Within certain strands of Christian mystical theology - most explicitly in the Eastern Orthodox tradition following St. Isaac the Syrian (7th century), and echoed in some Catholic and Western mystical writers - heaven and hell are not two separate locations but two ways of receiving one and the same reality. The same divine fire that the saints experience as light and joy is experienced as torment by those who have made themselves unable to receive it.

C. S. Lewis said that it is none other than the love of God that lights up the fires of hell. He means that when we resist the divine love it burns us in the same way that the bright light of day would torture the eyes of someone who had been trapped underground for an extended period, or in the way that a cheerful person would exquisitely annoy someone who is sunk in sadness. The sun is just being the sun, and the joyful person is just being joyful, but both can be received in a sharply negative way by someone who is ill disposed to take them in. It has even been proposed that heaven and hell are the same “place,” but inhabited by people of entirely opposite dispositions. Picture a table piled high with food and surrounded by hungry diners, each of whom has a long fork attached to his or her wrist. Those who insist on feeding themselves will go hungry, while those who are willing to feed one another will be perfectly satisfied. What God holds out to everyone all the time is the banquet of his love, but some know how to eat at that table and others don’t. (Bishop Barron, Catholicism)

Between the subject and the object lies the value. This value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any “self” or any “object” to which it might be later assigned. It is more real than the stove. […] It is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed. (Pirsig, Lila)

A consequence of such an approach - which is the standard modus operandi of mathematics ever since Hilbert - is that any single mathematical object, say the number 5, is understood primarily in terms of the structural relationship it bears to the other natural numbers. Mathematical 5 objects are determined by–and understood by - the network of relationships they enjoy with all the other objects of their species. (Barry Mazur, When is one thing equal to some other thing?)