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

There is also the reverse of that. For long periods of time people were led to believe that lovers having sex outside marriage were committing a mortal sin. Things like dating and just moving on, consensual sexual variations etc were considered too awful even to discuss. This is still true in many societies.

Morality is a lot more complicated than people think.

David

I agree... sometimes, we like to think of some things as morally objective, but the fact that some cultures simply don't have such objections in various circumstances leads me to think that many things are simply semi-inter-subjective instead.

The culture we grow up in often informs our moral standards, but so does unconscious past life knowledge. If we've spent multiple lifetimes in a culture, then that reinforces the cultural norms.

If we had a past life in another culture, who knows who that might influence how a new culture will be interpreted, albeit unconsciously.

Contrast that with the extreme example (if soul choice of upcoming lives is a real phenomenon) of a soul apparently deliberately choosing a fetus with a known birth defect (or a disease like the mother's AIDS for instance) that predictably had a 100% probability of dying after a long grueling illness lasting months or even years, with life experiences being mainly of extreme suffering, and no compensation. Or a soul choice of a fetus being born of a starving poverty-stricken family in Africa where the child will almost certainly die of malnutrition or be killed in warfare.

Well just on a point of logic, I remember back in about 1985 thinking, this terrible disease is going to bring down almost all the people who were a bit younger than us (i.e. not settled down with a partner), because unless they forcibly tested everyone for AIDS and quarantined them (or a bit later treated them) AIDS will spread explosively. Just to add to the horror, AIDS was supposed to have a very long incubation period.

In reality nothing like that happened, but that is a subject that is off topic here

I will engage in eating super-hot chili peppers, only to regret everything in the moment, afterwards laughing about the absurdity of what just happened, contemplating that going to the toilet the next day will be painful.

Chili peppers are interesting - I will eat a vindaloo curry and enjoy it. Yes it is hot, but maybe it hints at the fact that pain has more than one dimension. Something can be painful and pleasurable at the same time.

There is also the interesting fact that some people (not me) can mix pain with sex.

David

Sorry for the late reply. I decided it best to wait for my mind to contemplate your words for a while. I realized that I was overthinking it, and that the answer was a lot simpler than I was thinking it to be. Though it may not satisfy you. Then, for some things, words just aren't enough. Only the right experiences can fulfill, alas.


The reality is that souls make complicated choices, and choose to put pieces of themselves into complicated situations, all for the sake of experiencing challenges that will incite growth and increased understanding.

Free will and the unpredictability of incarnation makes a soul's journey complicated ~ souls don't always succeed in what they want to achieve from a lifetime. Sometimes, unforeseen circumstances get in the way, necessitating the soul to try a different approach in another lifetime.

This world is not an evil place of suffering... it's a complex mesh of intersecting lives each pushing towards some individual set of goals. Souls know the theory before they first come, but it's nothing like experiencing it all firsthand... and it's not easy for a soul to intervene in a life already in progress, which is why miracles are rare. As for why... the only insights I get is that it has to do with free will... the soul or spirit guides cannot intervene if the incarnate doesn't truly wish for it to.

It's a messy reality, but well intentioned, despite the grimmest appearances. There are no words that can sooth emotional pain, alas... except to say that this reality has no unexpungeable badness or cruelty to it. There's no fundamental wrongness, except in our perceptions. But those perceptions themselves are part of growth... even the darkest mindset has something to teach us, once we can find our way out of the blackness of it.

We may not like it... but then, we cannot recall why we chose to incarnate to begin with. My intuition is rather silent on that. I suppose it would ruin things, for myself, at least. Though I was never really one for spoilers, anyways... surprises are nicer, for better or worse.

At this stage in our discourse I can only say that despite areas of agreement we just will have to agree to disagree on this highlighted crucial point. As far as I my human self am concerned, since I am the human person who had to live it, I can very legitimately judge that the suffering of my earlier life indissoluably and permanently stands as a basic wrongness inflicted on me by another power not my human self. Of course (despite its natural importance to me) its severity was nothing compared to the very worst that is inflicted on Humanity. 

Anyway, this permanent indissolvability is because intense human experiences good or bad stand forever existentially and fundamentally in spacetime and consciousness and can't be washed away by later revelations of the reasons and rationalizations for them. Lived human experience is in itself eternal in a block Universe. 

