.
The idea of God intentionally splitting itself into parts in order to gather experience is also a concept discussed in Kabbalah, with the idea that the Ein Sof split itself into various emanations, each becoming more and more dense, and ultimately ending in Malkuth -- the physical world. However, in Kabbalah, physical life is not just a "fun ride" attempted out of boredom (although sometimes I have read that God split out of "loneliness"). Rather, it's a learning/evolutionary/reparation process -- a journey back towards wholeness, which includes a free will choice to follow a Left Handed (dark side) path to get there. There is also the idea of the Qliphoth -- the shadow side of the Tree of Life, populated by demonic/negative energies that are the shadow sides of the "positive" Sephirah. I haven't read much about the shadow side of the Tree of Life, but found this blogsite that discusses it. I'll link now in case anyone is interested in reviewing, although I haven't reviewed it in detail myself yet.
http://keepersoftherealms.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_27.html
I also agree that the two NDE stories I linked to are variations and/or contradictions to many of the more typically reported NDE's. This has always been one of my problems with NDE accounts -- the sheer variety of experiences, which to me has always suggested either individual brain malfunctions or an extremely varied (but perhaps real) afterlife experience that seems to be largely tailored to the individual NDE'rs religious (or lack thereof) beliefs/preconceived notions of the afterlife/cultural overlays. The problem of this incongruence is described pretty well in this article:
http://www.atheistrepublic.com/blog...ngruence-inconsistency-near-death-experiences
I'm not completely willing to dismiss all NDE's as deceptions/lies or "products of the brain" (as the article above suggests) quite yet -- but the variety of often contradictory experiences certainly does make them less persuasive or useful to me when trying to formulate a satisfactory "nature of reality" theory -- even when some of the NDE accounts are stunningly detailed.
However, perhaps we can analyze the first NDE account (I'll call it "Aaron's theory," after the NDE'r -- for now) on its own merits as a theory of reality, using your data points? In some ways, I see Aaron's theory as somewhat similar to dpdownsouth's Process theory. And Aaron's theory does at least address the #1 data point (evil), in that it posits an amoral -- and not wholly in control -- creator energy/force that appears unconcerned with morality/moral judgments and far more interested in "learning" everything -- almost like a giant AI computer soaking up knowledge. In fact, in this theory, everything IS part of the creation, so we are all creating this reality -- with no ultimate benevolent outcome guaranteed or even desired by the original creative force. It just is what it is.
Great stuff AryaS, thank you for the great research work you are doing looking at NDE reports to see if they contain any reference to reasons for the existence of evil (and as the excellent article you linked to above usefully points out, such explanation should not be limited only to human evil but "natural evil", too i.e. the inherent functioning of the natural world which requires constant killing, destruction, pain and death; freewill is a poor explanation of human evil per se, but it loses any value whatsoever in trying to explain why the material world should function as cruelly as it does).
Indeed within the framework you descrive above (I quote:
"it posits an amoral -- and not wholly in control -- creator energy/force that appears unconcerned with morality/moral judgments and far more interested in "learning" everything -- almost like a giant AI computer soaking up knowledge") the concept of "learning" is equivalent to mere experience, in the sense that it would not be learning in order to achieve in practice (i.e., in the material world) a result that it already has in mind (which is what NDE'rs who believe in "life as a school" imply: that we, as individual souls, have to go back to the material world and live again and again until we get it 100% right - pretty far-fetched as we know, and moreover this would only be possible for human beings, and those lucky enough to be born with the potential to do so, so what would be the point of the suffering of all other sentient beings? But this is just to underline what their optimistic view of thing would imply logically).
On the other hand, "learning" in this framework means "experiencing" what this creator force is potentially able to do ("discovering itself", rather than learning something in order to implement a pre-existing abstract plan), when manifesting in the material world. Now of course one can be optimistic and say that as it discovers itself, it differentiates between good and bad, and it strives towards goodness (as perhaps dpdownsouth was implying), but that is debatable because, for instance, even if the whole of mankind was transformed into a wonderful loving utopia I don't see how this in itself could change the very functioning of the natural, material world (unless one postulates that each and every animal, including bacteria, gets a life review where they are encouraged to change their nature and not kill other forms of life - I wonder if volcanos and earthquakes get life reviews, too, because they also cause plenty of death and destruction, and not only of human beings obviously).
I think the optimistic, developmental view of things is very anthropocentric, as if the material world was all about us.
