(2024-03-23, 03:41 PM)nbtruthman Wrote: [ -> ]An attempt to broadly summarize this issue:
As you bring out, there isn't much in the deep historical record, especially of channelings or other psychic pronouncements, that souls actually choose the broad outlines or even details of their next incarnations in some sort of soul learning process.
Such claims do come out occasionally as part of accounts of veridical NDE OBEs and veridical CORTs for instance, but the claims themselves due to their basic nature can't be veridical (checkable through later investigation and verification in the physical world). Most such claims have seemed to come via unverifiable psychic channelings and intuitions by sensitives, after long immersion in the belief system.
That is true, however, it is important to remember that much of the framework on which such ideas are based is well documented.
1) Reincarnation seems to be pretty well established by people such as Dr. Ian Stevenson, and is indeed part of the folk understanding of reality in many parts of the world.
2) Every positive Psi result that is adequately verified challenges the idea that consciousness derives from conventional physical action within the brain. Psi is all about consciousness doing things it is not supposed to do!
Quote:That leaves the persuasiveness of these claims to be mainly from the fact that they seem to make some sort of sense of life and its trials and tribulations in addition to its joys, rather than leaving this to some arbitrary or even random process. The mind shys away from the latter kind of "explanation", since this makes our existence with all its drama and good and bad experiences seem sort of pointless.
However, as has been somewhat explored in these discussions, the "physical Earth life is a self-selected and determined school for souls" model has some very unpleasant downsides.
OK, I realise I am repeating myself, but once you realise that from the point of view of souls selecting whole lives - souls who may have already experienced zillions of previous lives, and expect to experience many more - the suffering experienced in one life may appear negligeable. Some people throw themselves into exceedingly unpleasant short term activities, enduring intense exhaustion, frostbite, fractures, and sometimes death. This at least gives a hint as to why souls with a much larger perspective might choose as they are said to do.
This is a very trivial example, but as I have mentioned before, I have one leg that is weakened by polio (mainly in the ankle). Since this happened to me at age 6, I am sure my parents were mighty worried for a while. However, I remember quite a number of exhilarating aspects of my illness. Few of us remember learning to walk the first time, but I remember learning to walk again - and this experience was very rewarding, I can tell you. I wasn't given a bike until after I borrowed my mother's bike and rode it round the garden until the process became automatic. To use the right pedal, I had to press using my heel, and that is still the way I ride my bike even today.
What I am saying is that people often enjoy learning activities which are just on the edge of their abilities
Moving on to lives that contain much more suffering, I don't know, but maybe such people don't see the issue in the same way as we do, or who knows what happens. I'm sure it doesn't make sense to in effect reject a scientific idea because it is unjust!
The idea that our lives contain totally random components seems unlikely to me, and yes, I obviously do realise that wave functions are supposed to collapse in that way.
Quote:Mainly this is the clear implication that the usual assumption that the human is one with and the same as his soul, in other words that the human is in some important sense actually his soul, is actually invalid, since common sense would indicate that the human obviously would never select some of the very suffering-filled lives that actually in real life afflict many humans.
I tend to think the mind/soul simply expands to encompass its previous lives when it isn't embodied, and then forgets them to experience their current life without contamination. Something similar seems to happen when we watch a film - we are engrossed in the action, and then as we walk away from the cinema real life returns into focus.
David