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.
What about the other data points? Can it satisfactorily address the others?
My tentative answer is "Yes", but I also think that this is in a meaningful sense a more abstract theory than most of those posed in the article I wrote: it could encompass or subsume most of them, in that it puts forward an amoral ground of being from which almost any local deity, deities, or other powerful (a)moral agent(s) might arise who determine the scenario of
our little corner of reality - and, after all, the question addressed by my article
was localised (emphasis added): "Why are we incarnated in
this world?"
But I think that you and Magda have recognised this already - for example, Magda writes:
[W]e 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).
To which you respond:
This theory -- that we are some other/higher beings' science experience -- makes a lot of sense to me. And I think would make sense under Aaron's theory as well. If the creative force enjoys creating an unlimited array of "creatures" in all shapes/sizes and at all levels of consciousness, why not higher level beings who want to create/modify and then observe/experiment with lower level beings?
And similarly, this distinction is implicit in this exchange between the two of you:
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'?
Great question! And I think this one isn't satisfactorily answered by Aaron's theory. In his description, Beings in the energy field have to wait until there's room for them to incarnate somewhere -- it doesn't answer the question of who's running this revolving system of incarnation!
So, perhaps we ought to be asking two questions rather than one - roughly:
- What is the ultimate nature of reality?
- What is the nature of our local reality?
The first is of course a lot harder to answer, which might (I don't remember clearly) be why I instead posed a variant of the second in my article.
This adds some relevance, I think, to what you, AryaS, wrote to dpdownsouth in a more recent post:
I also have to say that, while I find your process theory really interesting, even hopeful, it feels somewhat new age detached/disconnected from the strange goings on we read about/experience down here. For example, as a so-called "conspiracy theorist," I feel the need to try to incorporate what appears to be going on in elite circles into my theory of ultimate reality.
This clearly becomes more relevant when focussing on the second question; that pertaining to our own local reality.
Also, I think that in the above quotes, you guys have highlighted another theory significant enough to be added to the list: that incarnation is a reality show (per the Truman Show, except that perhaps we are all Trumans) for the entertainment of higher level beings.
All of that said, there are some inconsistencies in Aaron's account. I'm not saying that these alone invalidate it, but they do bring it into disrepute:
- On the one hand, Aaron writes, "I can sense millions of years ahead" and "The thousand voices break into conversation, telling me [...] about the future", and on the other, he writes: "This ‘place/thing/existence’ that created us and is us, doesn’t know where life will lead".
- And on the one hand, he writes, "I can tell there is no time or space any more. Time doesn’t make sense to me now. It feels stupid that I ever believed in time", and on the other: "She tells me that it can take millions of years until it’s your turn to return to into a ‘Being’ again, but that it doesn’t matter because you can’t feel time when you’re energy".
The following statements in Aaron's account, though, are literally Satanic, and on that basis I reject his entire account as diabolically inspired: "
I learned that there is no such thing as good or bad, right or wrong. We are meant to be free to do as we please and follow impulses".
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
I agree with dpdownsouth that there is ample evidence (dare I say proof?) that NDEs are
not products of the brain - most notably, the veridical OBE components of NDEs, but as for NDEs being deceptions/lies, I agree with you that that is very possible given (as you put it) "
the variety of often contradictory experiences [...] even when some of the NDE accounts are stunningly detailed".
Segueing into another exchange between you and Magda:
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"?
Aaron's theory would not involve this type of "make it right" aspect. Presumably, any "life review" would be simply to review or process the experience.
But then why, given an amoral ground of being, would (as seems to be the case) the
moral impact of ones actions on others be emphasised during life reviews?
It's tempting to suggest that the reason is that our
local reality is governed by a moral deity who somehow emerged out of the amoral ground of being - but then we once again encounter the problem of evil. Another possibility is per the segue: that these life reviews are staged by amoral or immoral beings for some purpose antithetical to our own, such as our control or their entertainment. It's a very difficult phenomenon to come to grips with.
Another exchange:
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?
I agree, and this has always been a frustrating question for me. But perhaps if this is just one giant expanding experiment involving "learning for learning's sake," and if we are all energy beings that just repeatedly incarnate to gather more "experience," then isn't it possible that we just lose a lot of our memories of our past incarnations simply because once we "died" in that life, our energy beings merged into the "whole" again? So jumping into new incarnations may carry tidbits of past strong energetic imprints (i.e., the way water allegedly retains memory) -- but not for everyone.