This "a-moral force" of course has been posited by lots of people, and it's even become mainstream via the Star Wars saga. It's a never-ending saga about the constant shifting balance between the light and the dark side of the Force. And here is where the question of "taste" becomes relevant: for some ours is a wonderful saga, it's great that there is a dark force to fight against, that way there is something to do and you can be a hero etc (people like David's friends he referred to would think it's supercool). OK, there's drama and death but it's preferable to non-existence. As most of you will probably know already, Star Wars was based on the ideas of Joseph Campbell, who embraced the "hero's journey" and notoriously said (repeatedly) "
Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy."
Also "
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I will participate in the game. It’s a wonderful, wonderful opera, except that it hurts. And that wonderful Irish saying, you know, “Is this a private fight, or can anybody get into it?” This is the way life is, and the hero is the one who can participate in it decently, in the way of nature, not in the way of personal rancor, revenge or anything of the kind. " "I think it’s a really childish attitude, to say “no” to life with all its pain, you know, to say this is something that should not have been.
Schopenhauer, in one of his marvelous chapters, I think it’s in
The World as Will and Idea, says: “Life is something that should not have been. It is in its very essence and character, a terrible thing to consider, this business of living by killing and eating.” I mean, it’s in sin in terms of all ethical judgments all the time."
https://billmoyers.com/content/ep-2-joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-the-message-of-the-myth/
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So, I think it boils down to a question of taste - you either think the material world is an exilharating ride despite the suffering or you think the violence and suffering are part of a cosmic game that you don't find funny at all. This is not about evidence, because the evidence is all there. It's our shared experience of this world. Even if it were a dream, for some of us it would be an unacceptable nightmare that we wish we hadn't had, and that will make us sad and will make us wonder why we had to experience such a disturbing vision in the first place, whence it came and why, for others it was just something of little importance, something to be forgotten quickly as they turn to the next 'cool' thing to do.
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Now of course this is only ONE possibility - that we are already somehow the pure expressions of Ultimate reality, and it's necessarily a mix of black and white, you can't have it any other way. But we could simply be in a little pocket of reality, created by a being/beings who are not omnipotent (they just used preexisting matter to start a process which they cannot entirely control), and hence are NOT Ultimate reality, although they are vastly more powerful than we are, and this planet may indeed be their experiment, or their "reality show" where they occasionally may indulge in "interfering" with some of us (hence the huge variety of incompatible 'spiritual experiences', and I'm not referring just to NDEs).
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Other important points that I think have been neglected so far in this discussion:
1) if we are supposed to learn something specific (i.e., how to be better human beings, supposing this means the same thing to all people and in all cultures, which I strongly doubt, so we would definitely need to get lots more details about what that means in order to 'get it right'), why are we not told this explicitly and in a way that we are 100% sure about what we are supposed to do when we are born, instead of having to go through the process of working this out over and over again in each life?
2) Why the need to erase the memory of previous lives, AND especially of the (supposed) life review, if what we learnt and acknowledged during it was crucial and we are being sent back to "make it right"?
3) Again (and I have not read a proper response to this yet), if all is perfect love in the realm we go to after we die, according to NDEs, why is this material world so different?
4) Why is it that we should even be consulted about coming back (as at least some NDErs purport), if we are just the expression of a huge consciousness? Who is boss? How can there be a difference of opinion between It/other beings which would in any case be other expressions of it and us, its 'splinters'?
There's LOTS in NDEs that makes no sense, frankly. But I can see how lots of people find consolation in them (it's 'all about love', and it's going to be OK, and we don't really die etc etc) so that they prefer to take the approach that "we can't understand, but it might all make sense from another perspective and it must be somehow about love because lots of NDEs say so" (despite the dozens of inconsistencies and the lack of overall logic, both in practical and ethical terms).
No time to write more now but will simply say that, due to lack of time (and energy...) I will selfishly refrain from addressing points that I consider obvious or, frankly, extremely marginal in terms of human experience (like the preference for nightmares as a way to "learn" things - especially since nobody here has provided a clear explanation of why we should be learning something in an unpleasant way in the first place, given that we allegedly come from a place of perfection and love, which many NDEs refer to as "home". How come such loving source - if there is only ONE loving source- had to design such a cruel "bootcamp" for entities which are just an expression of itself, and who therefore should logically be wonderfully loving 'splinters' of such a perfect being in the first place?).