I found this interview very interesting as Dr. Zinser spoke with a lot of authority generated from personal experience on the battlefield of the mind. However, I failed to hear anything paradigm busting as Alex did. I heard the same metaphysical world view I've heard from others (like Grant Cameron) and from which I presently operate: this life is just one chapter or one thread of a greater story. Death is just the end of a chapter. We all contain a broken off piece of God/Higher Self/Light which has deliberately gotten lost in the Labyrinth order to have the experiences of returning, and along the way some souls get REALLY really lost and need help getting back to the light.
This idea seems to me to be very problematic. If it's true, it implies that all of life is a game created by God/M@L/TWE to entertain itself. It's as if it says to itself: "I am bored. I know what I'll do -- I'll instantiate myself in living beings and purposely forget who I am just for the craic, the sheer exhilaration of struggling to rediscover myself". Evidently, the supreme being never tires of this game no matter how many billions of times it plays it.
To my mind, it makes more sense to postulate that the supreme being (as Bernardo Kastrup believes), isn't intrinsically metacognitive (i.e. isn't self-aware; isn't aware
that it's aware), operating instead at something akin to an "instinctive" level. Everything is a process in its mind, and such processes can interact in myriads of ways determined by its inherent nature (which seems to be patterned and regular).
It isn't omnipotent or omniscient. There are things it can't, doesn't know how, wouldn't even want, to do. Somewhere along the line, it discovered how to dissociate itself into (living) beings that over time have become progressively more self-aware. We and all living beings, be they lesser or more advanced, are its means of exploring itself through the phenomenon of self-awareness, a natural outcome of dissociation. It isn't that we forget what we are, so much as that we have arisen to assist in its ongoing evolution.
That implies that what we experience is as much news to it as it is to us. We aren't Abrahamic-style creations to whom it issues rules and regulations which must be obeyed in order to find a way out of the maze and return to it. No: we're beings that have complete freedom to explore metacognitively, on its behalf, more of its own potential. We're all
participants in its journey of self-discovery.
In this view, its eventual aim would be to become completely self-realised in a metacognitive way. It already has all the power that's possible (albeit not omnipotence), and can do whatever it "instinctively" wants or wills
within the constraints of its own nature. However, employing the constantly evolving tool of self-awareness, it can experience itself more and more in ways conducive to its aim. It's not playing elaborate games with itself, but rather constantly striving to come to know and experience itself in ways it might be harder (impossible?) to do otherwise.
Hence we wouldn't be different and separate from it, but part and parcel
of it. Nor,
Intrinsically, would it necessarily know what good and evil are: it would be discovering this vicariously through our agency. "Good" would be whatever promotes its evolution (and thereby ours), and "evil" whatever inhibits that. To evolve, to come to know and metacognitively understand more and more of itself, it might instinctively want to evolve (good to prevail). However, because it's the other side of a dissociative boundary, in a sense it has let go of control, let the chips fall as they may. Theoretically, evil could eventually triumph, but in doing so, it would destroy the option the supreme being is pursuing; it would have to find some other way to evolve.
Why, if this is the case, would it want to allow us to become inexistent when we die? If we could continue and perhaps reincarnate (i.e. re-dissociate), and in our essence/soul be able to retain at least something of what we had previously learnt -- and subsequently evolve further, which is the same as saying that
it could evolve further towards its aim -- then to me, it makes a certain sense.
We, on our side of the dissociative boundary, could perhaps be said to be vulnerable to experiencing its intrinsic existential angst, associated with its desire to evolve. We have free will, and probably
necessarily so -- why? I'd say the dissociative boundary represents a distinction between two modes of experiencing: (i) M@L's native, instinctive and inevitably determinative, way, and (ii) its alters' (and therefore its own) proclivity to explore new territory.
Because the territory hasn't previously been explored, mistakes are bound to be made, i.e. there's bound to be evil. If it weren't so, there wouldn't be the boundary; there'd just be more of the same. M@L at the get-go doesn't know if there's anything worthwhile there, or if it turns out there is, how best to deal with it to further its aim. This idea hinges on the assumption that it isn't omniscient; if it were, we'd necessarily have an Abrahamic and dualistic conception of it as a trickster or joker that cynically manipulates us for its own amusement to avoid cosmic boredom.
If this idea has merit, then why is there any need to worry? We would be immortal, at least insofar as M@L's ideas/processes are effectively indestructible; it can't ever
forget anything it has done - which is what true destructibility would imply.
Moreover, since we all originate from its one source, quite naturally we would all be interconnected. It would obviously be counterproductive for us to act in a way that would frustrate it and harm ourselves. That's not to say that we don't ever act in this way: we do, and quite often, but in aggregate (hopefully) are making progress on M@L's behalf.
As to the ins and outs of what happens between lives, and to what extent there's bi-directional interaction between M@L and us, I can't say much. Whether there are angels, demons, spirits, ETs, "paranormal" activity and all the rest -- or at least what they might actually represent -- I don't know. I'm keeping an open mind about all that.