Some thoughts/questions:
First, maybe we
are told explicitly what we are doing here, and are told how to retain the memory, but upon succumbing to some sort of temptation (about which we were warned) we lose our memories - much like the allegory of the prince who, in a foreign land, forgot, after eating foreign food, that he was a prince, and had to be reminded of who he was by various signs sent by his father, the king - at least, that's the gist of what I remember of the tale. This is essentially one of the suggestions that I made in my article with respect to theory #3's accounting for "the veil", but it might apply more broadly to other theories.
Second, what does '
merg[ing] into the "whole" again' entail? On its face it sounds a lot like the death of the individual self, but you seem to be considering a scenario in which the individual self, having merged, nevertheless continues to exist as an individual entity who is capable of further incarnations - so does "merging" simply mean "losing one's personal memories by having them transferred to the whole"? If so, then it seems on the face of it to be inimical to the ground-of-being's functional (since it has no moral one) purpose: learning. Surely, an individual is more likely to learn (and thereafter transfer to the whole)
new lessons, as opposed to merely
relearn already-learnt lessons, if that individual
remembers the lessons s/he has already learnt (to say nothing of remembering or being taught the myriad other lessons which
other individuals have already learnt!)?
Assuming something like the filter model for the mind/brain interface, it may well be that a few people have a brain anomaly that prevents them empathising with others whom they hurt. Psychopaths may be extremely evil because they never feel the cruelty they create - analogous in a way to a blind person who causes injury to someone by mistake.
I don't think that this is sufficient as a theory of psychopathy. At least some psychopaths are not simply lacking in empathy and thereby causing suffering out of ignorance: at least some of them not only know full well
that they are causing suffering but do what they do
because it causes suffering.
about the Tibetan Book of the Dead -- and this part stood out to me:
"The Bardo Thodol teaches that once awareness is freed from the body, it creates its own reality as one would experience in a dream."
Could this explain the wide variation in NDE experiences? So that perhaps, in that first stage of post-physical death, we all create our own afterlife experience, based on our own cultural overlays, experiences, and upbringings?
This to me sounds like a (localised) variation of solipsism, and the same argument as against solipsism, it seems to me, applies to it: since I (would) have no conscious intent to "create", nor conscious experience
of "creating", these experiences, their creation cannot in a meaningful sense be ascribed to
me (and the same argument applies to any other individual).
Now, there could be approximately predetermined states or forms (semi-Platonic stylee) towards which the process of creation is pulling. But the journey towards these states would be mediated through process and thus not predetermined. To me, this avoids any 'question of evil' problems.
I disagree based on the evidence for the design of both the universe and the life within it. Though it might not be a perfect design, it is still evidence of a remarkable intelligence and potency. (An) intelligent power(s) capable of devising and then implementing the sophisticated designs behind life and our local reality is (are) surely capable of intervention into that reality to
at least prevent the grosser evils that occur within it. Most of even us mere incarnates would do as much even for our worst enemies were they to be subjected to some of the worse horrors of this reality and were we capable of extracting them from those horrors. See also my point to David below re the predictive powers of beings in NDEs.
Children born without the ability to feel pain (it does happen) are an extreme danger to themselves.
Assuming we accept that signals of danger are necessary (i.e. that danger and harm are themselves necessary), why would those signals have to be painful? Why could they not simply signal neutrally, such that those beings who learnt to recognise the signal and act on it survived and reproduced, and those who didn't either didn't survive or didn't reproduce?
At the ultimate level of reality, duality does not exist. At other levels, it certainly does.
No offence, but that's so inane a pair of statements as to be pointless. It's on the level of: "If we have two oranges, we can consider them as a duality - of two oranges - or as a unity - a single set of oranges". Well, sure, but that does nothing to demonstrate that, or even hint as to why, pain and suffering
as experienced in the here and now might simply be wished away as irrelevant according to some other
purportedly higher perspective.
So, here's my challenge to you and David: put your money where your mouths are. If you think that (your) pain and suffering in the here and now will be eclipsed by some higher perspective, then go nuts: cause yourselves all of the horrendous pain and suffering that you can think of and film it for us. Here are a couple of suggestions: blowtorch your toes off; gouge out your eyes with spoons. Be sure to record yourselves saying before and after each video: "This is all irrelevant from a higher perspective". Maybe smile enigmatically as you say that, or at least grin. A lighthearted chuckle wouldn't go astray either.
