I have no bias against the notion or concept of reincarnation, as I believe that spirit is never destroyed.  However, I believe the current paradigm as espoused through personal explorations, modern society and interwoven with ancient spiritual beliefs should be examined in depth.  This is important for several reasons:

The first stems from our purpose as incarnated beings on the planet.  If we have a purpose, other than to simply exist and gather experience, we all want to know what it is.  Modern reincarnation theorists (RTs as I will call them), believe that we are here, as it were, to be in school, to work out old karma (negative actions), and to learn to be more loving and join with God.  The RTs believe that learning is much quicker in the earth school where, after death at some point we all agree to have our memory wiped (after planning our future life, with teachers, spiritual advisors and loved ones), and start out from scratch as a baby with our old "soul," but no memory (except perhaps those buried deep in the subconscious).  The idea is that our souls recognize the unloving things that we've done, and wish to incarnate again in order to not make the same mistakes, and be more loving.  A "do over," if you will.  Bruce has likened the learning here, and the need to wipe our memories to seeing a movie; if you knew the ending, if you didn't live your life from scratch and knew that you were involved in this karmic game, you might not be as sincere in your efforts to live life.  Inherent in this theory is the notion that it is somehow better to fool ourselves by wiping our memories in order to hopefully become more loving spontaneously.  That would make us more worthy to be in the presence of God.  So if modern reincarnation theory is correct, it leads us to the meaning of our earthly lives.

The second reason I believe we should re-examine the RTs is the notion of free will.  Free will is a much talked about topic.  In many modern (New Age) paradigms, it is agreed that while certain things are planned, we all ultimately have free will, and can choose our own paths.  The world's major religions tend to agree with this notion.  However, in a sense, if reincarnation theory holds true, than most of us may be stripped of our free will.  It could be said that we all will choose, willingly to come back to work out these karmic issues.  Yet, I believe that an informal poll on the board might show more than 1/3 of us would currently not desire to have our memories wiped and start over from scratch.  Chumley wishes to be exterminated altogether (to hear him tell it).  If free will reigns, it must be reconciled with reincarnation.  Dave-MBS might say that when confronted with the reality of God and PUL we all feel so unworthy that we choose to go back rather than go on in our unworthy state.  I'm not sure I believe that for everyone.  Many sources (Christian and pagan) stress that God/the divine accepts us as we are.  Why then this overwhelming guilt driven need to reincarnate?

Another reason to re-examine the RTs view is that of memory and our own identity.  We learn through experience; this is how we define ourselves.  Our likes, dislikes, personalities are, our own.  If we wipe our memories or sublimate them completely, are we still ourselves?  Much of what makes me "me" is the synthesis of past and current experiences.  But never forget that wise old phrase George Santayana said: "Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it." The RTs believe that after we die, our past life memories are immediately restored and reintegrated.  So we say "ah hah," I was that Roman soldier, Asian emperor, etc. aside from being Shirley Maclaine!"  Now I understand my life lessons!  One can se the reincarnation theorists paradigm in a negative way here, as if one were born (as it is said few/rare buddhists are, remembering all previous past lives) with the memory of all our past lives, we would make fewer mistakes and have vast knowledge available from the beginning.  

I would like to hear the ideas of others before I present my own theory on reincarnation, as I think this is a great place to share information.  Suffice it to say, that I've laid the groundwork for the reasons I do not accept the current paradigm on reincarnation as it is commonly known.  In a future post I will hearken back to these three reasons for examining our beliefs, and why I think that true reincarnation is much more rare than is commonly believed.

Matthew

I have little -- if any -- fore-knowledge on how ReCar actually works, but if there is universal free will, then I have the choice to take all of the good that I have picked to in this life and enter another life as a continuation of this one.  I have learned so much as of now so it makes logical sense to keep everything that has UNlimited my universal views.  Being reborn like this would quite possibly help many people become "unstuck" from their uncertainties.  If I so choose to do this, there would still be plenty of mystery and suspense left for me to explore since I/we are only at the tip of the iceberg.

∑
Steve

Hi Doc. I decided, or intuited one reason I wanted to come for this life was for the anguish of having done my mother in, in another life, I came to make it up to her because it was me being out of control in my passions. (I was shown this, so we could call it a memory.)
it also explained her dislike of me from the start and outright rejection from the time I was a baby. quite understandable in those terms, that she had intuition also.
yet karma was only a part of it. I had been strung up for what I did. therefore the eye for an eye was performed. yet I choose to come to show my love, to make up for my crime. both of us managed to forgive each other this life for anything that went before.I wonder how many of us have killed before..I'm surely not the only one who has done this, for humanity has ceaseless wars and the killing is done by all of us, singlurly or jointly, it's still that we kill. I came back this time to be a healer and to heal myself first. it is time for all to never justify a killing. when we get there, we will have arrived at a very high plateau in our evolvement.

but thats only one facet of my life. I came back to turn a man away from perversion. I was able to do this with divine help. he is a major accomplishment for my soul that he no longer molests children.
this is my last life. I choose not to return. not to this planet. not because I'm not having a good time, theres just nothing here I want. it appears I've done everything there is to do.

having memory wiped out is necessary. if any of us start recalling just how free and easy and loving it is on the other side, not one of us would volunteer to come here and get a job and pay rent and raise children with an absent parent and have to shelter and feed ourselves and take this body to the doctor and vote for a president who takes us into war...ect....if you only knew...you wouldn't want to bring memories of a better place with you to the fullest extent...you'd just chicken out.

but we can get off the wheel...it takes persistent thought control and focus and constant attendance on what is being felt and intuited and choosing our thoughts and focus on the highest good. then you don't make karma and you're off the wheel for good.
DP says it's prayer without ceasing. I tend to agree with him on that point.

these memories come in like a transmission. they are not dreams nor obes, but transmissions unto the screen of my brain. they would not come in unless I was ready and had asked and I did.
each life though is their own person but me at the same time. so we have to go with the disc idea to understand for now.

love, alysia

I believe the occurance of reincarnation is strongly dependent upon whether or not the higherself/disc/Ithere theory is accurate.  As described by Bruce Moen and Robert Monroe, we are just one aspect of our higher self.  There can be up to hundreds, probably even thousands of different aspects connected to this higher being which are all undergoing(or have undergone) a life on Earth throughout the Earth's history.  This is possible due to the fact that there is no time outside of the physical plane, or at least time is a very different concept than what we experience on earth.  (I am still debating whether there is absolutely no time in the higher dimensions, or if it is just a different version of this thing we call time.)  

So anyway, if it is true that we are actually a being of much higher consiousness that is capable of creating a unique personality and sending it into the earth life system, then it seems as if reincarnation would not be neccessary.  Karma does not seem to reign supreme under these circumstances.  Rather, it is described to be more about gaining new experiences and learning new lessons which are unique to physical life.  An individual aspect of the higher self would not neccessarily need to reincarnate, because after physical death it joins the higher self and becomes one with all of the other aspects of itself.  Therefore, all of the lessons and experiences gained by the other aspects are essentially gained by that unique aspect as well, deeming a future reincarnation vitually unneccessary.  

I would be content if this were the case.  It seems like a pretty neat scenerio.  It would be quite interesting to say the least.

The disc theory has been proposed and further divided by some sources to simultaneous incarnations vs. sequential incarnations.  Sequential being like the Tibetan buddhists who retain past life memories one after another, bringing that vast amount of knowledge with them each lifetime.  The Simultaneious division is what Dude mentioned, where a disc, in order to gain immediate experience may send out thousands of probes to incarnate simultaneously.

The disc theory is very different than the standard notion of reincarnation.  I am more comfortable with the disc theory, than with saying that each of us as spirits/souls is inserted into a new earthly body.  

Alysia, you have experienced past lives, so you must know if you and DP are the same or two different souls in the same soul group or disc.  The distinction may seem artificial, but it is important.  The implications are very different.

One of my main objections to the notion of pure reincarnation is the notion of wiping our memory, and self-created hells.  The vast majority of humanity is not convinced about the afterlife, and many can and will create afterlife experiences that are not heavenly.  If we wipe out past memories and dive back in, there may be an equal chance or better chance in some cases that after starting to appreciate PUL and the universe, the circumstances of a new life might then lead us into "mistakes," and ultimately a self-created hell.   Take a troubled youth today (I know this one well - has nothing to do with members of the board).  One who gets involved with drugs, violence, self degradation.  He/she ultimately dies and enters a self-created hell.  What did this person do in a previous life?  If they were spiritually more aware in their previous life, they then took two steps backward.  Why?  Kyo has said in the past that we are free to explore our dark sides.  I would postulate however, that once the genie is out of the bag - once we advance toward PUL and the love of God, we would not choose to backtrack and then enter a hell (for the most part).  Yet in wiping our memory, given all the uncertainties of life in the physical world, inevitably many of us would be moving backward on the karmic wheel.  Let us not forget that a baby, a child knows nothing of Karma.  Few adults understand the golden rule.  So inevitably, coming back to earth life means wrapping yourself up in negative and positive karma/actions, and hoping that circumstances and your inner guidance don't conspire to make you lose your spiritual quest and take a step backwards (or an eon in a belief system ridden hell).

Let us say, in this life, I hae freed myself of some hindering belief systems now.  If I were reborn as a baby, I would be loaded down with a whole new set of hindering belief systems.  Seems a bit unnecessary and redundant, doesn't it?  We search, quest and meditate.  Try to free our minds and spirits only to be reborn and pick up belief systems from which we then must try to free our minds yet again?

No, I believe for the most part in the disc theory - with one caveat.  At some point there is no disc, and we merge with God.  Before that, we may see those we love and travel with (our disc, group soul) as a collection of spirits that is unique.  Ultimately this distinction will fade away as our experience with PUL becomes greater, however.  

I also believe that many who access past lives are merging experiences and knowledge of others within their soul group or disc and seeing out of their eyes, so to speak.  When this is happening, it seems that the past experience must have been you, but it is really a close union of two souls, rather than a past life.


M

Quote:

Let us say, in this life, I hae freed myself of some hindering belief systems now.  If I were reborn as a baby, I would be loaded down with a whole new set of hindering belief systems.  Seems a bit unnecessary and redundant, doesn't it?  We search, quest and meditate.  Try to free our minds and spirits only to be reborn and pick up belief systems from which we then must try to free our minds yet again?

What about having a choice of parents who will not interfeer in your divine quest?  In my instance, my parents consider themselves Christians but my Dad believes that my search for the ultimate truth is perfectly safe.  He told me of similar curiousities when HE was at my age range too.

Amazingly, Dad told that on one night when he was concerned that I was veering into the "darkness"  He was about to compose an essay about why Christianity is right way but a loud and serious voice told him "Do not worry, Stephen is alright!"  That pushed him out of his worry and now actually supports my efforts to uncover the mysteries.  This is the first time I have told this story about my Dad, but he is very certain about it!

Σ,
Steve

I would like to append my previous post with the following experience:  Currently, I feel drawn to the Latin Language subtlely.  I do not know if it is because I am part Italian, but Latin phrases seem to ring certain bells to me.  "Memento Mori" (Roughly "Remember that you are mortal") seems to be a hit with me.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_Mori

I see a lot of depth in this phrase.  No overall conclusion yet.

""
Steve

Matthew,

I have 6 main issues about reincarnation.
(1)  For me, the group soul concept is a key issue.  Bruce Moen's soul disk concept seems very close to the group soul concept experienced by sources as diverse as Swedenborg and Classical Channeling.  But both ES and Classical Channeling experience this group soul as an aggregate of distinct souls with shared core desires rather than as a fusion of separate selves from the same soul, whether we think in terms of linear or parallel incarnations.

(2) During his astral travels, ES initally experienced past lives on the lower planes.  But as he ascended to higher realms, he learned that reincarnation is an illusion created by unconsicous mergers with distinct souls.  These more evolved souls accompanied ES down to reincarnational planes to demonstrate this illusion.  But the"lower" inhabitants reportedly refused to witness this demonstration.  

