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

Yes, I recall an US Air Force veteran once saying that the idea people have soulmates is ridiculous because it implies some poor child ending up disabled due to a landmine was either random or part of the same plan as one finding their romantic partner.

Scenarios like that are a bit ridiculous, yes. But that's not how that usually goes at all.

The idea of "soulmates" is more along the lines of soul soul friends who are there to help give some experience the soul is seeking to understand. It's nothing personal ~ it's just part of the play, for better or worse. They have a role that they were chosen to play, whether of the good guy or the bad guy.

With romantic soulmates... well, that seems to be a lot rarer. So many think of such and such as their romantic "soulmate", but that's almost usually just delusion from New Age garbage. Usually, it's just your stock standard soul friend who has a lesson they were requested to teach before moving on.

For myself I cannot help but be a bit dismissive of the idea that there is some greater plan at work. One can believe in Survival and still accept reality has a great deal of Chaos if not Evil in it. From what I can tell Creation suffers from either an absentee or at best an earnest but incapable Land Lord...

I don't think there's some "divine plan" in the sense of Christianity. That just doesn't add up, looking at such a world of diverse perspectives ~ from humans to animals to plants to bacteria to fungi. There's just too much going on.

It makes much more sense of there are just plans that a soul has for multiple lifetimes, along with other souls in their soul group. Plans that are just about seeking out certain experiences that can give whatever insights that individual soul is seeking. Some souls have complex sets of ideas. Other souls just want to keep it simple. There's no right or wrong answer from such a perspective.

As for what a soul that decides on lifetimes of being a fungus wants... that's too alien a perspective for me to comprehend.

I think this is the most difficult to overcome argument, a forced confrontation with the stubborn real existence of the worst sort of experiences that human life actually sometimes has to deal with.
 
It occurs to me that there logically are several possible answers attempting to rationalize this worst case real world horror story example with the "human personality is one with his/her soul and all is good" theory. Food for thought. Options that come to my mind at least include, in order of increasing unattractiveness and increasing unlikelihood:

1)  The last resort argument: there is in fact a reassuring "all is good" answer, but it is beyond human understanding. This of course requires either a considerable act of faith or a very strong intuition to entertain.

2)  There is an element of randomness or chance (the "luck of the draw") in the incarnation process which has not been communicated psychically to humans because it would hamper spiritual progress. Like everything in this world, the reincarnation process itself has various flaws from the human standpoint, perhaps the result of the original designer(s) having inevitably to make tradeoffs. There is ultimate recompense or balancing out of the resultant meaningless suffering.
 
3)  Suggestion (2) above except there is no balancing out or making good of this great negative experience.

4)  Various beings can make mistakes in this process and that's that.

5)  In such a case as the horror story example the incarnated being is not a human soul and the rules don't apply to it.

6)  There is no valid rationalization. The theory that "the human personality is one with his/her soul and all is good" is itself a great deception on the part of the powers that be. The truth is very much less pleasant.

It's a bit of 1, 2 and 4, from my perspective. It's a lot more complex than it appears to our human perspective, as we're just missing most of the picture. Some things are chosen, but others are left up to chance deliberately, because it can be interesting to see what happens. Not all souls have the experience or wisdom to know what to choose or what they want. This all happens before incarnation, so there is not yet a veil of forgetfulness to cause a loss of knowledge of why the incarnate aspect of soul chose that life.

Scenarios like that are a bit ridiculous, yes. But that's not how that usually goes at all.

The idea of "soulmates" is more along the lines of soul soul friends who are there to help give some experience the soul is seeking to understand. It's nothing personal ~ it's just part of the play, for better or worse. They have a role that they were chosen to play, whether of the good guy or the bad guy.

With romantic soulmates... well, that seems to be a lot rarer. So many think of such and such as their romantic "soulmate", but that's almost usually just delusion from New Age garbage. Usually, it's just your stock standard soul friend who has a lesson they were requested to teach before moving on.


I don't think there's some "divine plan" in the sense of Christianity. That just doesn't add up, looking at such a world of diverse perspectives ~ from humans to animals to plants to bacteria to fungi. There's just too much going on.

It makes much more sense of there are just plans that a soul has for multiple lifetimes, along with other souls in their soul group. Plans that are just about seeking out certain experiences that can give whatever insights that individual soul is seeking. Some souls have complex sets of ideas. Other souls just want to keep it simple. There's no right or wrong answer from such a perspective.

As for what a soul that decides on lifetimes of being a fungus wants... that's too alien a perspective for me to comprehend.

For myself I don't think I can take the diverse, even contradictory accounts of how souls supposedly choose to suffer and whatever supposed plan "God" has against the real suffering in massive abundance that victims rarely claim was chosen in some pre-incarnate state.