I realize that of course perhaps in the highest spiritual dimension of reality there is no Block Universe and past events simply stop existing except as memories or other remnants.  

And it occurs to me that you have never directly engaged my example of how in your taught higher spiritual design of reality truly meaningless and protracted suffering can happen in the human world. This is where apparently (if soul choice of upcoming lives is a real phenomenon), sometimes a soul may deliberately enter a fetus which due to cruel chance of the physical world is destined inevitably and predictably to die young after a life of prodominantly extreme suffering, by time and place and circumstances of birth or by birth genetic or somatic defects or by diseases physically inherited from the mother. And it may be that the child dies before he/she has had any significant development of a human personality, and therefore can't learn anything from the experience. Both the mother and father may in some circumstances also die before any sort of learning could proceed from this terrible experience. 

In that extreme but eminently possible case that undoubtably actually happens occasionally in this wide world, there doesn't seem to be any at all either higher meaning or purpose or lower human meaning and purpose to it. The soul hasn't gained from it and the human certainly not - there is no spiritual or higher compensation whatsoever (other than the soul to have gained an acute appreciation of how important it is to avoid major mistakes). It is just fundamentally in itself 100% an eternal wrongness, it seems to me, and the spiritual doctrine that ultimately all is good from the perspective of the Souls is falsified.

Well... we often see "Evil" as such from our existing perspective. It's obvious to us, because it contrasts most heavily to our perspective, making it appear all too obvious. An interesting question would be... would we still have our perspectives if we lived and grew up in a vastly different culture... interestingly, I think we can, depending strongly on the spiritual growth of our soul, because our past life experiences can play a large role in how we respond to new things we've not encountered before and haven't formed a current life response to based on current life prior experience. We're not just blank slates, after all...

But then, you have so many people who really are just products of their environments... the rich and wealthy? All too often, the children of that class are raised purely in that world, so they actually believe that everything is theirs to control and have.

Its origin isn't evil... but ignorance and lack of experience to understand the suffering of those beneath them. They are blind to the suffering of others, and so never seek to understand suffering.

But it is our responsibility to try and force circumstances, if we are in a position to be able to so, that make the rich and wealthy pay for their greed. To show them that their greed is not right. That their world isn't all that there is.

So I would almost have to conclude that the lives of rich and wealthy come from a place of ignorance and so arrogance. Inexperienced souls that have no concept that what they're doing is harmful. A lack of understanding, and so a lack of empathy and morality.

In other circumstances... I could see it as a challenge for a soul who wishes to see if they can resist temptation... a massive one at that. Could they choose the moral choice over greed? A few can make that choice... many simply fall prey, despite trying.

I do wonder if I could survive such a challenge... or whether I'd just lose myself in such a lifetime... I don't want to know, actually. I think I know the answer, given my current life perspective.

It occurs to me that you have left out one type of "Evil" that very much appears to be "True Evil", in opposition to the various rationalizations you have offered which are mainly pointing out ignorance on the part of inexperienced souls. This "True Evil" is the undoubted existence in many severely warped human persons of cruelty of a high order perpetrated in order to actually enjoy the suffering of others. Sadism is the premier example. These people simply "get off" by causing and relishing and enjoying the great misery or agony they have caused on the part of their victims. 

How do you rationalize this form of Evil?

Wouldn't it be better to separate two questions rather more clearly?

1) Do we believe that souls should be given grossly damaged bodies (genetic or otherwise).

2) What is the evidence that souls are selecting their next life, or that other beings are
making that decision for them?

David

Wouldn't it be better to separate two questions rather more clearly?

1)        Do we believe that souls should be given grossly damaged bodies (genetic or otherwise).

2)        What is the evidence that souls are selecting their next life, or that other beings are
            making that decision for them?

David

I like your question 2 the most. Since if souls actually are selecting and planning their next Earth lives, the clear and disturbing implication is that souls are very different than human personalities, and there is high priority to answering the question of whether the assumption of soul choice of next lives is valid. 

