The soul, suffering, healing, learning, and spirituality [Night Shift split]

Since a lot of people encounter timelessness outside the body, this may mean that we ourselves have gradually designed our bodies rather than a god! The point is that groups of interested souls may work on this project and observe the end result. Note that this totally eliminates all questions related to  theodicy. Maybe we started out without bodies and have gradually invented a physical world in which we can pretend to be physical for a while.

David

I think this would quite the leap in assumptions though, that all evil can be explained away because this world is essentially "virtual" in that it has no real consequences within it?

I think this would quite the leap in assumptions though, that all evil can be explained away because this world is essentially "virtual" in that it has no real consequences within it?

Well I mean it as a hypothesis to kick around. I mean this doesn't seem to be the sort of reality a loving god would build, but neither is it a totally evil reality.

Our disembodied selves built it as a theme park, or maybe as a test to see if such a thing was possible.

We are not omniscient, and designing a reality would (I think) only be possible if we could exploit timelessness to tweak the system and run it again.

Remember that Cambrian explosion. I think this is a sign that designers more like us did the work - we tested a whole range of ideas and selected the best two or three.

David

Well I mean it as a hypothesis to kick around. I mean this doesn't seem to be the sort of reality a loving god would build, but neither is it a totally evil reality.

Our disembodied selves built it as a theme park, or maybe as a test to see if such a thing was possible.

We are not omniscient, and designing a reality would (I think) only be possible if we could exploit timelessness to tweak the system and run it again.

Remember that Cambrian explosion. I think this is a sign that designers more like us did the work - we tested a whole range of ideas and selected the best two or three.

David

Assuming the Cambrian explosion is a sign of design, would it really require timeless beings? If these beings were timeless, why would they need to test ideas in temporal space?

I do agree that time & space seem to be different than the usual linear time explanation *and* the supposed block universe...but it isn't clear what this means AFAICTell, just different observations/claims/extrapolations across the board?

It strikes me that many of your recent descriptive explanations in our discourse regarding the soul and the soul/human relationship (derived from your intuitions and other experiences) seem to instinctively refer to this soul entity as some sort of "it", a somewhat alien being with radically different motivations and personality and memories than the human self it projects into physical incarnation. This in turn seems to be directly in contradiction to your spiritual philosophy regarding the claimed extremely close relationship of the human and his/her soul (that they are "one" in some sense). And this teaching conflicts with a basic fact of human life, which is that the lifelong human experience is nearly 100% of being a discrete isolated limited human personality.

A selection from your writings:


Comment: So for the soul sometimes disaster is significantly risked because it is "interesting to see what happens" Inhuman. Knowing the eminently possible consequences, most human beings would reject that choice of the "luck of the draw". That choice exhibits either complete ignorance of or pitiless disregard of the horrible real physical world consequences and experiences that may occur to the human incarnation just because the soul decides to take this chance.


Comment: None of this has any particular relation to the human personality - it's the ruminations and desires and decisions of a drastically different entity - "something else".

I reiterate that this very much reinforces my contention that during physical life the incarnate human and his/her soul are de facto separate discrete vastly different beings, and that consequently, bad things happening to the human incarnation during this period of Earth life because of soul decisions are true injustices of a high order. I'm not saying that I know that your philosophy of the human/soul relationship is necessarily false - I'm just saying that if (though it is somewhat incomprehensible) it is still somehow true, it is a great injustice to humans - that this design of reality is to be deplored as a great wrongness from the human perspective. And this wrongness is important and greatly matters because the fact is, almost all humans live their entire lives necessarily from the human perspective.

It seems that no amount of descriptions can overcome a severe emotional blockage... the only thing that could help would be experiencing that the soul is nowhere near as different as you seem to believe ~ beliefs that have no supporting evidence. You seem to pick the interpretations of my words that confirm your existing biases rather than thinking about it logically. All very understandable ~ emotions are very difficult things to wrangle with, as I've been learning. Some emotions take a ridiculous amount of strength to overcome, nevermind see past...

My words are merely an attempt to describe something whose scope is far beyond our own comprehension, yet is also fundamentally not particularly different from us incarnates. It's very hard to describe such a unique sensation of experiencing the soul. No, it's impossible... when there are no words in the human language for such a thing. I wouldn't know where to start.

In the end, the soul is not "drastically different" ~ it has a direct, most intimate knowing of every one of its incarnations, because they are fundamentally extensions of it. The soul I call an "it" because the soul is something not biological, as well as no fitting in within any existing human descriptions of gender or any other ideas of identity.

