Ok, let me dabble in this discussion for a moment, there are a lot of good points being brought up and a ton of stuff to think about, and too much to respond to all of it (though with my long post it looks like I tried  )

Here is where I'm at in my current belief system (which is subject to change at anytime, restrictions may apply).  I believe that we preplan the bulk of our life, and make pre-arrangements and contracts with numerous people and even 'backup' plans.  I also believe that when we come down here we have complete free will.  So I can only conclude that 'contracts' and 'agreements' are also made on the fly while we are here.

So using this scenario, perhaps the murderer came down here to try to overcome these 'tendencies' and it was his original 'plan' to do so.  However, while down here he chose to invoke his free will and decided, 'I'm going to do this thing'.  I fully believe that everything happens for a reason, I do not believe in randomness.  So when his soul said, "Uh, hey guys...I guess I'm not going to overcome this tendancy - we need someone to go into an agreement to be the victim" then the girls soul may come forward and say "ok, part of my being here was to help this family 'wake up' and my original plan isn't working, and my backup plan if the first one failed was to be murdered - so I would like to volunteer to be his victim for the greater good"....and well you get the idea.

So it may not be that it was 'pre-arranged' before they were born but done on the fly because that's how things worked out.  I can't pretend to know what really happened at a soul level with these two, but it's just an idea.

Also, I wanted to say that how we think of things as a human (with our emotions and what not) and how we view things from a soul level are two completely different things.  Imagine viewing everything that happens on earth from a view of 100% love, and with the understanding that in the end everything is for the greater good and will be ok.  It's just not the same feeling as we have here with our anger, guilt, shame, jealousy, hate, etc.  It's like comparing apples and oranges.

I once had a lucid dream in which I died, and I actually went through the process of releasing from my body, I felt the 'pop' and the release from my current body....and the feeling that came over me was SPECTACULAR and while I was still aware of what concerned me as a human (how will my son be without his mom, will my mom be ok?)...in this form it just didn't matter because NONE OF THIS IS REAL.  It is truly a stage and we are the actors...so will we make the person acting as a murderer burn in hell?  What will that teach him? 

At a soul level - he is not branded as a murderer - he is a soul going through an Earth experience.  It's not like he goes back to the afterlife and starts trying to murder souls up there.  He may go through his life review with his guide, and may be very upset with himself for not doing what he meant to...and starts the process of trying to figure out how to break this cycle when he is on earth and comes up with a new life and situation that will finally get it through his head to change while he is here.

One more thing I wanted to add (would someone shut me up already?).  Why is there so much talk of anger and vengeance and punishment from God?  Why is he so angry?  Why are we suppose to fear him?  Why would he want to torture his children? Why do we keep putting human emotions on something that is so big and great.  My mom said that the day I was born she stopped believing that 100%.  Because she said, "When I looked at you for the first time, I thought no matter what she ever does I will always love her with all my heart and could never think of punishing her like sending her to hell..and if I could feel that type of love as a mere human how could the great God in all his infinite wisdom do that with his own children."

So finally to my point (she has one?), if you can view all situations from 100% love and compassion (play pretend for a moment) and I mean with every fiber in your body and soul for every single soul in existence (yes - I even mean Hitler and Osama), then you will begin to touch on the feeling and the way they view things from the otherside.

As a great man once said, We are more then our physical bodies.

Jenn

  Oh, to answer JG's question, "Where does the evil in humans come from??"  I would elaborate more on the concept of Love and UnLove....

  Cayce's Source(s) often talked about "self being the only sin" which i believe meant that everything negative we experience whether from receiving or from putting out, comes from believing in what i call the illusion of a separated Self.  A psychotic serial killer is a good but extreme example of someone who lacks entirely any feeling of or belief in any connection to anything outside of him/herself--they seem to feel very dissassociated from other around them.  At least from what i have read of such personalities, and how they explained their feelings, thoughts--their psychology.
  We see this in the world, and is coming more into light or in contrast since there is a raising or speeding up of vibrations overall in this galactic area, and we see more clearly that everything that creates destruction in the world, the corporations/world banks, the Osama's, the Bush's, the Hitlers, are functioning almost completely from a psychology of the Separated Self.