Perhaps getting comfortable with a certain degree of contradiction is a good idea.
I find it hard to imagine how at the ultimate level some sort of paradox is not involved - rational explanations sure seem to fail. But I don't think that we should get carried away by dragging the contradictions down to less lofty realms.
[If] evil/suffering are irrelevant/not important at the next level, then why [do NDErs] get sent back with any direction at all -- or why have any desire to do good or to love more?
Right - this point keeps on coming up in various forms, and those who advocate the life-as-a-school model continue to fail to have any answer to it: David even wrote explicitly earlier in the thread that the apparent lack of utility in the purported hereafter of the lessons learnt in this realm is a legitimate problem for the life-as-a-school model. In response to my emphasising this, David wrote:
Remember what we don't know here:
1) Does intelligence control everything in this reality, or just some aspects? I.e. could we be struggling with stuff that didn't get designed in in the first place?
2) Are we being trained to go and tame some other physical environment, or is Earth the only one?
3) Does looking at painful experiences look different from a vastly different perspective? One hint might be childbirth, which is, I understand, seriously painful, and yet most women do not seem fearful about giving birth - even after a previous unpleasant experience.
4) Does the non-physical world need the physical world in some way - perhaps it can't just abandon the physical with all its problems?
The first two and the fourth of these questions seem to me to point towards the significance of the distinction I noted earlier between the ultimate nature of reality and the nature of our local reality. They are in any case good questions.
The third though seems to me though to be cherry-picking: it involves a trade-off of pain for new life, whereas not all pain is associated with a commensurate gain. Moreover, I can't see why childbirth
need be painful.
NDE's definitely suggest that things can happen down here that surprise those above. I mean, if they were all powerful, they could predict what would happen in the resuscitation and the NDE could proceed or never even begin. At the very least if the complete timeline of a life is available before birth, it must contain many probabilistic alternatives. Conversely, if 'they' find NDE's useful, there is no reason to associate them (usually) with extreme medical emergencies.
But to make this point, David, you have to ignore those NDEs in which later life experiences were accurately predicted, such as the time and means of death of a loved one.
I also suggest (provisionally at least) that there is similarly an apparent contradiction between the apparent ability of beings encountered in NDEs to predict such future events versus the apparent inability of designing powers (presumably the same as or at least related to the beings encountered in NDEs) to perfect their designs from the get-go. Here's a provisional further suggestion to give you a sense of where I'm coming from: that kind of foreknowledge implies an independence from time (at least of the time of our particular realm) that would allow these beings the "timelessness" (unlimited time) in which to achieve perfection.
What I am trying to say, is that you might expect access to demonic powers to have been totally decisive - and it hasn't.
Why would we expect that? Isn't it obvious that there are also benevolent powers? I mean, if the diabolical had decisive power in this realm (albeit that one had to appeal to it in some way to access its power), then why would there be any remaining goodness in this realm at all? Why wouldn't it be an utter hell?
A few acknowledgments of and responses to other shared links:
The article shared by Magda on the Tibetan Book of Dead - very interesting, thanks for sharing, Magda. I don't right now though have anything in response to add to that with which AyraS has already responded.
The Joseph Campbell interview shared by Magda. Wow. Times two. That was a fascinating read. As you allude to, Magda, one of the very interesting perspectives (amongst many) that Joseph Campbell brings is to highlight the distinction between those religions which embrace the (evil and suffering in the) natural world and see no overriding moral imperatives with respect to "nature" versus those which distinguish between good and evil and side with good. As I think is obvious by now, I see things via the same (or at least a very similar) moral lens as you do. That said, there is value in living in harmony with the natural world versus the approach taken by the Abrahamic religions: that the natural world is the dominion of mankind to subdue and exploit for its (his, really, since this is a fundamentally patriarchal system) own benefit.
The link to the article on the shadow tree of the Kabbalah shared by AryaS. This strikes a chord with me, and I suspect that a lot in Kabbalah would resonate with and make sense to me. I read a fair bit of the article, but ultimately the darkness was too much for me to want to delve into in the detail in which the article delved into it (even though I understand such darkness to be real).
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Hopefully that does
some justice to those who have posted such interesting contributions to this thread. Thanks to all for sharing your thoughts - this thread has been and continues to be pretty epic.