I do accept that there can be souls who simply journey together, for whatever reason, experiencing a different set of relationships across lifetimes. This fits what it seems to me this world - if no[t] universe - is, a place that seems to be finely tuned to offer some possibility for incarnation even if the origins, reasons, & afterlife destinations are different for said groups of souls.

That I at least can see as a possibility, as opposed to an Omni-God whose Perfect Goodness allows for said suffering.

For myself I don't think I can take the diverse, even contradictory accounts of how souls supposedly choose to suffer and whatever supposed plan "God" has against the real suffering in massive abundance that victims rarely claim was chosen in some pre-incarnate state.

I do accept that there can be souls who simply journey together, for whatever reason, experiencing a different set of relationships across lifetimes. This fits what it seems to me this world - if no[t] universe - is, a place that seems to be finely tuned to offer some possibility for incarnation even if the origins, reasons, & afterlife destinations are different for said groups of souls.

That I at least can see as a possibility, as opposed to an Omni-God whose Perfect Goodness allows for said suffering.

Yeah, the problem of evil is something that makes no sense in the face of a religious entities with curiously very human ideas.

I'm far more partial to transcendental... All-ness that seeks expression in all forms, being infinite in expression and potential. But religions don't really like such ideas, as they can't really blame or accuse people of violating some absurdity. Says a lot about religion compared to the mystic traditions which seek to go beyond all of that nonsense.

Yeah, the problem of evil is something that makes no sense in the face of a religious entities with curiously very human ideas.

I'm far more partial to transcendental... All-ness that seeks expression in all forms, being infinite in expression and potential. But religions don't really like such ideas, as they can't really blame or accuse people of violating some absurdity. Says a lot about religion compared to the mystic traditions which seek to go beyond all of that nonsense.

I think the challenge is religions do try to offer some avenue to make sense of Evil, if only in recognizing Evil *as* Evil.

Mysticism can make Evil seem like a choice on a cosmic menu, which recalls video games where if you want to have certain abilities in-game you can be Good or Evil but it has little to no bearing on the actual world the game takes place in.

I think the challenge is religions do try to offer some avenue to make sense of Evil, if only in recognizing Evil *as* Evil.

Mysticism can make Evil seem like a choice on a cosmic menu, which recalls video games where if you want to have certain abilities in-game you can be Good or Evil but it has little to no bearing on the actual world the game takes place in.

Though religions still struggle with explaining why Evil exists, while also arbitrarily designating things as Evil if they don't understand them, or if they fit some description in their holy book.

As for Mysticism, I liken it more to the analogy of tabletop roleplaying games.

It's a bit of 1, 2 and 4, from my perspective. It's a lot more complex than it appears to our human perspective, as we're just missing most of the picture. Some things are chosen, but others are left up to chance deliberately, because it can be interesting to see what happens. Not all souls have the experience or wisdom to know what to choose or what they want. This all happens before incarnation, so there is not yet a veil of forgetfulness to cause a loss of knowledge of why the incarnate aspect of soul chose that life.

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:

"Some things are chosen, but others are left up to chance deliberately, because it can be interesting to see what happens. Not all souls have the experience or wisdom to know what to choose or what they want."

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.

"....there are just plans that a soul has for multiple lifetimes, along with other souls in their soul group. Plans that are just about seeking out certain experiences that can give whatever insights that individual soul is seeking. Some souls have complex sets of ideas. Other souls just want to keep it simple."
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"The idea of "soulmates" is more along the lines of soul friends who are there to help give some experience the soul is seeking to understand. It's nothing personal ~ it's just part of the play, for better or worse. They have a role that they were chosen to play, whether of the good guy or the bad guy."

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.

I think the challenge is religions do try to offer some avenue to make sense of Evil, if only in recognizing Evil *as* Evil.

I think I would beware of that - it might be interesting, but look what it seemed to do to Alex Tsarkis!

I don't deny that otherwise it might be a relevant question.

David

I don't deny that otherwise it might be a relevant question.

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.

For myself I don't think I can take the diverse, even contradictory accounts of how souls supposedly choose to suffer and whatever supposed plan "God" has against the real suffering in massive abundance that victims rarely claim was chosen in some pre-incarnate state.

I do accept that there can be souls who simply journey together, for whatever reason, experiencing a different set of relationships across lifetimes. This fits what it seems to me this world - if no[t] universe - is, a place that seems to be finely tuned to offer some possibility for incarnation even if the origins, reasons, & afterlife destinations are different for said groups of souls.

That I at least can see as a possibility, as opposed to an Omni-God whose Perfect Goodness allows for said suffering.

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