(3) The best evidence stems from the alleged memories of young children. The best research on this has been conducted by Dr. Ian Stevenson of the U. of Virginia.  But in a couple of his cases, it was proven that the "remembered personality" was still alive at the time of the child's recall.  This glitch suggests some other explanation for the memories other than reincarnation (e. g. temporary possession, unwittingly tapping into universal mind, etc.).  

(4) If one reads karmic law and spiritual lessons into reincarnation, then one might expect the world to be a more moral "school" than in prior centuries.  Such moral improvement is debatable. Also, I find the implication offensive that 6 million Jews were gassed because they had bad karma and in a sense had this ghastly fate coming to them!  Also, I object to the centuries of neglect of the lower caste in India simply because helping these poor souls might interfere with their bad karma.  

(5) The overwhelming majority of past life recall occur in cultures sympathetic to reincarnation.  Why aren't there more American cases?  The reply that parents discourage such reports from their children seems unsatisfactory.  Why don't chlld psychologists at least report more child fantasies about past lives?

(6) Consider the world's population explosion over the centuries.   What did all these modern souls do for bodies centuries ago?  To claim that  they incarnated on other planets just seems to push the population problem back a step.  If we reincarnate, then it seems plausible to suppose that many new souls are born who have not yet reincarnated.  

Still, during his NDE Howard Storm learns from Jesus that some souls might reincarnate on earth.  So perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between the pro-and anti-reincarnation camps.

Don

I agree with what you have written Matthew. I've considered the same issues regarding reincarnation and various notions of karma. In addition, it seems as though weighted karma is a definitive for any lifeforce engaging in any type of physical existence at all. If given the definition of karma: the effects of a person's actions that determine his destiny in his next incarnation; the total effect of a person's actions and conduct during the successive phases of the person's existence, regarded as determining the person's destiny. Fate; destiny. the cosmic principle according to which each person is rewarded or punished in one incarnation according to that person's deeds in the previous incarnation. action, seen as bringing upon oneself inevitable results, good or bad, either in this life or in a reincarnation. Given these descriptions of karma, it would seem as though weighted karma is an inescapable if one is to partake in any physical life of any kind. It is almost as though we are born with this unbalanced karma even if it is our first incarnation into the physical realms. For instance, if it was our first incarnation into a physical world what would we have to work out?... what would our mission be if we didn't have any previous physical karma from past physical incarnations to correct, to work through? Or is it rather, our first incarnation is set up for us to "build" weighted karma per se... As such, we now have as a result of our very first action, some form of karma from which we can base our next physical incarnations and karmic missions upon? Seems like bit of a paradox when considering the "RT's" perspective. Also, is there a scale to karma? What karmic "things" would warrant reincarnation over others? Are there specified degrees of karma? Or is karma only in the eye of the beholder with regards to the severity of the action? How much negative karma can be worked out in the spiritual realms and how much requires another physical incarnation in order for the correction to be made? What's the deciding factor in whether or not karma has been corrected? Will physically reincarnating in order to fix past negative karma only lead to the creation of new negative karma? I know that self reflection/meditation/etc. can allow one to see past the cycle... but, as has been mentioned, if the theory held that we reincarnate with memories wiped clean and only a vague intuition to guide us through karmic action... this seems like a recipe for an endless cycle despite the best efforts made.

PUL,
Cosmic_Ambitions

Steve E,

You said that Latin language is attracting you presently. I assume you're alluding to the possibility of a former life when you used Latin?  

We talked here awhile back about our progression through our incarnations being in a sort of helix pattern, that at some times we may circle over material we've already lived through in order to ease or rectify any tensions left by memories related to stray previously-lived issues.

My husband started speaking in Latin phrases a few years ago and then wrote a short story (that 'wrote itself,' he said) about a monk. After the story was written his interest in Latin subsided. In the final scene of it, the monk dies in a stable fire but not until after he got several horses out, (showing an understanding of horses my husband had never expressed before.)
We feel he resolved some aspect of his / the monk's death by writing it. If we had tried to ignore his sudden fascination with those phrases, he would not have had the opportunity for his sense of resolution.

So I'd say enjoy your new interest and see where it leads.  :)

Bets

I'm picking on Don's post because he's got it laid out so nice and neat, and addresses a lot of questions I've addressed with people in the past, but tidier... :)

I have 6 main issues about reincarnation.
(1)  For me, the group soul concept is a key issue.  Bruce Moen's soul disk concept seems very close to the group soul concept experienced by sources as diverse as Swedenborg and Classical Channeling.  But both ES and Classical Channeling experience this group soul as an aggregate of distinct souls with shared core desires rather than as a fusion of separate selves from the same soul, whether we think in terms of linear or parallel incarnations.  

I think it may be that there is a lot more variety in how these things work than we tend to think.  I think of soul groups as potentially anything from a drill team or choir that is so blended together it's almost one, to a collection of friends who send Christmas cards once a year.  Some may be so close they practically are "one soul", others could be much less homogeneous.  There are both drill teams and loosely tied groups on earth, no reason to think that sort of variety isn't possibly elsewhere.  Not to mention how differnet groups can overlap, be part of each other, etc., Of course, being pagan, the whole "as above so below" concept is pretty standard for me.

(2) During his astral travels, ES initally experienced past lives on the lower planes.  But as he ascended to higher realms, he learned that reincarnation is an illusion created by unconsicous mergers with distinct souls.  These more evolved souls accompanied ES down to reincarnational planes to demonstrate this illusion.  But the"lower" inhabitants reportedly refused to witness this demonstration.  

Could be.  Could be ES was shown one way it works, for some folks, some times.  And it leaves the question, if you feel like a distinct soul, what's the difference?  Or is "soul" like "crowd"...a singular noun describing a group of single entities...who are in turn made of up multiple molecules...single entities made up of a group of atoms...
 
(3) The best evidence stems from the alleged memories of young children. The best research on this has been conducted by Dr. Ian Stevenson of the U. of Virginia.  But in a couple of his cases, it was proven that the "remembered personality" was still alive at the time of the child's recall.  This glitch suggests some other explanation for the memories other than reincarnation (e. g. temporary possession, unwittingly tapping into universal mind, etc.).  

No reason it can't be both...if I get information from someone talking in the next room, I have no way of knowing if they're in there, or talking over a speaker, or reading someone else's thoughts and words from a paper.  If I repeat the knowledge I received, and it's pr oven accurate, it still doesn't prove how it got here.  Proving how it got here doesn't prove any of the other possible methods aren't possible at other times.

(4) If one reads karmic law and spiritual lessons into reincarnation, then one might expect the world to be a more moral "school" than in prior centuries.  Such moral improvement is debatable. Also, I find the implication offensive that 6 million Jews were gassed because they had bad karma and in a sense had this ghastly fate coming to them!  Also, I object to the centuries of neglect of the lower caste in India simply because helping these poor souls might interfere with their bad karma.  

Could be a valid point.  Could be that we don't see a big enough picture, and that all this suffering is like the grief they give you in basic training, in order to make you a better (and therefore, hopefully live) soldier later on.  I have my doubts about the idea that we're no more moral than people were thousands of years ago...just the fact of being appalled by the Holocaust implies that.

I don't think "bad karma" is the point so much, at least not for everyone.  I see it as like Outward Bound, where they used to (maybe still do?) haul a bunch of people who've never faced dirt, difficulty, or even the remote possibility of death, out somewhere in the wilderness and scare the crap out of them.  They pay good money for this...and while they may be miserable while it's going on, almost all of them say it was a learning experience, very worthwhile, etc., later on.  We have no perspective while we're here...it may be that even the worst imaginable suffering on this plane is like have a bad sunburn for a few days, once we're back on the other side...painful, but worth that day surfing off Maui and communing with the ocean gods.

(5) The overwhelming majority of past life recall occur in cultures sympathetic to reincarnation.  Why aren't there more American cases?  The reply that parents discourage such reports from their children seems unsatisfactory.  Why don't chlld psychologists at least report more child fantasies about past lives?

Well, you'd expect that, wouldn't you?  I've never known a little kid that I talked with much at all that didn't come up with some sort of "I did this" stuff.  A lot of it bears a suspicious resemblance to what they saw on Disney last night...most of it probably is.  How very hard it would be to figure out which was which, even if you were open to it.  I don't know...sheesh, really, any parents who'd be open the the idea that their kids were reincarnated.  Even if the kid said something they positively couldn't brush off as made up, heard on TV, picked up from friends, or whatever, they sure aren't going to tell anyone about it.

I don't know the answer to the child psychologist question, other than the standard American cultural assumption that those things would be picked up from TV, etc.  Unless it's very blatant, you don't see what you aren't looking for.  Really, how many people have lives sufficiently unusual that, without names, one person's account of a past life would seem sufficiently specific to ring any bells, be something they couldn't have gotten from TV?  I'm a farrier, not a usual job for a woman, so if a kid claimed to have been a woman farrier before, someone might think it was me come back.  But if I was a house-wife living in a subdivision and driving an SUV, who's going to think the kid got that from a past life rather than reruns of "Leave it to Beaver" - or at least a more modern version of it?  

(6) Consider the world's population explosion over the centuries.   What did all these modern souls do for bodies centuries ago?  To claim that  they incarnated on other planets just seems to push the population problem back a step.  If we reincarnate, then it seems plausible to suppose that many new souls are born who have not yet reincarnated.  

I've never understood this argument.  Maybe they just hang around.  Maybe our souls split like amoeba and become two that are differentiated from the point of split...same memories up to that point, different after...would explain all those Napoleons, anyway!  :) Maybe they come back every 100 years now instead of every 10,000.  Maybe new souls are "born".  That would explain some of the slow spiritual improvement, like the Holocaust, mentioned previously...new, still bratty baby souls thrown into the mix.  Maybe that's a learning experience for the older souls...to learn to cope with that.  If our souls really are "splits" off souls groups or whatever, could be they just split into more "bits".  Way too many "could be"s to write the idea off over numbers.

Still, during his NDE Howard Storm learns from Jesus that some souls might reincarnate on earth.  So perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between the pro-and anti-reincarnation camps.

This has always made the most sense to me...you can, but you don't have to.  Also mentioned by some folks on here in the past was the theory that not everyone is a "normal" (whatever that is) human soul.  Some could be "drones", as it were, ringers for others to react off of.  Not sure if I buy that theory, but it's another possibility.  None of this is "either/or" stuff.

Don

Matthew I really don't see the point in making a big deal out of whether reincarnation is real or common until we understand what perception is. We don't have a good handle on our measuring system.

Lucy wrote on Jan 14^th, 2007 at 11:16am:

Matthew I really don't see the point in making a big deal out of whether reincarnation is real or common until we understand what perception is. We don't have a good handle on our measuring system.

god I love u Lucy! you just summed it up.  wow, we are rocking on this thread and it just occured to me I could take this one thread and turn it into a book as communicating is what we are doing, and thats the important thing for each of us, not just me and my books that are all unwritten but dying to be written.

perception is just perception, something we see, for example that we perceive with one of the 5 senses in C1. we all know perception is determined by the underlying belief systems we accept as conclusionary.
the definition of a belief system is that it is a box. a limitation, a structure with which to perceive something "out there."
that is not to say to throw away all perception. its just a tool to move towards our greater selves that living a life gives us.

