Thanks @gavvet for a thought-provoking and original post!
"Everything is energy, and it's all in alignment."--@quinneaker
God is energy, heaven/hell are energy...it's all vibration. Chaos/entropy/hell are of low vibrations, and heaven/divinity are of high vibrations. The human mind is unable to perceive all energy at once (the computer mainframe just can't handle it), but that's what gives rise to experience--the contrast of this and not that.
"if we cherish this attitude we will be locked in this state forever" <----beautifully stated, although it's the same with any experience we choose to embody, be that heaven OR hell. If it's all we see, if we attach to it, if we cling to it, then we exclude all other possibilities.
Love the parallel you've drawn between repentence = moving past sin as electing a more ordered state.
For some, it gets confusing to call that choice "Jesus", because our culture has attached significant and dense meaning to that name. As the philosopher Alan Watts points out, Jesus did not say that he was "THE" son of God (as in the King James version of the Bible), but rather that he was "A" son of God (as in the Greek). He was "A" Christ, not "The" Christ--christ meaning enlightened being, just like a buddha. (Similarly, there's a difference between THE Buddha with a capital B--the being once called Siddhartha Gautama--and a buddha with a lowercase b, of which there have been countless recognized incarnations.) People get super attached to this exclusivity, and even use it as justification and excuses for why they themselves are unable to embrace their own divinity.
Jesus did not represent that he alone was the exclusive path to God, but that every man, woman, and child had access to The Way/Light/Truth within their own divine being, but Christianity has to misinterpret that to sustain its own existence. Religion has a great time saying that Jesus is the one and only path, because then people NEED religion to find God. If you can find God yourself, then religion is superfluous and the church has no power.
If you use the structure of religion to connect with your own godliness, cool. If you use the framework of science to connect to it, cool. They're both control structures with particular rules, so if you're into having someone else tell you how to do it, or if you're into relying on something outside of yourself, cool.
It doesn't really matter how you get to the point, but every single being can tell when they are in the expansive realm of possibility or not--you can feel it. We've come up with words (which are inherently limiting) so we can communicate these experiences amongst ourselves, but stuffing God into the limits of language necessarily negates the entire expansive truth of what that concept actually is.
Actually, check out the actual words of Jesus to Nichodemus in John 3:16-19.
All 25 major English translations agree on the word "only". http://biblehub.com/john/3-16.htm
This also makes it very clear that Jesus is claiming to be the only way - "Whoever does not believe stand's condemned already"
And, Jesus said, "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life, no one comes to the Father but by me."
In Matthew 16:17 it is pretty explicit:
So I'm not sure where you are getting your information, but you ought to check your sources. :o)