What I mean is religions often will say that some action is actually bad, whereas in some mysticism - especially the more modern stuff where you choose your life - it seems the entirety of the world is akin to a play or video game.

As William James once said, "If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight..."

This isn't to say religion hasn't been used as a tool for those who make special exceptions for themselves - examples of cult leaders abound - but I am wary of the idea that we can rationalize the suffering of this world as merely part of some learning process.

I agree. But it can be both real, and a play... both perspectives are quite valid, because it's part of the process. If the suffering wasn't real, it wouldn't have a meaningful impact on the soul's spiritual development. Hence the veil of forgetfulness. Everything down here needs to be experienced as if it were truly happening in a very real sense ~ the pain being felt in a very real manner. Because it really is, from this incarnate perspective.

Else, there'd be no purpose to incarnating. In a play, the characters go through very real experiences, even if the actors know its just a play. But the actors must play their roles, or it'd be a very poor play... which is why the characters don't know that they're just characters. It would deny their reality, which is very real from their perspective, and it very much needs to be. Such a play needs to have real impacts for there to be real learning.

When it comes to mysticism, I refer to actual mystical traditions, rather than modern pseudo-mystical movements ~ New Ager stuff being very much in that vein. It's all very fake and pseudo-profound. Very materialistic in the non-philosophical sense.

I think this would quite the leap in assumptions though, that all evil can be explained away because this world is essentially "virtual" in that it has no real consequences within it?

There is no such thing as objective evil as religions claim... but subjective evils are very real, as they relate to individuals who are directly affected one way or another. But it is only evil if it is identified by the individual being harmed, as that is how subjectivity is, after all...

This world can be "virtual" in one sense, but very real in another ~ as the consequences for the incarnate entity are very real ones, given the intimacy between mind and body. Unlike video games, the player for this game feels every ache, pain and blow... but also every pleasure, every calm, every thought, decision. Because it's far more than just a video game or play ~ part of a soul is literally within the game. And it's a very serious game, at that.

There must be real consequences for there to be any real spiritual growth for the soul, after all. Even if the soul itself isn't meaningfully affected by any injuries its incarnate aspect suffers. But it may choose to carry on wounds from previous incarnations... in the form of birthmarks or biological defects.

Since a lot of people encounter timelessness outside the body, this may mean that we ourselves have gradually designed our bodies rather than a god! The point is that groups of interested souls may work on this project and observe the end result. Note that this totally eliminates all questions related to  theodicy. Maybe we started out without bodies and have gradually invented a physical world in which we can pretend to be physical for a while.

David

It would seem to be the case, somewhat. Except that with the capabilities souls have, "pretending" is a very different thing from what we know of through role-playing and video games... souls can go very deep into role-playing ~ all of us here with our very individual experiences being very real examples of that, heh.

Wouldn't be very exciting otherwise... for better or worse.

Assuming the Cambrian explosion is a sign of design, would it really require timeless beings? If these beings were timeless, why would they need to test ideas in temporal space?

I do agree that time & space seem to be different than the usual linear time explanation *and* the supposed block universe...but it isn't clear what this means AFAICTell, just different observations/claims/extrapolations across the board?

Well it isn't so much a matter of asking if they would 'need' timelessness - the evidence seems to point in that direction.

To me the Cambrian explosion (and I understand there have been other smaller such explosions)
seems exactly the sort of thing a human engineer might do!

ChatGPT had this to say (after a little prodding)

One such hypothesis is the "two-letter genetic code" proposed by Francis Crick, one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA. Crick suggested that the genetic code might have initially consisted of only two bases per codon, rather than the three bases (triplet code) seen in modern organisms. This would result in a much smaller coding space, likely encoding for a limited set of amino acids.

The idea behind such hypotheses is that the genetic code could have evolved from a simpler form to the more complex triplet code seen in modern organisms. This transition could have occurred through processes such as gene duplication, fusion, or recombination, allowing for the expansion of the genetic code to accommodate more amino acids and regulatory signals.

However, it's essential to note that these hypotheses are speculative and not universally accepted. While they provide interesting insights into the early evolution of genetic systems, they lack direct evidence due to the challenges of studying the origins of life, which occurred billions of years ago and left limited traces in the fossil record.