Doc, the way I experience DP, it is like looking at someone else's life. long ago at age 19 I visited a trusted mentor who as it turned out had human failings. she had no concept of disc members. she basically called it past lives. at the time I was hoping I had been somebody else of more esteem than what she was revealing. she just gave me a list of common type lives of common type people. I recorded them and put the tape in the closet. there was maybe 12 lives influencing this one. A study of Elias calls the disc members essence spirit (if Dora wants to come correct me, be my guest!) its what I now believe. essence or disc will contain as many as 800 lives in general. so you see we are drops in the bucket of humanity as an individual personality in C1. no need to have a big ego then to get corrected as its so inconsequential when you know you're just a drop in the ocean, or a sound wailing in the grid.

try to imagine the sound of the grid, 6 billion voices making one sound..not quite a choir that's for sure. you've got all your harmonies and disharmonies in that sound together.

whatever, back to DP. its like theres yin and yang in each of us as energy. he would represent the polarity energy inside me, while LR expresses the body's affiliation of female, therefore as energy, which we all are without a body, we can achieve balanced polarity within one life by embracing such thoughts of who and what we are.
we are not given the whole chunk of where we've been and done as we can't handle that, it's simply too much. we need to make ourselves anew in each life without baggage, but we still carry just enough baggage so we can work that out in this life, in agreement with those we came in with.
then when we realize we can become responsible for the creation of our own reality we join up with others who think the same way, that taking responsibility is what's it about, then we proceed to a civilization which is self governing and does not ask Bush to create peace for us. we do it ourselves from within and then it starts to catch on.

(50 years? hey! maybe sooner!)

anyone can get in touch with essence, other selves, disc members by holding that thought for two minutes to know thyself, then releasing and trusting and waiting.
but u have to be ready to accept maybe you won't see what you want to see. so then you just ask for help. we are not alone, there is assistance. just ask to be shown what you can handle. curiosity and a sense of adventure, or courage to look at the total self is what we all need.

we are all perceiving from our own little perches..you have to fly away from the cages of perception, either doing obes, or meditating or self examination daily. once you fly, you get the overview from on high and it's looking mighty fine once you do. because its "just" a life. it's just experience gathering.
and its the people you loved, who loved you, thats all that gets sifted out and distilled. so live each day like it's your first, or your last, and you'll never experience being at the bottom again..u just get a sense everything is swinging like a pendulum until it rests in the middle.

theres is a level we can call the 7th. folks called it 7th heaven. its a perfect suspension between death and life, as a spirit completed in its experiences. it is blissful nirvana and they can remain there as long as they want. even independent of their disc members.
but they still have their individualized mind. if for one second they begin to entertain a curiousity about having another life, being with others, thinking if there is something more than this wonderful blissfulness they do enjoy, their curiousity takes them into one more adventure and away from nirvana and back into their disc members locale where schemes and plans get cooked up, each one contributing what they would like to experience next.

thats makes drug addicts experience look quite different. many are wanting to attain inner strength by conquering drug habits.

this picture is us; we are in essence love. we all reach for one another for without  one another we can be nothing.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v323/spiritvideo/Alysia/myspace%20graphics/godhands.jpg

DocM wrote on Jan 14^th, 2007 at 2:07am:

The disc theory has been proposed and further divided by some sources to simultaneous incarnations vs. sequential incarnations.  Sequential being like the Tibetan buddhists who retain past life memories one after another, bringing that vast amount of knowledge with them each lifetime.  The Simultaneious division is what Dude mentioned, where a disc, in order to gain immediate experience may send out thousands of probes to incarnate simultaneously. M

Hey Doc,

I'm no expert, but just wanted to say that Tibetan Buddhists believe in BOTH sequential and simultaneous incarnations. For instance someone I know, Lingtrul Rinpoche, is the speech emanation of Lonchenpa. Simultaneously there is also a body emanation, a mind emanation... aspects of the same being incarnating at the same time.  

And.... it's understood that a seperate self is an illusion. So... what reincarnates?

I think Lucy's point is important, that we don't have a good way to measure these things until we understand what perception itself is.

Tim F.

blow me down Tim, you summed up my thoughts in a sentence while I did it 8x10 page.

Tim said:  And.... it's understood that a seperate self is an illusion. So... what reincarnates?

I think I'll take up buddism shortly! ;)

Link's to definitions of perception.

http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=perception

Matthew,

I have some ideas regarding this topic from a healing perspective that I will try to gather together and post.  

I read something Don mentioned the other day about memory loss during 'decent' to lower vibrations.  From my experience this is a fairly accurate description that Don gave via the sources he mentioned.  It's my feeling that the lower vibrations is the reason for memory loss.  In essence one could turn the idea of death around and say that death is the experience of human birth.

Love, Kathy

Right on cathy,I believe everything you said.Death is the birth of human life.Love george

Excellent question, Matthew!
With Lucy, I think clarification is in order. I'd like to work only on two small points: karma, free will. (This is a bit tedious in order to be rigorous, sorry.)

First, we tend to think of karma as some kind of exotic metaphysical force field. In fact, karma is simply cause and effect. People who are careless driving nails can hit their fingers. Tha's the karma of carelessness while driving nails. If you fail to put fuel in your car it will stop running. That's the karma of not gassing the car.

Karma. The nature of karma is easily understood when we look at the attitude of the actor. In this sense, attitude is the posture in life that inclines us toward certain kinds of responses, just a a physical posture tends to incline us toward correlative physical choices. As we learn to be less rejecting, we tend toward a context in which love is more accessible. As we learn to be truthful and logical, we tend toward a context in which things are more clear and understandable, as well as easier to handle. As we learn to find happiness by doing useful things in a useful manner we tend toward a context in which we feel joyful more and more of the time. These are states of our attitude. Karma, by bringing natural consequences, helps us learn to avoid errors, so that as we find ways of dealing with things and the amount of hassle is reduced, we are conditioned toward improvement. This is basic BF Skinner and Ivan Pavlow stuff.

Free will. Everything we know in our everyday lives has got to be input from outside, whether through unknown spiritual mechanisms, or social learning theory. The idea that we always have totally free will simply doesn't work. As a hypnotherapist, I often program people - so much for free will. We also bring some stuff with us, which seems to have been acquired in the past by similar means, and recalled. So let's just postulate, for a moment, that we are totally programmed, a product of 100% conditioning. I worked with the math on this for my Soc PhD - the correlation between 100% learning theory and observed data increase is on the order of r=+0.95 - for social science that's scary! - at an alpha of p<0.001. So it's good science. That mans that we DO NOT get free will on the level of social learning theory etc. At very best, our will is only partly free, and partly conditioned by context.

Now, let me take you back to the Very Beginning, prior to the MegaPiffle that started everything. What was there? In the totality of utter emptiness we have only the "Uncaused Creative Tendency". From this we have an emanation of the universe. The "stuff" of the universe must be emanated too, so it emerges prefabricated.  I suggest that the nature of the soul is not only "in the image of God" but actually "of the substance of God" in the sense of being a projected creative tendency, which is what life seems to be. In other words, we, and what we do, manifest God. (This assumes that God is infinitely near - theories that propose God as infinetely distant and alien would be different.)

When the world goes through some kind of changes, this is a real, emergent, creative act. It did not occur before. It involves, at least by inference, relationships with everything else. Thus, each event manifests God's creativity. Then God responds, in most cases indirectly through manifestations like you and me. Thus, when we make a choice or decision, we do so as God's projected agent within the world of God's projected structures. This means that we are making choices at the forefront of the surging wave of life as it expands into the conditions of its setting. Because we are acting in a totally novel manner we are not responding to conditioning, but rather we are projecting God's will, and as such, we are being truly creative. To be truly creative is just like it feels - we sort information, figure out the best course of action, and then do something that is 100% new, not programmed. The knowledge waas programmed, but the new situation places the programming in an open ended context where it is only half the picture, and our attitude toward selection of options provides the other half.

Where this goes, if you follow it through, is toward a perpetuall greater acord with the overall nature of the cosmos, and especially a greater accord with the nature of God. Then, carried into the indefinite future, the tendency is to perpetually come into ever greater oneness with God. This is a steadily increasing process, as everything evolves, including God-and-the-world system. In this manner, we not only have immediate joy from becoming closer to God, we have an eternity in which we perpetually increase in that joy as we follow an asymptote toward oneness wth God. (This corresponds roughly to Hinayana.)

Personally, I see this as leading to a jump in which we recognize our identity with God, and (often abruptly) realize this in nirvastarka samadhi. (This is a well documented state - read the Upanishads, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, or Hatha Yoga Pradipika to get a classical taste of it. This corresponds to Mahayana.) That is a merger into the God-stuff, after which we become co-creators with God (I like Cayce's term) and as part of God we have totally free will because everything is creative and new all the time. Programming has now been translated into learning, which is just what it feels like when we make a decision.

PUL
dave

PS- The MBS part of the name is a hint to those who want to locate me on-line, Doc. I operate the Mind-Body-Spirit Hypnoclinic in Los Osos. Ths is my one concession to advertising. ;-)

Lights of Love wrote on Jan 14^th, 2007 at 2:06pm:

Link's to definitions of perception. http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=perception Matthew, I have some ideas regarding this topic from a healing perspective that I will try to gather together and post.   I read something Don mentioned the other day about memory loss during 'decent' to lower vibrations.  From my experience this is a fairly accurate description that Don gave via the sources he mentioned.  It's my feeling that the lower vibrations is the reason for memory loss.  In essence one could turn the idea of death around and say that death is the experience of human birth. Love, Kathy

from working in resthomes and observing the aging process of my mother and grandmother I notice a tendency to lose their memory as they age. some call this a name of altheimers...yet not all people get it as they age. it depends on a lot of different factors surrounding their belief systems and their support system or lack of that.

I noticed when the nurses and their family tend to stop talking to them as if there was a person still in there...then they age more rapidly in that case. the soul can always be reached with love, memory is brought back with love.
it appears the soul essence leaves this plane bit by bit and this can be perceived as "natural due to the sheer number that age this way, as the organs begin to fail one by one as indicative of this process of leaving or transiting back into spirit, rebirth as Kathy says.
I do believe altheimers is a choice of the soul for experience sake and a gradual remerge into the astral is taking place as opposed to the car accident way out, another choice of the soul, yet on unconscious levels in most cases to date.

most retrievals will occur when there was no time to prepare a paradigm for the afterlife as in sudden departures, which may in fact be a previous optional choice as well, since I don't believe in accidents nor chaos, but order within heavenly dimension, and again chaos could be seen to be yet another experience towards perception of the opposite. I am of the opinion the necessity of retrievals will become less and less as our society awakens to the afterlife realm while in C1 yet. it will be like the 100th monkey concept.

nothing dies, nothing is born, all just is.

I like what Dave said; wait! what'd he say? he he, be right back!
ok Dave said: Programming has now been translated into learning, which is just what it feels like when we make a decision.
_____

life for me has been a series of undergoing de-programming and realizing the power of making a simple decision. right on Dave. :)

Perception..maybe it has both passive and active forms.

I was thinking of the old alchemical saying (something like this):

The eye is more inclined to see what is behind it than what is before it.

So, in the passive sense, perception occurs without free will. We learn an awful lot by mimicry; there's no free will in mimicry. one is trying to be congruent with some thing else. We just try to perceive the same things as everyone else.

Are we taught to perceive our (ego) selves as differentiated?

And what made the first split (with God)? What was the first perception of separation?

(Is the photo real or enhanced? or does it matter?)

good questions Lucy. we learn, then we unlearn. we are born screaming and in most cases go out screaming (quiet screaming included)

I say it's all real at the same time a movie. it only matters if we decide it matters.

perception can be like the eye viewing the eye. somewhat impossible to conceive that but if god is having an experience as you, then god is looking at itself.

we try to define the edges of the universe only to figure it out that there never was an edge.

I have the impression that because we must, due to our physical nature, be created out of mud by logical processes, even miraculous ones, we still have to be subject to the same logical definitions as a machine. At least on the most primitive levels. That implies no freedom, all genetic programming. Social programming lifts us to the next level, as do schools etc. Then we get into a regenerative mode, feeding back information to ourselves so that we can test and develop ideas. That seems to lead to transcendence, a sort of perpetually perfected awareness/perception/function, ending in an asymptote that approaches God.

Guaranteed enternal job security, and the perks improve too.
;-)

Dave taught me a new word today..asymptote.

the perk might be if I can surprise myself.

