FK: OK, but what does that MEAN?
How about: darkness is loss of light. Death is loss of life. God is life and light of our souls. If we die separated from God, our soul is deprived of God's life-giving energies and exists in spiritual darkness.
Well, I don't really "think" I have any problem with those images, but I don't see how any of them couldn't equally apply to one actually and really existing in a place called "hell". That is why I'm asking what the difference is between existing in a "state" with no location, and actually existing in torment in an actual place that takes up space in whatever dimension it's in.
The Jews and Greeks believed that "Shoel" or "Hades" is a place below the surface of the earth (the "underworld"). Do you believe that hell is a "place" below the surface of the earth as the OT seems to imply?
I think where the easterns have difficulty here is the terminology of "place", which means a location in spacial dimensions, whereas they see the separation from God, which isn't truly a separation from God since God is Omnipresent, but is a separation from the Love, Grace and Mercy of God, as one being of a purely spiritual condition, of "darkness" or the absence of Light.
But in that construct, it is forgotten that the wicked will be resurrected to a real, physical body, which indeed does require a "place" since that body has spacial dimensions.