Think about that for a moment. Clearly shifting from 2 to 3 bases per codon would mean scrapping all actual life on earth (so it doesn't make sense from a conventional evolutionary standpoint) but if an Engineer had the genomes stored in a Computer, the switch from 2 to 3 would be trivial. (by 'Engineer' I mean a spiritual engineer, and the corresponding word 'Computer' refers to a non-physical computer except that the Engineers might do all the computational work themselves).

Incidentally, it was Lone Shaman from Skeptiko that first got me interested in intelligent design, and showed me the speculations about simplified genetic codes.

David

It seems that no amount of descriptions can overcome a severe emotional blockage... the only thing that could help would be experiencing that the soul is nowhere near as different as you seem to believe ~ beliefs that have no supporting evidence. You seem to pick the interpretations of my words that confirm your existing biases rather than thinking about it logically. All very understandable ~ emotions are very difficult things to wrangle with, as I've been learning. Some emotions take a ridiculous amount of strength to overcome, nevermind see past...

My words are merely an attempt to describe something whose scope is far beyond our own comprehension, yet is also fundamentally not particularly different from us incarnates. It's very hard to describe such a unique sensation of experiencing the soul. No, it's impossible... when there are no words in the human language for such a thing. I wouldn't know where to start.

In the end, the soul is not "drastically different" ~ it has a direct, most intimate knowing of every one of its incarnations, because they are fundamentally extensions of it. The soul I call an "it" because the soul is something not biological, as well as no fitting in within any existing human descriptions of gender or any other ideas of identity.

Severe emotional blockage? How about really having to even indirectly deal personally with a sampling of the real life injustices and cruelties of physical life that I have generically been referring to? 

All this seems particularly ineffectual when I consider the problem I am soon going to confront when I visit a relative who has been suffering constant growing pain throughout his body since starting back in November or so, now finally diagnosed as a relentlessly spreading aggressive malignant cancer. I will impotently personally witness a gritty real life example of the grueling intolerable injustice inflicted on so many humans. 

I don't think any words on my part or on your part for that matter are going to be able to assuage his acute physical and emotional suffering happening right now in real time. He does not understand these concepts and wouldn't believe them even if I tried to explain them. How to really reach him? What he most needs right now is something to at least dull the pain, when Percodan and other narcotic opiate drugs offer little relief. 

It's ridiculous to try to tell this person that during his between lives period he as his soul accepted the high probability of (or even deliberately planned and brought on) this terrible outcome of his life. I know better - it would be cruel and probably would only elicit great and justified anger at my effrontery in giving him what to him is so much New Age-seeming poppycock. As far as I can tell he is not and never has been conscious of his soul (or even less, as being part of his soul), and would scoff at these ideas.

Your words seem to me to embody much wisdom, but they still fail miserably in actually dealing with nitty gritty physical reality as it can be sometimes.

There is no such thing as objective evil as religions claim... but subjective evils are very real, as they relate to individuals who are directly affected one way or another. But it is only evil if it is identified by the individual being harmed, as that is how subjectivity is, after all...

This world can be "virtual" in one sense, but very real in another ~ as the consequences for the incarnate entity are very real ones, given the intimacy between mind and body. Unlike video games, the player for this game feels every ache, pain and blow... but also every pleasure, every calm, every thought, decision. Because it's far more than just a video game or play ~ part of a soul is literally within the game. And it's a very serious game, at that.

There must be real consequences for there to be any real spiritual growth for the soul, after all. Even if the soul itself isn't meaningfully affected by any injuries its incarnate aspect suffers. But it may choose to carry on wounds from previous incarnations... in the form of birthmarks or biological defects.

Doesn't all of this mean it really is just a game? What are the real consequences that are occurring if all the suffering of this world is just chosen?

Also, from an evidence standpoint, not clear at all everyone who reincarnates is choosing any biological defects? CORTs, AFAIK, don't present a clear picture that everyone is choosing to live a horrible life on earth. I can think of one abused woman who dies only to become an impoverished washerwoman by her own claim. She simply maligns that this is her fate, rather than something chosen.

This isn't to say no one is choosing their incarnations, but it seems to me that even in some of these cases what is chosen isn't the suffering but the acceptance of it. The example that comes to mind is the case of the cop who dies from criminals shooting him who chooses to come back his own daughter's child yet has heart defects in line with the bullet wounds of his prior life.

For better or worse it doesn't seem to me all the Evil of this world is chosen. Perhaps for a few souls but not all?