I learned this from Allen Watts, a philosopher. on the tape he is laughing. one of my favorite activities to keep from going too crazy.
he said man as god does want a surprise.

maybe thats true, and maybe its like a perk? a surprise suspends the attention somewhere outside of the box. :)

Lights of Love wrote on Jan 14^th, 2007 at 2:06pm:

It's my feeling that the lower vibrations is the reason for memory loss.  In essence one could turn the idea of death around and say that death is the experience of human birth. Love, Kathy

This is a mirror image of how we ordinarily view life & death and beginnings & endings.


I have felt the truth of Kathy's statement.

Being in "Dreamland" has felt like the Real World. I have had a fuller memory There. Waking up in the physical world has felt like falling asleep... into the true Dreamland of this physical world. It feels true to say that 'death' is a birth back into the Real World.

I guess it's a question of perspective.

Interesting thoughts you guys.

From my Father's NDE he described it simply as, "We know everything before we are born and we know everything after we die".

I appreciate everybody's ideas here. There's always something interesting, useful, and engaging between this eclectic mix we have here on this forum. The diversity is very much appreciated. I feel that there are many priceless gems to be gained from one another even in the most unexpected ways.

Dave, you have provided much to take in and think (feel) through. Thank you (and all) for sharing your gems with everyone!

PUL,
Cosmic_Ambitions

Great topic Matthew and replies all.  I believe individual re-incarnation and our solar system re-incarnation in evolution go together.

It is interesting to bring up one's Oversoul (or higher self) My thoughts are; the reason for re-incarnation into the Earth's schoolroom is ultimately to raise one's consciousness to join with one's Oversoul.  Our Oversoul being our original self.

Although we are not seperate from our Oversoul (being that small voice of reason within us) we are on the outside of our Oversoul.  And our tasks experienced in reincarnating are stepping stones enabling us to seek higher, seek the joining back to our Oversoul.

This means a seperation from our Oversoul did take place.

There is mythology writing on this seperation:  
She, is the soul and He, is the Spirit and together they make One. The original androgynous- him in her and her in him.
He projected her out of him too see her form.  (There is also mythlogies of her projecting him out of her to see him)
From the projection of the inside into the outside they became seperated and search for one another over eons of time.

Here we can see a 'bursting for life' took place and desire to evolve.  So, it is not unnatural to want to evolve and this bursting for life must be part or the reason for evolution.

The above mythology may be viewed as a fairy tale or a real event, one cannot say this is exactly what happened because one doesn't know for certain but there is a thread of mythology in this occurance of seperation and we find it in the Bible :  the Bride and the Bridegroom.

In Astrology; re-incarnation is likened to the twelve tasks of Hercules.  The Zodiac sign we experience in each life builds the Spirit strong enough to join with the Soul so eventually the need to re-incarnate dissappears as the Soul and Spirit have joined to become partakers in Creation at higher levels.

Further it is said; we meet with our Soul (if male) or Spirit (if female) or both (Gay represents a form of the androgynous) The androgynous in Spirit is beyond sexual activity as it is the coupling of all the spiritual bodies and ultimately it is female (soul) and male (spirit) joined as one - it is the ultimate joining - it is The Chemical Wedding.

.. we meet with our twin spouse eternal between death and re-birth, maybe even in sleep at night but never to have the Chemical Wedding until our wordly tasks are completed in order to consummate the marriage.

Um .. am I going off the subject a bit into mythology land?!  

:)

Ps:  Alysia that cloud picture is stunning!

I have probably struggled with the ideas put forth about reincarnation as much as anyone and I doubt that I have any definitive answers.  At this point, I do believe that each of us is an incarnation of our higher self or the part of us that is never separated from God.  From my observations we are composed of conscious energy with bodies of consciousness that exist on several planes of vibration.  Each of these bodies exist in a world of its own while at the same time penetrate downward to exist within the same space in which we experience the physical world.

The astral plane for example is an entirely different world than the physical that each of us is most familiar with.  There the form of objects is fluid in nature and radiate light rather than light being reflected off them.  As one travels within this plane of consciousness a great deal of focus and concentration is needed to experience it in a cohesive and comprehensive manner.  We, as humans have extremely sloppy minds and to me this is what makes memory of astral travel difficult.  As we learn to develop our focus through concentration and meditation we are able to bring the higher levels of our existence into our physical consciousness by what can be likened to harmonic resonance.   The laws that govern the astral plane seem to correlate with those of the physical world except the vibration of this world is one of finer substance and faster vibrations.

The spiritual plane is another world with even finer substance and very fast vibrations.  It is one that is filled with light and love.  From what I have experienced of it, which is extremely limited, it is incredibly beautiful.  The consciousness of this plane appears to be that of integrated wisdom or the accumulation of lifetimes of consciousness over eons of physical time.  It also appears to me that this level is where we hold our individualized belief systems that govern our creative impulses of desire.  It is from the spiritual plane that consciousness reaches out toward the direction that it feels attraction to and thereby seeks the fulfillment of its desires. This is cause and effect as Dave so eloquently described.  

To me the idea of separation doesn’t exist at this spiritual level of our being, instead there is more of a spiritual longing for something that is unfulfilled within the consciousness of our being.  This is what seems to be passed downward toward physical manifestation and leads us directly to our life task or what needs to be resolved within our individualized consciousness.  As the energy of our higher consciousness moves downward to our physical body it splits at the astral level and as it continues its penetration to the physical body, duality is experienced because of conflicting beliefs.

I typed the above after I got home last night and planned to continue this morning, however I’m running late so will go ahead and post this.  Hopefully I will have time later this afternoon to speak more about how I think this relates to us as incarnated beings.  

Lucy, I also want to respond more about what I believe perception is.  In a nutshell, I think our perceptions come from more than one source, our higher intelligence as well as all of the thought forms we create and move through as we live our daily lives.

Love, Kathy

Caryn and Kathy are leading me onward into lands of higher thought :)  I much enjoy your knowledge of astrology  and mythology Caryn and you comparison to the bible also as there is much symbology in the bible to be deciphered. it seems we have left brained logic then we have right brained "above logic" to bring into balance on this planet, and there we have duality, contrast, polarities like the bride and the bridegroom concept.
the twelve number is interesting.
I didn't know why I picked 12 as the number of my guides, however, were there not 12 around J's table? and then you mentioned the 12 signs of the zodiac. this could have meaning.  I have been meeting with my twin spouse out of body at night, so I directly relate to your words on this.  I even remember asking him if we "were getting married?" this back in the 80's. The meetings have increased over the years.
You're absolutely right. it is the ultimate...something.  I am not finished here with my tasks.  well, you are not off the subject, at least not for me!

Kathy always has something to say to me.  You are so right the vibrations of the astral plane are faster. From obes, I have noticed to my wonderment how fast everyone moves; even some of my slow moving within physical friends and associates fairly seem to fly within this other area of being and I can see that "moving faster" correlates with a vibration thesis.

continuing with our discussion on what perception is exactly as opposed to "knowing" I am reminded of Bruce's discussion of the interpretor part of the mind. Is perception the same as an interpretation?
I don't think so. first we perceive, then we interpret what we have perceived.

I believe that's where we can get it wrong, to misinterpret what we perceive. that is where we can get into the problem of taking a comment personally from another person, who may just be asserting their own interpretation of their own perception about whatever.
Bruce said, as I recall, hello Bruce! :)  that when working in these areas of exploration to ask for another perception to replace the first. (perhaps a symbol) I think he said "nudge" it, and if it remains, work with it, but it can sometimes be replaced and yet another perhaps more fitting interpretation can come into place.

I'm using the above reference in terms of doing retrievals or other explorations, such as talking to your deceased family member.

thanks everybody it's been "real!"

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v323/spiritvideo/Alysia/myspace%20graphics/Breakdancebear1134696485.gif

Alysia and Cathy thanks for your writings.  Twelve is a great number!  At the last supper there were 13 around the table, including Jesus.  The hidden number (there's always a hidden number!)  The twelve seats with the throne in the middle.  To me this 'seating' arrangment symbolises the Zodiac passing through the Sun.  :)

Also, the American flag (symbolising Aquarius and this must symbolise the Age of Aquarius, surely) - my number might be wrong have to check again so please don't laugh if I got it wrong.  America has 52 states (correct?) and if we count the stars on the American flag they are 51 (correct?) symbolising the one hidden star or state if you like.
The numbers might be off by one count but the stars are one short from the number of states.  Interesting hey!

Meeting with your twin spouse is awesome Alysia. There are rare accounts of meeting with ones twin spouse while on Earth together - that must be awesome!

That is an interesting debate - is perception the same as an interpretation?  The quote .. its in the eyes of the beholder - comes to mind.  It also depends on the persons perception receiving the interpretation!  I know philosophers have debated this question for years lol

I do think our perception is individual and so will the interpretation be (told as best one can - Art is good for perception expression) but I think there is a collective consciousness which relates to the same perception and interpretation ...

Cathy, I enjoyed reading what you wrote - sounds good to me.

:)

One dictum of New Age thought is that while in spirit, we get together with spiritual advisors and select the next incarnation to maximally benefit our learning.  We are not privy to all that would happen in the life, but know it "in general."  However, when we see what goes on in the physical, it makes one wonder how much planning and choice go into it.  Take the drug abuser, wife beater, murderer, child abuser.  In one sense you may say they are working out karma.  In another, you may ask: "what purpose or learning can they have in mind while in spirit to reincarnate and become this negative person?  Some may say the spirit yearns to explore its dark side.  Oh really?  Let us not forget that many of these unfortunate or errant souls will consign themselves to a self-imposed hell on leaving the physical world.  This may endure for decades or eons.  

So what exactly were they and their advisors thinking when they decided to incarnate?  Free will is a b#$ch, isn't it?  Could they not have explored their dark side while in spirit?  Like attracts like there too, so base thoughts or desires would (according to Swedenborg) lead them to others with a like mind.  

I have heard it said that most people, when they cross over end up in Focus 27, or the free area of heaven.  I am not sure, from what I see in the physical world why this would be so.  Belief systems are rampant throughout the world.  Hells (self created) should be overflowing.  So, how does one dive down into the earth plane, go down a dark path away from God, and say it was pre-planned?  It defies logic, and there should be some divine logic to all of this.  

One could argue that the killers, abusers and the like are "new souls," or younger souls who have to work their way up.  This is the only argument that I could see that would still allow the pre-plan paradigm of New Age thought.  Still, it gives one pause.  


Matthew

hard questions Doc but questions we all must answer. logic is only a tool. we have to do a lot of this: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v323/spiritvideo/Alysia/myspace%20graphics/yoga.jpg  maybe some of us are younger souls and that could explain the mistakes and injustice's we see, although it really doesn't satisfy us does it?

here is my definition of free will. my "bible" is A Course in Miracles introduction:

Quote: This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what you want to take at a given time. The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.

this course can therefore be summed up very simply in this way:
Nothing real can be threatened
Nothing unreal exists

Herein lies the peace of God.
____
I think the thing to focus on is what our inheritance is and the word natural. so that even those who trespass against us have an equal opportunity to inherit, and reap the fruit sown, cause and effect as Dave is telling us.
We can make a choice for our own selves, but not make a choice for another, we can rise to forgiveness as taught by J in his example, to show the perpetrator no injury has really been done as what they did was not real, it was not the truth that we can be separate from what created us.

therefore as regards the drug addict choosing a life of degradation it is because they do not understand they can choose another way.

I should think we need to applaud drug counselors for their tireless work here, but we need each other one and all to figure it out. the way I deal with what I see is just to deal with the person who crosses my path and not the entire world. if we each did this, to deal with the person in front of us, commit random acts of kindness it can snowball throughout society and maybe we would not be confronted with this problem so often of drugs, violence, rape and murder.
we each play our part, but not one person has all the answers.

