Though it seems objectionable to many people, It may be that we are here voluntarily. It may seem otherwise maybe because we have become somehow 'entangled' with this environment and our purpose is to disentangle ourselves.
Whenever I think along these lines, I can't help but think of experiences with mountaineering. There are moments when you couldn't be any "higher on life" when you're out there, but there are also moments (due to weather, injury, exhaustion, overwhelming fear, etc.) where you question your sanity for ever involving yourself in such a damned activity in the first place and just want the experience to be over really, really bad.
Life, in general, and human reaction to it, seems similar. Things are going good and "life is grand", we're "living the dream", and want to "live life to the fullest" and be "young forever", etc. Then we might experience disease and loss and suffering and all of a sudden life sucks and why would we ever sign up for this crap.
Seems like a fairly similar reaction. Many folks who climb in the mountains ultimately admit they don't do it solely for "fun". They do it for the
adventure - or, the robust and wide-ranging set of varied human experiences, both good and bad, you can have while in the mountains. You can test yourself, probe your limits better, and learn more about yourself, as a result. It's a far richer activity, than one that is just "fun"
This analogy is far from perfect and I don't mean to relate "adventure" to war, disease, etc, but I can't help but think we do
not come down here because things are perfect and good. That would limit the experience. We come down because things are imperfect, and therefore allow a broader range of unique human experiences to learn and grow from. Also, we got to keep in mind many of the things that make life imperfect come from us. Perhaps it's the striving to make life more perfect, to "glorify Christ in the world" and realize "we're all brothers after all" that is the purpose of life in the first place. Or, as Alex points out - NDE'rs who ask what the purpose of life is, get the answer, "learn how to love". Anyhow, just like you can't isolate the "good" from the "bad" in climbing, you can't in life, either, in general. Nor would we probably want to, if we could step back and see it's net worth. It would be like climbing without the challenge, without the weather, without the fear of death, which as Jim Morrison said, one can feel most alive from while confronting. Why bother?
Also, I think, if we could
see "the Kingdom of Heaven spread out upon the Earth", if the eternal spiritual realm and our eternal self was as real to us, indeed more real to us, than our physical being, how hung up would we get on our physical circumstances at that point? If our eternal self was realer to us than our physical being/body, or if we identified with the spirit and looked at the body only as temporary vehicle, there would be no loss in the world, as far as death goes. Death would only be a transition, with both sides of that transition visible to all of us at all times. The only loss would be the loss of that unique experience we can have while incarnated in space-time in a physical body. (Then again, if we were that spiritually evolved, would incarnating still hold any value?) But, we would have the knowing that what is absolutely vital to making the experience of being alive special is the transitory nature of the experience. In that case, fear in the world is due to our isolation and separation from the eternal divine, which can bring about an
appearance of mortality and the seeming imperfection to life, which all makes us wonder why we signed up for all this in the first place. But, it's just a mistaken, limited perspective tricking us, while at the same time providing a set of unique experiences one cannot have "in heaven", while in touch with the eternal divine.