bullied, neglected, or war experiences and much more. All of this has an effect on the souls that the people who died saw before they came back to life. They saw souls that looked damaged, hurt, full of holes, pieces missing. So what happens immediately is that they go to a portion of heaven where they are attended to by healing spirits/souls whose job is to bring a soul back to full soul health. Once healthy again, the soul gets to have a long 'down' time in which they get to relax, play, vacation and just enjoy and area of heaven meant for souls to have fun stress free environment in which to play without any worries or concerns. Many believe that there are different jobs in Heaven or that a soul can review their past life later, once ready and then decide when they are ready to go back again for another life. Very few ever said that a soul had the one life and goes to heaven for good and never has another life. The different lives are like the different grade levels in school and there is always more a soul can learn but that they get a choice as to what they want to work on and which of several lives they can choose to be born into. I can't verify all this as I have not been there recently and have no memory of it all myself from before my current life. But from all that, my best guess is that purgatory is actually a wonderful separate place in Heaven where all souls recently done with a life on earth go to be healed and to have down time to recooperate, not to be cleansed of evil but maybe the hurts and damages of evil done to them while they were on earth. I assume Heaven is a hundred times prettier than the prettiest scenes you've ever seen on earth so I assume your 'purgatory' or my "soul recovery center' to be just as beautiful and wonderful as the rest of heaven.
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