I've told this heart warming story before but it bears repeating. my part is cheerleader so may as well accept it!   my best friend Gabi came over from Germany to marry a drug addict whom she knew from childhood. She took it upon herself to try and bring him out of it, because, perhaps it was karma, but she knew she was madly in love with him from the start. Five years of living with her, he finally gave up drugs in favor of a life with her.  this is a success story, and I think if we keep our eyes on success stories it will tend to produce more success stories rippling through our society.

thanks for making me think of the hard things Doc. I wish us all peace of mind.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v323/spiritvideo/Alysia/myspace%20graphics/angellady-1.jpg

Thanks Chuckles.

Doc wrote:

"I have heard it said that most people, when they cross over end up in Focus 27, or the free area of heaven.  I am not sure, from what I see in the physical world why this would be so.  Belief systems are rampant throughout the world.  Hells (self created) should be overflowing.  So, how does one dive down into the earth plane, go down a dark path away from God, and say it was pre-planned?  It defies logic, and there should be some divine logic to all of this."

I have wrestled with these same thoughts Doc.

I agree that there should be some divine logic to all of this... The only thing that I could conjure up with regards to these puzzling thoughts that you have posed would be a methodology of divine justified illogical logic. -- Seems reasonable?

PUL,
Cosmic_Ambitions

Cosmic,

yes, but it is important to account for these inconsistencies.  If you see the movie "What dreams may come," there is a sense at the end that in heaven we may get the yearning to dive back down again - it would be fun wouldn't it to fall in love all over again, etc.

My drug addict, or wife beater example doesn't fit in with this.  Sure let's dive in again.  Oh wait a minute....there is a chance that through free will I will choose to beat and maim people, live out a life and then die and go to a self created hell for a long time.......Hmmm........now why would I do a thing like that?  I'm in heaven right?  Making a choice to incarnate.....right?

I am not sure how this is accounted for, but I think it raises doubt about the commonly thought of reincarnation paradigm.  Maybe direct experience in the astral can get us more information.


Matthew

well if this helps any, my stepfather, my sister, my late husband, these and others upon transitioning were told to go and make amends with those still physical, in order for their souls to progress on the other side. Not one of them I've come in contact did not have at least one guide with them in this chore.
if they could achieve forgiveness for whatever they had done, they were circumventing karma and what that implies. I didn't ask them about reincarnation, although I do know a spirit who wants to become my grandchild whom I have known in my life before they died.

the point is it's time to educate everybody about ceasing to make karmic ties right here and now, through study of how we do that and how we undo it.

btw, people in hell, they do not realize they are in a hell. seems normal to them.
u can see why getting their attention is necessary to offer a new choice.

read Bruce's account of the phychologist who liked to make others quarrel so he could entertain himself this way. he was in a bst of one-up-manship, where everyone pulled little tricks on each other. but since he did this same thing in his lifetime here, he just continued on the other side tricking people into fighting with each other. By no means did he consider this hell. it was just life as usual.
heck, he might still be there but Bruce and Rosalie, I think, they attempted a retrieval on him.  They have to get tired of where they are at before they can move out of what they have made. sooner or later, human consciousness notices a repetitive pattern and they ask for help which is standing by.

Everything we consider negative, I see as having been caused by fear.  Fear is the root cause for people choosing to behave in horrendous ways… abuse, murder, etc.  To put it simply, in most cases there is a deep underlying fear of powerlessness.  The person who commits these acts compensates by overpowering someone else.  I think eons ago fear became a part of our consciousness as we descended down into the lower vibrations.  Or it also could have been that the lower vibrations are what caused memory loss and thereby resulted in the origination of fear in the lower vibrations.  Something happening along these lines is what makes the most sense to me.

Each of us has belief systems that are contained within our own reality or what we can call thought forms.  Thought forms are groups of similar thoughts that we habitually think.  We add strength to them by repetition and by strong emotion.  If we are constantly thinking a fearful thought, such as my wife / husband is going to leave me, we will begin to act as if that were true and perhaps begin to push the person away, thereby creating exactly what we were afraid of.  This is over-simplified, but this is cause and effect in action.  Again this is simplified, but it shows how each of us is truly responsible for everything we have created our life to be.  

Thought forms are also where most of our perceptions come from.  Perceptions actually originate within our own belief system at the spiritual level, but as they move downward they are filtered through all of the other thought forms that may or may not be in conflict.  Remember the contradictions arise at the astral level vibrations of our being.  This is where consciousness splits into duality.  If there are no conflicting beliefs, the energy moves uninhibited and the perception received from the spiritual level is clear.  I think this process also has a tremendous effect on memory because our memories get muddled up in our thought forms.  Thought forms also are not necessarily negative.  We can convince ourselves of many things either positive or negative.

Previously I mentioned the laws that govern the astral world correlate with those of the physical.  I also believe these have a correlation to the spiritual world as universal or cosmic law.  When the energy of our higher self moves downward toward the physical reality it can become distorted when it runs into an area of our being where we have created a fearful block or where we have walled our self off from our true nature, which is spiritual.  These blocks or distortions are always related to the beliefs we hold.  If our beliefs are not in conflict with cosmic law, then as the energy moves we experience pleasure.  When our beliefs conflict with cosmic law, we experience pain.  It’s the pain that we attempt to block.  

Essentially every time we keep ourselves from feeling pain we wall ourselves off from our true spiritual nature.  Our memory of our spiritual nature becomes walled off so much so that what we have left is a great deal confusion that results in all of the pain and suffering we see within the physical world, which in turn results in myriads of belief systems all of which were created to alleviate this pain and suffering.  This in turn returns back through the astral world, and on to the spiritual.  It’s a continual feedback process.  I think this is how long term karma is brought about and where the idea of mankind having a need for salvation came about.  It is our strong, concrete belief in separation that beckons us here lifetime after lifetime, but what is a lifetime anyway?  We are eternal beings.

Consider Genesis where lifetimes are mentioned as being in the hundreds of years… so and so lived 900 years.  Guess what?  I think this may be true.  The physical body becomes ill because of the blocks and distortions we create in our energy bodies.  If we create out of spiritual longing or the spiritual need of our individualized consciousness, then it makes perfect sense for the need of reincarnation to occur.  Mainly because the physical bodies we create are so laden with the karma or the walling off of our true nature that they cannot maintain longevity.  In this sense, reincarnation would be useful.

Love, Kathy

Alysia and Lovelight- Fear is the killer, you're right. I can tell you the drug side, since I was initially a drug sotted hippie. By intending to "see God" and vigorously practicing appropriate pranayamas etc, plus a liberal dollop of psychedelics, the drug user can effectively depart the everyday world and reach a point of emptiness in which the ego is sufficiently suppressed that there's just a viewpoint looking at God from a partially merged perspective. Then, because the lifestyle does not support that knd of ealization, it is lost. Further, it cannot be regained by taking more drugs (although all of us have tried) because it is a state that lies beyond definition. Until we can live in a manner that our lifestyle alone brings that realization back, it's gone forever. That's when people start worrying, getting confused and anxious, and they start looking for comfortable alternatives, like just "getting high". That's the danger of drug use. However, the other approach is to take the experience to heart and use it as a goal for the future, changing life so that it becomes closer and closer and one day we can work up to that same level again. That's a more difficult trip, but it leads in the proper direction if we let it. Forty years after the fact, I'd say that it has been a wonderful trip.

Doc - I don't think anyone rationally sets out to be a total a$$hole. My feeling is that it is a social problem, especially arising out of limited options as a child. We are limited in the places that we can go because of the structure of the world, and an error at one point becomes a cause of problems at another point.

On the assumption that God worked within logic to create the cosmos, in the very first instant of creation, all the relationships and linkages for all time and eternity were logically implied, and began unfolding, expressng their nature. This is like a city in which all the roads and sidewalks have been cast into concrete. We are going across town from our birthplace to our future, a sort of exploration. The pathways are all completed, but we choose the various walkways and roads over which we will pass acording to what we have learned. If it seems that some bypass is more interesting, we might give it a try. (Eg: I tried the drug route.) Then we find ourselves in a new location from which to make the next choices etc. (In my case this was to become an addict and focus on gratifications, or become a yogi and focus on ending dependencies on gratifications.)

If a person has experiences that suggest physical gratification and violence are the way to go, that person will move toward those pathways, hanging out with people of similar type, and acting in that manner. Similarly, if a person had chosen pornography and gross sexuality and aggression as a useful path, there is a tendency to move closer to that kind of people, and to share experiences with them. We make choices, receive social support and gravitate toward the extremes of the various ways of living. With a total social support system that favors sexual excesses, such as clitoridectomy of women in the Middle East, then it seems that what we are doing is actually normative and proper, as we force people to undergo such things. In exactly the same way, a person caught up in macho power, aggression, hatred as a way of self expression, and who feels that sexual aggression is normative, will tend to act out by sexual aggresion, raping and sodomizing by force. All the social supporters will cheer this on, folie en groupe.

To the degree that we simply act out of the social control imposed on us, we do not exhibit freedom. One of the primary purposes of education is to bring new norms to light, and to broaden the parochial vision of narrow little minds. As they expand, narrow minds discover a wealth of new options, and they become the creative sources of a new social order. Even if the new social order is only a few percent better than before, this overall tendency means that we can free ourselves. When we move to the other side of the collection of struggling beings, we find the expanding wavefront of reality blooming forward into emptiness - this is the cutting edge of manifestation of the Creator, guided by the same creative logic as in the Big Bang, and thus we become the means by which the will of God is projected, through our own faculties, and in so doing, we are totally free. (Freedom does not imply that we can act illogically - to expect that you could hop out of an airplane without a parachute would be jumping to an unsupported conclusion. You'd go limping away with an invalid inference. ;-)

From a purely logical viewpoint, it looks to me like once we are in a valid place, our karma finally run down, and once we live logically by following a path in accord with the universe, then we sort of become part of the manifestation of the creative impulse, and begin to merge into the nature of God - since this is an infinite process, things just keep getting better until we make the next jump and abandon indivuation, at which time we merge back into God, except for a point of identity to which our history is attached. As someone told me, "I feel like a drop of water in a bucket of water. I'm still the drop, but I'm also all the water in the bucket." That's sarvastarka samadhi. Nirvastarka samadhi is total Oneness.
PUL
d

This has been a great discussion with great comments and observations from everyone.  Thanks for starting it, Doc.  I notice you saved the easy question (sic) for just recently.  Why would anyone choose to come back to earth?  [See adjusted question later.]

Lust?  Sex?  A few drinks, or a few drinks to many?  Perhaps, the subtle blending of flavor in a great glass of wine? A delicious meal?  Maybe a piece of Lil LaVica’s banana cream pie? – it’s unbeatable!

Then there’s sheer joy of physical action!  Skiing down a steep mountain with fresh powder with the thrill of speed and the pleasure of motion (and hopefully some grace but that’s not required).  The beauty of the sun in the blue sky giving the day a brilliant hue against the backdrop of rugged pine covered mountains.  Then end the day with the beauty of the sunset so awesome that it makes you want to cry.

Then there’s the joy of watching your child take his or her first steps; of watching him in a school play; of nervous excitement of her going on her first date.  I have to add the enjoyment of a great book and the delight taken in a moving poem.  Life’s joys are ineffable.    

Earth is an attractive place.  I don’t think a child abuser comes back with the intent to abuse others but probably comes with the hope of learning about love.  No one is born a child abuser but most of them were abused as children themselves.  .  It’s important to look at each case individually – there are different forms and different causes of child abuse.  Some are: mental incapacity to learn parenting skills, an act of rage or serial acts of it; an act of stupidity such as leaving your child in the locked car on a hot day while you either run an errand or go have a drink or two.  On a more serious level there can be mental health diagnoses ranging from ASPD to the psychotic.  Fortunately most abused children don’t go on to be abusers.

The question changes to: why would someone come back to be abused as a child?   Well, most overcome their suffering and adversity and go on to experience some of the things mentioned above.  Some fail and perpetuate the syndrome.  