In very partial answer to that, it seems to me that there is some evidence but not a lot. Though there are a lot of non-veridical (not confirmed by independent investigation in the world) accounts in the paranormal psychic literature that claim that there is a soul choice process, there are not many veridical accounts claiming these things, where there is independent evidence of the source of the information being immaterial and spiritual. Some of them would be from NDE OBE accounts, and others from reincarnation memories of small children. I don't put much stock in Michael Newton's hypnosis-achieved between lives data. Most of the soul life-choice claims seem to me to be from unverifiable channeling and other psychic sources. 

Whereas there are many examples of veridical evidence of actually being out of body during NDEs and in reincarnation past life accounts from small children, for instance.

This brief survey might lead one to put the soul life choice hypothesis in the probable but not certain category.

At this stage in our discourse I can only say that despite areas of agreement we just will have to agree to disagree on this highlighted crucial point. As far as I my human self am concerned, since I am the human person who had to live it, I can very legitimately judge that the suffering of my earlier life indissoluably and permanently stands as a basic wrongness inflicted on me by another power not my human self. Of course (despite its natural importance to me) its severity was nothing compared to the very worst that is inflicted on Humanity. 

Anyway, this permanent indissolvability is because intense human experiences good or bad stand forever existentially and fundamentally in spacetime and consciousness and can't be washed away by later revelations of the reasons and rationalizations for them. Lived human experience is in itself eternal in a block Universe. 

I realize that of course perhaps in the highest spiritual dimension of reality there is no Block Universe and past events simply stop existing except as memories or other remnants.  

And it occurs to me that you have never directly engaged my example of how in your taught higher spiritual design of reality truly meaningless and protracted suffering can happen in the human world. This is where apparently (if soul choice of upcoming lives is a real phenomenon), sometimes a soul may deliberately enter a fetus which due to cruel chance of the physical world is destined inevitably and predictably to die young after a life of prodominantly extreme suffering, by time and place and circumstances of birth or by birth genetic or somatic defects or by diseases physically inherited from the mother. And it may be that the child dies before he/she has had any significant development of a human personality, and therefore can't learn anything from the experience. Both the mother and father may in some circumstances also die before any sort of learning could proceed from this terrible experience. 

In that extreme but eminently possible case that undoubtably actually happens occasionally in this wide world, there doesn't seem to be any at all either higher meaning or purpose or lower human meaning and purpose to it. The soul hasn't gained from it and the human certainly not - there is no spiritual or higher compensation whatsoever (other than the soul to have gained an acute appreciation of how important it is to avoid major mistakes). It is just fundamentally in itself 100% an eternal wrongness, it seems to me, and the spiritual doctrine that ultimately all is good from the perspective of the Souls is falsified.

You make many unfounded presumptions about the nature of souls and how they relate to incarnation, concluding that it means that they are alien, cruel, possibly evil. Souls are none of that. They don't think like a human, or any other biological entity for that matter. They have a much wider perspective, given that aren't limited by incarnation.

The portion of soul incarnates, and is increasingly blinded by the veil of forgetfulness through more and more connection with the physical body. The soul and human incarnation aren't different ~ but the human incarnation is more and more affected by incarnation. The human incarnation, again, is not a completely separate entity ~ it is a part of the soul that chooses to put itself through hell.

You think the human suffers? Yes, it does. But, so does the soul, because the soul chose to experience that existence. The soul experiences everything its incarnate portion does... so I'd be asking, why the hell do souls choose put themselves through this seeming hell? Because souls are never permanently harmed. The incarnation may suffer... but that suffering is healed once incarnation ends, and the context of the suffering is revealed in full.

It's not a cruel design... it's a design where a soul knows that it may suffer horrifically, but it will be mercifully short according its perspective on time, which is vastly different. Souls look at reality far differently than any incarnate entity does, which is why they can consider putting themselves through these experiences.
You also ignore, or are perhaps blinded to, the beauty in life. There is so much beauty I couldn't recognize before, as it seemed to have no meaning. But now, I can appreciate the small things. A jumping spider's curiosity. A dog's simple happiness. A cat's pretense aloofness. A plant's reaching for the sun. And so on.

