Can someone here explain this more fully. I don't feel that the original poster was answered? thanks. in other words do these hells exist here on this earth according to one's state of mind or not?
See
here... this and below should answer Retro
Page 16-17...
Certain texts and certain people maintain that there really are places like the hell realms and the god realm and that you physically go to these places. However, in the Bodhicharyavatara, Shantideva asks, 'The burning grounds of the hells, the guards of hell realm, who made them?" Nobody made them. These places come out of our own negative thoughts or negative emotions. These realms are not physical places that we can go to. They exist only in our mind and we can only find them through our mind. For instance, if we really hate something and if we die with this hatred and violence is still in our mind, it is said that we could be born into the hell realm. The hell realm could be in this place or that, at the same time, it could be anywhere or everywhere because it is in our own mind. The human realm is no more 'real' than the hell realm and the hell realm is no less 'real' than the human realm. All of them are of the same nature. They are as real as our experience of them and these experiences come mostly from our own mind with of course many different causes and effects but through our own karma.
Look at the Shurangama Sutra...
http://www.cttbusa.org/shurangama/shurangama30.asp" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
"Ananda, all beings in the world are caught up in the continuity of birth and death. Birth happens because of their habitual tendencies; death comes through flow and change. When they are on the verge of dying, but when the final warmth has not left their bodies, all the good and evil they have done in that life suddenly and simultaneously manifests. They experience the intermingling of two habits: an abhorrence of death and an attraction to life.
”When they have ninety percent emotion and ten percent thought, they fall through the wheel of fire until their bodies enter wind and fire, in a region where the two interact. With lighter emotion they are born in the intermittent hell; with heavier emotion they are born in the Unintermittent Hell.
”When they are possessed entirely of emotion, they sink into the Avichi Hell. If the emotion has gone into their hearts so that they slander the Great Vehicle, defame the Buddha’s pure precepts, speak crazy and false dharma, are greedy for offerings from the faithful, recklessly accept the respect of others, commit the five rebellious acts and the ten major offenses, then they are further reborn in Avichi Hells throughout the ten directions.
”Ananda, it all comes from the karmic responses which living beings themselves invoke.
3. Is Vajra Hell a "scare tactic" to encourage practitioners to maintain samaya, or the geniune kammic consequence of breaking samaya?
Once, I asked a Muslim friend of mine what if there was no Allah and the Prophet Muhammad and all the threats of not keeping the commitments of a Muslim, would he still do good. His reply was 'For what????' You get the idea....