I’ve always felt the earth as learning experience explanation seems to pat and not completely satisfying.  However, after thinking about Doc’s post I have to conclude that it offers some explanation.  Maybe the opportunity to try and overcome the impediments of life (and we all face impediments) is too great a chance to turn down.  Another thought is that maybe it’s harder to resolve issues in the spiritual realm and the rough edginess of earthly existence provides a better opportunity.

I guess I don't really have an answer but there are a lot of possibilities to consider.  I just noticed Dave's post and he, like everyone else, has given me more to think about.  Like I said great discussion!

Rob

thanks Dave and Kathy, seems like perfect self expression from you two and some very useful thoughts. I like it.

I would like to talk to Doc briefly of a few retrievals I did of criminals because it appears you are struggling with a conflict that something quite unfair or illogical is going on in our universe.  also a part of me studies forensics shows and I believe this part of me works these areas that I'm not completely privy to consciously; sort of like an apprentice in the justice system, maybe a future life in the making. to support my conjectures, a friend of mine is already planning a future dive he did say...he seems to be more aware than myself of spiritual matters, but I've met him obe enough to believe in him and what he says as very trustworthy.

briefly, there is always an agreement between perpetrator and victim, yet this cannot be revealed in C1 until after the deed, or lesson incurred is all over with, otherwise you are correct, nobody would sacrifice themself on the alter of the earth plane to endure suffering, pain, illness, rape and pillage, murder, etc.

Earth must remain for now an experiment and a land of opportunity for soul growth and overcoming those challenges but there are definetely perks here such as the generation of love, the good times ideally outnumber the not so good times.

as to the retrieval of the crooked ones, and we are all a little crooked or we could hardly be coming to a perfected planet; we'd simply not fit in, and as they say, the good die young.

I retrieved a rapist amid many guides standing by to assist me if need be. As I was engaged with retrieving him I was receiving info about how he thought all the while. I had to understand him first before I could accomplish what I'd come there for.

Rape is not a sexual crime I learned, but a an issue with his feelings of helplessness due to his upbringing. His mother I learned had made him feel that he was not manly and so this led to his crimes to prove he had control over women and was indeed proving to himself that his mother was wrong. I submit this to show that a study of the criminal mind is necessary for retrieval in these kinds of cases. just putting them in jail does little to reform society and sometimes they do succeed in getting good counseling.
once I as the retriever could see how his mind ticked my fear was subsiding so that I could understand and bring PUL into the situation which caused the successful retrieval.
my guides instructed me simply to agree with him that he was in control and that he was a man and not the weakling he had been led to believe by his mother, a very prominent person in his life. he had carried his programming over from childhood.

it seems that our programming would start in childhood and therefore it is with the children that we can build a better society so that they are not raised with the wrong ideas. I too accepted my mother's opinion that I was not supposed to be born, therefore I was in the way. I had the challenge of learning to love myself despite I was being told I was not lovable. One tends to obsorb ideas as a child, and even mature people accept fallacious collective ideas as fact. and so we can go crooked from that standpoint, and sometimes other lives will infiltrate, yet i hardly believe that any karma is set in stone to be played out as we are not robots here and there's so much assistance on the other side, if we could but just bring ourselves to ask, from a kneeling posture for what is readily available, even though we are a godless society right now, love never entirely disappears.

so we are not going to solve the worlds problems on a board. but one by one as retrievers reaching for understanding we can do our part.

love, alysia

As mentioned in the dream forum, I encountered my (negative?)-ego as a separate entity from my creative self.  It would make an unearthly growl at me because I called it "Super EGO" like it hated the name.  That is a good sign that my "creator-self, who is typing at this moment" is now greatly unimpeeded by selfishness and pointless earth games that hindered me in the past.   :)

I will explore this person in greater detail tonight if possible.  I just got the idea that I can learn more from him.

Good question Matthew and great replies.  Rob, I agree the world is a beautiful place and those moments with loved ones are truly beyond any words.

I do think we have a choice through free-will whether we choose to be good or bad (basically) I reckon once we are born into Earth we do forget why we came.  Our extraversion spirits have been condensed into a small seed and have the mesmerising influence of gravity and even the Moon to contend with - everything becomes dreamy and vague.

This is why attaining spiritual knowledge is important because it is to awaken (not change merely awaken) one out of the cloud of Maya.  (someone made a good post on Maya here)   I do believe hypnosis (contrary to the term) is a way to awaken one out of this dream world.  After reading Dave's website I believe Dave is a leader in this field.

The reason why we come in the first place?  I think to have a good look at ourselves at what we have become through our past life experiences.  And I think God wants us to come to him willingly, we need within ourselves to make this choice,  our relationship with God is not forced it comes through free-will and that is the highest compliment we may give to God, I think.  

The experiences we learn in Earth and our choices grows our spirits so much and if we grow in the physical we can imagine how much we grow in the spirit.  

I think people who make the wrong choices (the baddies that is) have been easily influenced into complatency and they will find their path back to God will take much longer.

Sorry about going off on this again.  I woke up in the middle of the night realizing that in my previous post on child abuse that I had left out a few key points.  I’m used child abuse as my example because I think it’s worse than murder or drug addiction.  From a judge’s point of view a child abuse case and the decision to remove a child from the family is the hardest type of case a judge can have.  It’s important to recognize that each person and each case is unique with it’s own particular circumstances.  Generalizing is not helpful to understanding why something happens to a single individual.  Anyway, here are some additional points I left out.

First, while I said most abused kids overcome the adversity that’s not to say that they aren’t damaged in some way.  Overcoming the adversity however allows them to lead normal lives perhaps in a better stronger way than they would have without the abuse.  However, that doesn’t explain the kids that end up dead.  In books dealing with reincarnation we see the explanation that an entity may choose to reincarnate into such a situation for the purpose of teaching the parent or abuser about love or life.  I suspect that when that parent is in jail for a long number of years they go through their own version of hell and perhaps make some atonement.  This makes me wonder whether earth for some people isn’t in fact a belief system hell and that while here they may well see some light and move on to a better state.

Second, there are the kids that go from bad circumstances to worse ones.  Removing a kid from an abusive situation into a more abusive foster care situation happens but that is quite rare.  We read about these cases because the media picks up on them instead of the cases where a child is successfully returned to his or her family or placed for adoption.  I can only assume the choice to go through this type of life deals with atonement for that person or learning a lesson.  I also note that it’s possible that it’s possible for even this type of abuser to learn and grow and overcome the cycle of abuse.  

Third, there are abused kids that never get out of the situation and go on to commit violent crimes or become abusers themselves.  In jail child abusers are in turn abused and considered the lowest form of life (along with rapists).  Often these inmates have to be isolated from others for their own protection.  Such isolation amounts to being locked up 23 hours a day.  Today’s prisons are abusive institutions themselves.  Perhaps these are the losers that fail to learn whatever lessons they came here for.  But the way our society treats them doesn’t reflect well on the rest of us either – often enough we find that such a “low life” person was not only abused as a child but that the state failed to intervene in the case and the abused child was in and mostly out of various interventions any number of times.  This person in many ways is a failure of our larger social system to detect and resolve abusive situations in the first place.  If there is a karmic lesson for the abused person in this, there is also a karmic lesson for society as a whole.

Finally, I’ve made my points from the point of view of an earthbound person trying to explain why things happen the way they do.  I strongly think that we’ll not understand the issue of why someone chooses to come to earth in horrid circumstances unless we look at it from the point of view of the spiritual side of things.  Our religious traditions tell us that there is a higher purpose that is served even though we don’t understand it.  Not a satisfactory explanation but perhaps there is some truth in it.  

I apologize for going off on this lengthy tangent.  I do think there’s more going on than we’re aware of.  Each individual life on earth is exploring his or her own unique set of experiences.  In our own ways we’re all experiencing life (which is good) and we’re struggling to grow, develop and expand our own understandings of existence and love.  Regardless of circumstances we all have that spark of light, however dim it may be, that reflects our source.  Ultimately life is a divine dance of infinite possibilities and I think we will find it revolves around love – we just have to get there.

Amazing to me is that I tend to agree with just about everything that everyone’s written here.  Love - Rob

Greetings Rob

You wrote a very moving post and it is all very well saying; choose between good and bad and that is it problem solved when the reality is at grassroots stuck in a cycle of abuse and mis-treatment.  Both the abused and the abuser are crying out for help.

I think you have addressed the problem with a senstivity and an understanding which is admirable. It is difficult to understand why one would choose to be in a situation of abuse or choose to become an abuser (as Matthew pointed out in the beginning of this thread) In the understanding; an abused child overcomes the adversity and infact becomes stronger through it plus the reincarnation explanation for both the abused and abuser to learn love is a truth.

It is said unfortunately pain and hurt is the only way one learns deeply because if one had a constant tap of love and light and joy and happiness one would become complacent and not seek any higher.

But child abuse is horrific; it is a bitter pill to swallow in every society and surely this cycle may and must be broken out of.  Surely it is wrong to say oh they learning a lesson and tough takkies to them.  No, I agree Rob it is the value society places upon its citizens and how society cares for it's young, old and mentally disturbed.

Prisons, although do give time for reflection, cannot be of much help for an abuser because immediately they feel cast aside, locked away and on top of their mental problems they have to cope with this sigma plus life inside prison which surely creates even more of a mental problem.

And maybe now we should say; it is not a spiritual truth to become a child abuser it is a mental problem? And with this comes the question is the abuser being allowed to be used by unseen influences (but we won't go into that now because this needs to be defined further)  But if a person who is an abuser has a mental problem from passed unsolved issues the clearing up of these unsolved issues will lead him/her into a better frame of mind.

How does society and the law tackle this?  It is a long road but I would suggest each person who is found guilty of child abuse (or any other crime rape etc) should be put into the professional hands of an hypnotherapist who will take the person into regression to the cause of the blockage and breakdown of that person's mental health (thanks Dave for this clarity)  Prison's should be changed into 'resting rooms' and here guidance through creative stimulation should be given -i think learning astrology could be a positive start for someone to feel not outside of the world but part of the world - but mainly rest and positive motivation should be given.  Here the whole identity of prison will change into a 'spa' attitude rather.

People in society can help by recognising any abuse which is going on around them - offer friendship to the abused and lead them to the law which has has made the necessary changes and is ready to help in a compassionate manner and get to the root of the problem with professional psychologist instead of casting the problem aside.

Well, I am not qualified in suggesting this but if I was President I would do this and hope they do.

Your comments and others will be welcome Rob.

My respects to you.
Caryn



 

Hi Caryn,

Thanks for you thoughtful comments.  Something set me off on the question of why someone would choose to come back to a life of abuse or other bad things.  The more I think about it I realize I have no answer to that question and that frustrates me.

Rob

Hi Rob and everyone. I hope we can talk frankly at least I think we can.

these are difficult subjects but we think about it nonetheless. and thank u again for your encouraging words to me Rob.
I believe we can solve a lot of problems of society with crooks and rapists, etc, a great percentage of crimes by going back to family values where the caretaker in the family is perhaps a grandmother, instead of putting her into a resthome.  getting off track... :P what I mean is not all abused children will be abusers, but the less that children are abused the better chance they have of contributing whatever their unique gift to society is, as they won't be carrying around a chip on their shoulder, so they can concentrate on their school and work better.

but maybe forums like these can help? where people can gain some more awareness?

I can hope for that, that at least we started to teach a child to ask for help and this does help that they know they will finally be listened to. then the problem is the vigilantees spring up and start ripping children out of homes left and right for the wrong reasons..so sigh....I think more prayer is good.