There is no actual difference between the incarnation and the soul, other than the incarnation became affected by the nature of incarnation through the veil of forgetfulness. What the nature of the veil of forgetfulness is... isn't a curse or inherent limitation. If anything, it's a consequence of interacting with a reality whose energies are so heavy, so that portion of soul becomes strongly affected by that ~ during incarnation, at least.

The point of all of this is that you are looking at it all with a very dark, poisoned and distorted perspective, which achieves nothing meaningful. It is a feedback loop based on your traumas, which indeed poison the ability to see with clarity. I know, because I've been there myself, and have only recently attained the clarity to see past that.

And even then, I have my moments where I'm momentarily stuck in the blackness... constipation strips me of my clarity, for example. I cannot connect with my intuition. But the difference is experience... I can recall the moments where I had clarity, and long desperately for that again, because the feeling of calmness is worth everything.

It occurs to me that you have left out one type of "Evil" that very much appears to be "True Evil", in opposition to the various rationalizations you have offered which are mainly pointing out ignorance on the part of inexperienced souls. This "True Evil" is the undoubted existence in many severely warped human persons of cruelty of a high order perpetrated in order to actually enjoy the suffering of others. Sadism is the premier example. These people simply "get off" by causing and relishing and enjoying the great misery or agony they have caused on the part of their victims. 

How do you rationalize this form of Evil?

Only if you think that is an inherent part of someone's personality, will you consider them evil. Some souls, during incarnation, simply fall prey to the very worst, as they aren't wise or experienced enough to understand how much misery it causes. Remember, souls do not think like humans ~ souls also incarnate as every kind of animal, plant, bacteria, fungi, etc, so souls are fundamentally something that are above any notions we incarnate beings may have.

Yes, for the human who understands pain and suffering, cruelty is unthinkable and even sickening.

In order to understand someone who relishes cruelty, it requires understanding why they are like that... that is, the causes. Some individuals go through horrific trauma, such as friends and family dying senselessly, and in an attempt to rationalize it, some can only take a very twisted view, caused by trauma, which causes others to want to suffer like their friends and family might have.

Children can be casually cruel sometimes, if not taught ethics and morality... so they can go on to live as if they never grew up, never being disciplined. I've read of cases like a woman stabbing a man 100 times, using the excuse of "cannabis psychosis" and "being forced to smoke". If someone is never taught to treat others like you would wish to be treated, and are instead constantly coddled and babied, the lesson is they can do whatever they want.

The point is that human morality isn't a universal, but is something learnt. Through culture, society and many lifetimes... and some souls simply go through experiences where they never learn ethics and morality, so they spiral down a dark path. Souls aren't human ~ they learn to be human, through many lifetimes, many experiences, seeking out experiences that can hopefully teach them something valuable.

The life of cruel sadist... I cannot imagine it, but the takeaway from that would be having to face all of the pain and suffering inflicted on others, to feel it all. Life reviews have their place... that soul would eventually learn of how senseless and pointless it all is. There's nothing to gain but misery.

One of my soul's lifetimes would have gone like that... but my soul cut it short by having that incarnation be murdered before it could get worse. A mercy, I think.

Wouldn't it be better to separate two questions rather more clearly?

1)        Do we believe that souls should be given grossly damaged bodies (genetic or otherwise).

2)        What is the evidence that souls are selecting their next life, or that other beings are
            making that decision for them?

David

Well... the first relies on the second. Some souls indeed choose their next life. Some souls choose to jump into the unknown. Some plan, some don't. It depends on whether the soul has a purpose in mind, the seeking of particular insights they think a life might give them. Sometimes, the soul just wasn't ready, and doesn't get the insights they wanted ~ but that itself is an insight. Souls aren't instantly wise ~ they need to learn wisdom through experience.

So...

1) Souls aren't "given" grossly damaged bodies, so much as some choose them, and some are just looking for no particular experience, where anything will do. Souls don't think like an incarnate entity, so grossly damaged bodies aren't a big deal... not until they incarnate and maybe find that they hate it. Some souls just take it all in their stride, not letting it hold them back. Some souls simply go with the flow, easily adjusting to that body, embracing the limitations. But that's rare.

2) I know from my own experience that I have gleaned, is that at some point, my soul choose very particular sets of lives in Tibet, the Amazon, and finally, Australia. Spirituality, Shamanism, and... well, whatever this life ultimately means, which I am not privy to right now. Growth maybe. Challenge. A test. Something like that is what I seem to be getting...