I knew a pervert once. the problem was where he came from in certain southern sectors  molestation of children was happening more than it wasn't and so the general consensus was to keep it hidden instead of bring it to the public awareness.things are changing though.   also he had it worked out in his mind that he himself was as innocent as a child, and attracted to that innocense to usurp it, join with it, rather than be a guidance factor to the child, and this is distortion or perversion of mental area. by identifying, by loving the victim in distorted fashion.
Jeffrey D. the same, by eating the victim, he claimed to be giving them eternal life.

you see the sickness is spiritual too. but we have to be able to look at them closely, what they are thinking and then we can straighten it out, but so few of us are really good psychologists who also believe in god. which to have such a belief, to me, just means we have to believe that good will prevail in the long run, and hopefully the short run if we pray hard enough.

Hi

Alysia you are so right it is a spiritual sickness.  A mental sickness which penerates into the spirit.  Talking openly about social problems can only help and believing in the power of prayer.  Also praying for people who work with these social problems on a daily basis; let us pray for them to have the wisdom, the strength and may they be comforted knowing they are making a difference.  Let us also do our bit to help the social workers by becoming social workers ourselves.

By God's will.

A thought just occured to me on this subject.  I have real issues with the idea that  there are definite rules for how everyone's incarnation(s) work.  I wonder if we don't have a choice of "planned life" or sort of a reincarnational grab-bag...dive in and see what you get.  Or maybe we get to design our lives only under certain circumstances...a specific lesson we need/want to learn, or we really screwed up (or were screwed over) in a previous life.  Maybe newer souls just have to take what they can get, because they either aren't allowed to make choices yet (not having, say, the experience and maturity to do so) or just haven't learned how.  After a while, several incarnations, or more time "over there" maturing, maybe we learn how to lay out a life plan, but it's an acquired skill.  Obviously those who didn't know how to pick a "good life" would be more likely to end up in ugly circumstances, sort of like foot soldiers, who if they survive may get to be generals behind the lines.  Or they may re-up half a dozen times and never go beyond corporal.

Or not, but it fits the question.

Hi Cricket :) good questions and I don't have answers of any great merit but some thoughts off the top..that the foot soldiers are very important to the general, else he couldn't be a general, so it's like an equal situation. I'm like a choir person in other words, without the choir, the soloist is pretty dull. I see in my mind life planners on the other side, but they are only in suggestion capacity and that life here is an experiment on each part. u really can't own your own soul if there's coercement on the part of the planners towards that.

but thinking outside of linear time and now I believe both are realities, linear time marching in order and another dimension where every life is happening at once like a huge wave of consciousness units connected to each other and forgetting this connection to make their own unique design of the snowflake pattern through the experiences and choices.
then I see these other beings higher evolved, the overseers who have nothing better all day than to watch all of us experimenting and I hear them saying OMYGOD! now what are they doing?
send reinforcements quickly! they're setting off the atom bomb!

another thought: if thinking in terms of linear time and inbetween life planning stages we can view this image if it helps:
TV was invented first on the other side before it got here. so theres all these monitors and TV's and they set you down to have you look at images of your life to be by flipping through the channels. each channel will show a different possibility for that life and you pick the channel finally deciding which movie you want.
then u get a choice whether to dive in immediately or go talk about it some more.

i got this from a friend of mine who said he came back too soon, too eager to get started he said! he was the most innocent of hard knocks person I'd ever met so I believed him.
along these lines of everything happening at once, Hitler won the war and all of that progression is playing itself out in another dimension of time. one thing is for sure, although he might have made it to the top, life is designed in this dimension that after reaching the top, there's nowhere to go but down insofar as dictators are concerned.

I hear you when you say you have a problem with definite rules for how it works, same here, thats why we come back as pagans and hippies, etc. hey, check out this new image I found..hee hee
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v323/spiritvideo/Alysia/myspace2/runroom.gif

its natural to want to break out of the room, so your idea of the grab bag and my idea of the experiment is like the same idea.  I think we can become better planners young and old when we start noticing other people around us and start planning for the highest good instead of just what we want, yet the planners will be the first to say "do what u want then come on back and tell us what happened."

that the foot soldiers are very important to the general, else he couldn't be a general

Which makes perfect sense to me, but doesn't align real well with the "everyone gets to design their life" theory, or any theory of fairness in the short run.  I suspect that the whole thing evens out over time, but that it's such an incredible amount of time that even those who think of "karma" as over lifetimes can't really grasp it.  If you get "good" five lives out of ten, and "bad" the other five, it's fair, all right, but if it's the first five that are bad, it sure doesn't seem like it in the short view.

And it's always possible that it isn't always entirely fair...nice to think it is, but we don't totally know that.  Maybe some folks just luck into a somewhat easier time of it.  I'd like to think it all evens out in the end, but I have no proof.

Hi Cricket maybe you work somewhere in the justice realm? seems something has occurred for you that is not fair.

the best I can give forth here is that there is two parts to the mind, the unconscious intentions for incarnating, and the conscious C1 mind which goes about the daily routine until the unconscious is becoming known.

There are many who don't get a chance to plan their lives at first, they would be swept up in life, we are not all equally the same vibration, the same age, so to speak, but we all have the same opportunities to learn and we are all loved equally by something which allowed us to become.

we all go through learning phases. for me learning to get into the now moment and appreciate whatever was there was an important thing to do, and it leads to an awakening of one's intentions for incarnating my opinion.
the issue of what's fair and what's not fair boils down to a realization that we are responsible for what we feel, and that another cannot tell you how you will feel or react in any situation. then u know being shafted is quite impossible unless you're allowing that to happen by being unconscious that it could happen.

this not going to make sense to you I know. :-X  but even unfair situations can be turned around and seen from another perspective that it led to a positive situation occurring for the greater good.

we can get off the wheel, this I know is possible. its just a decision of accepting the consequences of that decision whatever that turns out to be. a willingness to be wrong possibly and a willingness at the same time to change my mind with further information coming in. we are constantly counseling each other on the other side, so there's hope!

I like the image of diving in that several people have used.  Maybe things aren’t all that pre-planned.  Maybe some are so intent to get back here they dispense with planning and take what they get.  If we have choice, why would anyone come back to an abusive situation?

We have rationality and choice but other factors are present.  For example, in physical life we largely act our impulses and go along with our conditioning.  We learn by cause and effect – karma.  We are attracted to people and situations who are similar to or resonate with us – like attracts like.

Maybe our inner vibration, nature, impulse or essence brings us back to certain types of experience.  All of us for whatever reason are attracted to the earth plane but the reasons for or the needs served by that attraction are personal and unique to each of us.

I wonder if the nature of consciousness isn’t to experience itself?  If we start at a point of balance, one experience will create an imbalance.  We go on from there having more and more experiences as we explore our own natures and seek to ultimately regain that initial balance.  

In the meantime, we’re just dancing along life’s fiery rim – that’s paraphrased from an old Sufi poem.

I like your thoughts Rob and I think thats part of being part of a forum like this that we lead each other into more thoughts..

you talk about the balance we come back for, that maybe one thing to look for. a lot of folks who work in the justice system are those kind of moderator spirits holding those scales in their souls.
I can only speak personally if I want to be heard..so here goes. I came in as the emotional type, probably too right brained artistic. quite out of balance with the left side of logic, mental areas. the whole idea from the pov of my guides was to get balanced the mental conception to the emotional abstract area, or we can call it the subconscious and conscious area, or even we can take Monroe's hemisphere halves and put them together for the balance idea.
I think I'm in balance these days sufficient to my perception. what I wanted to talk about is we all have different reason for diving in. after writing my book about some roadsigns I followed for self discovery, and here again, you're right, god is discovering himself/herself here on this planet, is a good way to put it, the eye viewing the eye.

I came in to retrieve someone in my family was on the wrong road. I know this now, but didn't comprehend my mission until many years after it was accomplished. It was about not giving up on this person. might have been stubborness on my part but since it turned out so well I get to take the credit for setting him right, as indeed it was him that told me I was successful, this through love, unconditional, obes, and C1 behavior. speaking of justice and balance, something like that happened in the heart area of both of us.
since then I've seen all you need to do here is help one person to be assured a safe return to focus 27, the park, where more freedom of expression exists, say than on the lower bst's.

so then I read ACIM which informed me the only thing that matters around here is our relationships..we get on the other side, and right away we're trying to mend what we left undone on the surface of the planet.

thats why I think if we take care of what's in front of us, the people in our lives are the people we've been waiting to meet all our lives, especially uncle jack or that person you thought you married by mistake. none of it is a mistake after you see the overview, it was just what you needed although you thought it wasn't what you wanted.

I think we come in with a set of probable circumstances known as intentions or plans. we can get off track too. I was gonna live a life with drugs and a helper interrupted my plan (thank god) he said it wasn't in my intentions to do that.
Seemed like a miracle at the time that I didn't want drugs anymore after that.

I have strange dreams that in two years I will spy a toothbrush laying on the counter that I will have purchased on sale.
two years later I see the package in a new house that I saw in my dream, the same package the same bathroom and when dreampt, I was in another state, another house with no plans to move to this particular state.

so I can see that a part of me is drawing the future based on known factors of my character and my habits:
1) this part of me knew that I can't resist a good sale.
2) I would move to a part of the united states where the property is so cheap it's almost free.
3) the reason I would move was for financial reasons, so I wouldn't have to work and could write a book
4) some guides in order to make this happen for me told me the price I would have to sell my current property for in order to move and write this book in another state where the property was affordable. so we have helpers, I'm not the only one who has helpers.
5) the toothbrushes would be found in this other state..my higher self knew once I saw the sign "family Dollar stores" my brakes would be squealing...sigh....somebody reads me well...must be me, yet my unconsciousness part of me, the higher self we could call it.

so we might ask about destiny, whether it's real, and how silly to say it was destiny I pick up some toothbrushes 2 years from now. I gave myself this dream I think just to get myself thinking about destiny and how much freedom I really have about that in terms of the way I act and the things I'm in the habit of doing.
I vasilate between feast and famine type balancing thoughts...limit and unlimited thoughts..I think we all do.
I think our lives only change for the better to work on our thoughts and feelings, but not on another person's thoughts and feelings as right or wrong.
then we take what we've learned to the other side where it's less of a struggle to live and be happy, but also less of opportunity to get our characters balanced and strong. basically, unconditionally loving is what I mean.

Hi Cricket maybe you work somewhere in the justice realm? seems something has occurred for you that is not fair

Something has happened to everyone that isn't fair, I expect.  I'm probably about in the middle overall life fairness-wise.  I've been screwed by circumstances a few times, got way luckier than I deserved a few other times.  However, my situation isn't really relevant, being sort of in that middle "average" fairness arena.   Wasn't born into wealth I didn't do anything to earn, but wasn't born a deaf and blind infant in a Calcutta slum, either.  And I never thought things were necessarily guaranteed fair to begin with.  

However, when anyone brings up abused children or others with very rough lives, and reincarnation, there always seems to be a background theme of fairness...I've seen way too much unfairness, in both directions  to think that "fairness" is a natural law like the conservation of matter and energy or something.  And while decrying the unfairness of abuse, we also have to remember that being born into a life with no worries ever isn't fair either. If there is "fairness" (and perhaps we don't know nearly enough to even know what that really is), it could stretch across lifetimes, so that any given persons life, or last six lives, might look extremely unfair, once again in either direction, to an observer without that millenial vantage point.  Not a problem for me, as I said, I don't necessarily hold fairness as a requirement, but seems to be a huge problem for many when discussing reincarnation or where we end up in the afterlife.

A thought just occured to me that we could also get to pick a life "from a hat", as it were, and then are given the opportunity to play with planning it to the best degree possible, given the lot we threw.  So everyone has an equal chance of a screwed up life, or vice versa, but then get to try to prove we can do something with it.  And some folks maybe can't, and end up overwhelmed and either fall apart, or become abusers or whatever.

Way too many options to even try to guess.

I went to a mentor for a look at past lives once and related to a few things she said. she said I had lived a life where I had everything I needed, was perhaps spoiled and rich, lots of leisure time, beauty, etc...castle to live in whatever. just didn't cut it for me. came back to focus highly displeased with myself. must have not really helped anybody out that time. came back as a nurse (all this probably not linear time) attending the sick in hospitals..was told many a patient was soothed by the way I wiped their brow as they slept and this helped them deal with their pain, then there must have been a food shortage..she said I starved to death slowly as I was giving my food away to them.

these lives I do relate to as I'm so much into giving everything I own away even today, or I try to sell something like property for $50 below market and my kids rush in and say HEY! THATS OUR INHERITAGE! I get sheepish and concede I need watching!

looking at other lives these days is very enlightening to lead my thoughts somewhere out in the wild blue yonder...some of them were about learning how to die well. I don't think any of us know how to die well. I mean without all the fear around it.

we should not mourn at funerals, we should throw a party.
love, alysia

I am confused by Bruce Moen's explanation of the difference between being a parallel incarnation and simply being a member of a soul Disk.  Bruce explains the distinction this way:

"As an analogy, it is the difference between being a member of the same extended family, a cousin, an uncle, a fourth aunt twice removed, and being a clone of a member of the same family.  I/There can be thought of as a family with members simultaneously existing, while being physically on earth, nonphysically on other planets, within other dimensions, as I/There, etc."

On this analogy, reincarnation is a false doctrine if understood as the ongoing survival of the "I" that provides continuity to identity.  My clone may be identical to me in his personality and core desires, but he is not me in the sense of my survival.  Nor am I my uncle and aunt, etc.  Still, in the unity of the soul Disk "I" might experience the lives of other Disk members, as if "I" do live, have lived, or will live their lives.  Future lives might be generated from the Disk without my "I" experiencing them until those lives return to the Disk.  Does this in effect mean that once I've lived my earth life, I remain in my Disk indefinitely and my "soul Stuff" gets used to create a "relative" whose memories I get to experience once he returns to the Disk?

The soul Disk concept seems incompatible with the astral principle like attracts like.   Free will allows incarnating Disk members to make choices that reprogram their core desires. But if souls change their essence, will they not be drawn away from their current Disk to unite with newly likeminded souls?  Bruce Moen's understanding of the Disk seems less coherent than the group soul concept of Swedenborg and Classical Channeling, according to which participation in a group soul is based on the principle that like attracts like-minded but otherwise unrelated souls.   Neither view seems to allow the traditional sense of reincarnation.  

Ginny was a long-time member of this site, who seemed to find success with Bruce's mothod.  In one post, she announced her plan to try to experience life in the Disk.  Apparently, she never succeeded.   The very idea sounds ghastly and suffocating, even incoherent.   Can anyone articulate what such an existence might be like?  

And how can the Disk concept be reconciled with the discoveries of Swedenborg, Robert Bruce, and George Ritchiie that we experience memory loss as we progress through the astral territories?  How can it be reconciled with the insights of Robert Bruce and Swedenborg that time still exists in the astral realms in the sense of sequential changes of mental state, though its "rate of pasage" may be compressed?  :-(

Don

Berserk wrote:

"And how can the Disk concept be reconciled with the discoveries of Swedenborg, Robert Bruce, and George Ritchiie that we experience memory loss as we progress through the astral territories?  How can it be reconciled with the insights of Robert Bruce and Swedenborg that time still exists in the astral realms in the sense of sequential changes of mental state, though its "rate of pasage" may be compressed?"

I asked my father if during his NDE if he had any recollection of the life that he had just left. His response was that his memory of his former life was not recollected through the tunnel or in the light. He just was.

That's not to say that it isn't eventually recollected, but rather that his experience did not carry him far enough to reach that point.

Interesting thought though. Maybe it's not initially remembered thereby easing the initial transition.

Also, interestingly my father reported that he did have a sense of significant "time" passing as he traveled through the tunnel and into the light... although he said that his return trip back to his body took no time at all.

PUL,
Cosmic_Ambitions

I think I have found an answer to the memory loss/reincarnation conflict, and while I considered posting it on Don's ADC thread, this seems like as good a thread as any to take a shot at it.  Swedenborg, as I recall claimed that full memory can be restored at any time by God's grace, even after there had been considerable memory loss.  I think of it this way; in Alzheimer's disease, or after a stroke, profound memory loss is quite common on the earth plane.  Yet we are told, that after physical death, people afflicted with these diseases can communicate quite naturally to their loved ones, and have complete recall of their earthly lives.  How can this be?  Furthermore, we are told that the recall available in a "life review" is so detailed as to include virtually every event that an individual has ever experienced.  Again, how can this be, when we can not summon these memories while incarnate?

I believe the answer to this dillema is that we are, as ES describes in "Heaven and Hell," what our inner, true self focuses on.  As we focus, we may voluntarily, close off our access to these earthly memories, much as being immersed in an all consuming task here on earth may often involve us doing it at the expense of immediate memory or concern about other things.  In my theory then, the fact the Robert Bruce encounters beings who stutter and can't recall their earthly pasts in no way invalidates their ability to remember if their concentration were refocused on their earthly lives.

Free will most likely includes the ability to focus our essence or consciousness on new tasks and a new being, but also to revisit where we have come from.  Since the life review is present for many but not all people, it must be an important part of the divine plan, and available to all of us when it is needed either for our spiritual growth, or to help that of a loved one.  ES just about says as much in HH.  Divine grace need not be something that is unavailable to us; "ask and ye shall receive."  

Don, your scenario with memory loss implies an impasse or a profound loss as earthly memories are shed.  I have seen you mention the restoration of these memories by God's grace, but sort of brush it off as something ES mentions as a seemingly rare event.  I think this grace is the key event to reconcile the issues you cite from astral adepts (mostly Robert Bruce).

Unlike those who believe in total life planning and the "I" omniscently knowing and involved in reincarnating (choosing family, living situations, etc.), I believe that feel-good scenario is not born out by mystic experience.  

As to the existence of the disc, and life in the disc, it sounds like a difficult concept to me.  If each soul is continually striving toward love and a unity with the divine, then in my "monist" theosophy, eventually all concepts such as disc or soul group, or heavenly society (ES states that there are scores of various societies that people join in the hereafter going on the concept of like attracting like), must at some point vanish as we appreciate the unity of all things.  I don't think those who believe in the disc see life in it as being in some sort of suspended animation.  Rather, they see invisible cords of communication allowing individuals to continue to function as individual souls.  Thus experiencing life in a disc need not be any different than one's current life, although one might be aware of the thoughts/experiences of other disc members simultaneously to one's own thoughts.

Matthew

remembering...memory..I'm reminded of a physics show where they showed on the brain itself a tiny line impressed on the tissue each time we learn something new.

aside from my brain which is going to turn into dirt someday :) I'm an ACIM student and teacher. we are all at the same time students and teachers of what we believe in, no matter the subject whether religion or science or economics, we teach what we need to learn.
the brain is a mere reflection of the mind which is eternal.

After I studied a year the ACIM material I was told to forget the material and go and live it, see if what it said was correct. so far it's been proven correct what it said. for my own experience of course.
one of the things it said is that all of us are in process of remembering who we are.

we always were since the beginning co creators with god. so if you see intuition, hunches, aha moments in this light, that you are remembering who you are it helps to cause you to not believe in separation ideas anymore, instead to feel your intrinsic oneness with god, all that is, and all become your brothers, all become your kin.

In our oneness there is nothing to fear anymore. fear is the opposite of love. we are love operating in a world of fear, in the act remembering that we are love and we are all one. too simple huh? works for me.  thank you for a great well put together post Doc. you should be paid :)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v323/spiritvideo/Alysia/myspace2/dovec.gif

Hi Matthew When i go into the spirit world,the one thing i dread is being told i have to reincarnate and im hoping it is choice as given the choice to reincarnate it would definetly be no to reiencarnate back to the earth plain.

I feel on this earth plain now that i must owe a lot of karma out from a previous life as nothing has ever gone right for me from day one on this earth plain,i know this sounds very negative but i have always tryed to think positive through my life,but the way i feel at the moment ,im to tired to come back down here and try all over again.

When i get to the spirit world i want to stay there were the real love is and peace,i would not want to leave that,but these are just my thoughts on reincarnation.

Love and God bless        Love Juditha

Hi Juditha I feel much the same way as you do, but I feel like you are needed here with the special gift that you give simply because this world is so lacking in unconditional love and you are learning this so it's difficult as you know and remember love and caring on the other side. I think it's an unconscious knowing and we come here to become conscious, like manifest what we know.
I saw many spirits on the other side once they get home they are saying, oh I see what I was doing now and I didn't do such a bad job after all, and I don't think you are doing badly at all from what I can see here!

keep up the good work. A lot of people respect you here. love, alysia :)

betson wrote on Jan 14^th, 2007 at 10:41am:

Steve E, You said that Latin language is attracting you presently. I assume you're alluding to the possibility of a former life when you used Latin?   We talked here awhile back about our progression through our incarnations being in a sort of helix pattern, that at some times we may circle over material we've already lived through in order to ease or rectify any tensions left by memories related to stray previously-lived issues. My husband started speaking in Latin phrases a few years ago and then wrote a short story (that 'wrote itself,' he said) about a monk. After the story was written his interest in Latin subsided. In the final scene of it, the monk dies in a stable fire but not until after he got several horses out, (showing an understanding of horses my husband had never expressed before.) We feel he resolved some aspect of his / the monk's death by writing it. If we had tried to ignore his sudden fascination with those phrases, he would not have had the opportunity for his sense of resolution. So I'd say enjoy your new interest and see where it leads.  :) Bets

[This quote is from the first page.  The time right now is 1:11 AM with 1:12 comming very soon after.]
I never thought about it quite like that.  Putting rationalizaion asside, the Language looks like magic to me for a reason of sorts.  I have not locked onto the memories of a life yet, but to me there is nothing quite like this laguage.  The visual impression is sort of an artistic one; my best description of how it impacts me.  The words look artistic to me rather than conveying a phonetic-based idea.

Of interesting note, my Grandmother is Sicilian therefore my mother is to which is often related to Italy where the Roman Empire once had it's capital.  As many know, the Roman Empire widely adopted the language of Latin.  It is very possible that this was an intentional hint left for me by myself or by somebody else before I was born to help me get back on track, given that this has to do with a previous life sequence.

I did have quite a dream yesternight that is relevant to this discussion:
I am running from the police in a car pursuit of sorts.  I am a criminal and the police are chasing me in a automobile pursit. At the end of the pursuit, I assume I am busted and just give up without resistance and I even tell the police how much I desire to be punished. According to the dream, I get sent away to some sort of boot camp and actually died there from being pushed too hard;  I am not sure if I interpreted this part of the dream properly sense the info doesn't feel solid.

After this, I am meeting with an elderly lady who looks like a librarian of sorts. She seems to know me fairly well and I have a talk with here. This is roughly the conversation that we had.  The conversation was more telepathic than vocal:
Steve: *What a dream*  "Was that one of MY past lives?"
Unknown:  *That is correct...*
Steve:  *Weird*

Touching the lady, I get an unpleasant sensation but decide not to pass judgement over what I do not understand so I did not interpret her as hostile. I just took this as an ego bruiser to help me out in my present-day life.  This lady seemed to be speaking to me as the criminal personality, not my present personality.

With this dream in mind, some things in my life make more sense. For instance, I have bought a couple of Airsoft guns (that fire plastic pellets) since I have long had a liking for guns and sport shooting. Also, when I was about 11 years old, I really got attracted to playing shooting games like Doom which I still enjoy off and on today.  I still get the occasional urge to play a shooting game for fun.  In addition, my favorite shooter is Doom because I am shooting Demons instead of people which doesn't bother me.  
[smiley=vrolijk_26.gif]

In addition, I generally do not have bad dreams any more.

However, my aggression plays a defensive role in today's life rather than me showing off as a "tough guy". I would rather be a shield to the weak and bullied than rob banks and mug people so I am sure that I have redeemed myself now.  :)

Steve Σ