What I find interesting is the statement of whether other beings force souls into lives... is there any evidence? I'm not aware of any, but I know of all the usual claims, like prison planet and the soul trap theories. Used to believe in those, but my spiritual experiences wiped away those possibilities as absurd. But, back then, I was blinded by pain and suffering, so they naturally appeal to someone looking for meaning... or the seeming lack thereof... that's how those traps grab people, though. They lure the desperate.

Only if you think that is an inherent part of someone's personality, will you consider them evil. Some souls, during incarnation, simply fall prey to the very worst, as they aren't wise or experienced enough to understand how much misery it causes. Remember, souls do not think like humans ~ souls also incarnate as every kind of animal, plant, bacteria, fungi, etc, so souls are fundamentally something that are above any notions we incarnate beings may have.

Yes, for the human who understands pain and suffering, cruelty is unthinkable and even sickening.

In order to understand someone who relishes cruelty, it requires understanding why they are like that... that is, the causes. Some individuals go through horrific trauma, such as friends and family dying senselessly, and in an attempt to rationalize it, some can only take a very twisted view, caused by trauma, which causes others to want to suffer like their friends and family might have.

Children can be casually cruel sometimes, if not taught ethics and morality... so they can go on to live as if they never grew up, never being disciplined. I've read of cases like a woman stabbing a man 100 times, using the excuse of "cannabis psychosis" and "being forced to smoke". If someone is never taught to treat others like you would wish to be treated, and are instead constantly coddled and babied, the lesson is they can do whatever they want.

The point is that human morality isn't a universal, but is something learnt. Through culture, society and many lifetimes... and some souls simply go through experiences where they never learn ethics and morality, so they spiral down a dark path. Souls aren't human ~ they learn to be human, through many lifetimes, many experiences, seeking out experiences that can hopefully teach them something valuable.

The life of cruel sadist... I cannot imagine it, but the takeaway from that would be having to face all of the pain and suffering inflicted on others, to feel it all. Life reviews have their place... that soul would eventually learn of how senseless and pointless it all is. There's nothing to gain but misery.

One of my soul's lifetimes would have gone like that... but my soul cut it short by having that incarnation be murdered before it could get worse. A mercy, I think.

Thanks for making my point for me. Everything you say about the nature of souls versus that of humans (and their relationships) makes a sort of sense assuming the truth of the teaching that the soul often or usually deliberately chooses and plans the broad scheme or even the details of its upcoming incarnation. There is some evidence for this, but it does not rise to the level of the veridical evidence from NDE OBEs , CORTs, and other paranormal experiences/communications for an afterlife and the existence of some sort of spiritual realm. Also of course your and other's spiritual intuitions achieved after many years of effort have also to be put in the balance as a body of evidence of a sort.

But in my mind all of this can only reinforce my observations of the truth of real life, that whatever the soul is, this entity must not be human but is actually something somewhat alien from the human standpoint, and that consequently it is a great mistake for a human person to naively assume (accepting New Age or other spiritual sources) that "he" (his human self) as his soul chose that lifetime, or even that his soul is ultimately good from the human standpoint.

Instead, the soul is a somewhat alien entity that does not strongly value the actual raw sometimes subjectively endless experiences of its human incarnation, (especially when they are predominantly very negative and consist of suffering of various kinds), except for whatever it learns from them. Your own words regarding the overall soul/human relationship make this clear, it seems to me.

What the soul very much values is the learning it may acquire from human experience and struggle, regardless of what the incarnated personality may go through. That sort of entity looks at least to me to be somewhat alien. Your own words clearly indicate this. 

In this reasoning I am just trying to uncover at least a glimpse of the unvarnished truth. It turns out that this truth is probably somewhat unpleasant, but so be it.

It has to be admitted that still, there is some doubt of these conclusions, based on the testimonies from numerous accounts of the entry stages of the afterlife from NDEs and CORTs, episodes of "cosmic consciousness" such as documented by Bucke, and from some mediumistic communications and channelings. Leading perhaps to some serious cognitive dissonances. Our reality is complicated.