  This also ties into Love and UnLove, in fact another way to put it is that Self connected to all, the awareness of the connection, the belief in it, and importantly putting forth like you believe it, could be called Love whereas Unlove could be considered a lack of awareness of the All interconnection, the non-belief in it, and thus not putting it forth.   I somewhat disagree with Alysia in her other post (or maybe i would just put it differently), whereas i see the connection between Unlove and fear, i do not believe it is the same thing, though fear comes from UnLove.   

What i got from Bruce's books is that Love and Unlove (and all the symptoms of Unlove) are not polar opposites but rather just an absence of Love energy which as Alysia said earlier Love is the very creative fiat from which all things (and all beliefs, ideas, etc) sprang.  I think ultimately that even this absence of Love, is really an illusion since we can never get away from the fact that all things are connected at the most intrinsic energy levels--this is Love in other words, Creation is Love... Oops, lol, i'm dissecting it again...mentally masturbating.

Another thing which points to Love being the only true reality, is that is the only thing which is eternal whereas many of our creations which are materially and/or negatively based eventually has their patterns of vibrations break back down into that Raw consciousness from which all is formed--not that energy is destroyed, but that which individuates that energy is lost...?

JG wrote: Where does the evil in humans come from??

Evil acts such as murder I put down to a lack of empathy of the individual.  They cannot identify with a person’s anguish or pain and feel no remorse that their actions may cause.  It’s no coincidence that empathy is the backbone of all the world religions, and it is empathy that governs morality to a large extent.

However, Jkeyes raised an interesting point that I’ve been thinking about for some time – it’s my view that a lot of people who don’t commit unsocial acts only do so for fear of being caught.  Being empathetic may be something we aspire to, but it is also something many of us fail.

Just look at wars where there is a total breakdown of law and authority.  Humanity will wantonly loot, rape, kill, etc.  Even in the west where we like to pride ourselves on being more humane, western troops in Iraq are increasingly being accused of torturing people, and the scandal at Abu Ghraib is a good example to show people in trust being complicit with indecent acts all too easily when they think there will be no repercussions.

So, why do many disregard morality?  Saying both participants in a murder chose to experience these things just doesn’t ring true to me.  You may claim the soul chose to experience a murder, but I’m sure in most cases the bodies and minds of those murdered certainly didn’t.  This suggests denial of free will (the soul being evil to experience evil!) and also implies ethics and morality are purely physical world constructs and that good or evil don’t really exist. 

I understand what some of you are saying – to truly learn you have to experience things yourself, and in many respects I would agree wholeheartedly.  I can watch the news and see endless reports on people being murdered etc, and at some level I can be detached, but some things you don’t need to experience in order to learn.  I don’t need to kill someone in order to know it is wrong to kill.  I don’t need to torture or be tortured to understand inflicting pain on another is wrong.  Everyone inherently knows through empathy that some things are right or wrong, but whether they choose to act in a manner deemed befitting is down to free choice.

To summarise, evil comes from a lack of empathy and indifference to justice.  Where an individual has either empathy or a reverence to law and order it can prevent unsocial behaviour, but I fear with many of us it takes both.   

Meneleus.

If memory serves, it was learning the "knowledge of Good and Evil" (that is to say, passing judgement on the world that God created in humnan terms) that caused the Fall from Eden. This is a matter of placing our human judgement foremost, as opposed to being content with the way things are set up by God (or the Big Transpersonal Oneness, if you prefer). Bob, Marylin and Alysia have the right idea - that there is a purpose, a prearrangement, and essentially an agreement to be in this world in a manner that best meets our needs. How we got here and what we are doing it for is rarely visible.

Jesus told us that "these things must happen, but woe to him who does them", which kinda catches both sides of the story. The "must happen" is the part in which we have set matters up for a lesson, in concert with the others with whom we have some kind of karmic agreement, and the "woe" is how we learn to not repeat it.

An example, a woman came to me with severe pains, fibromyalgia plus rheumatoid arthritis, and asked,  "Why me? And why this pain?" A past life regression found her as an Indian girl playing in the Midwest a century ago. She was abducted, imprisoned in a barn, raped and tortured by a few men, and finally starved to death.

She carried an intense rage against them, not unreasonably, I figured, but the rage had maintained her connection to the pain of the event through her intense hatred and the need for justification of her judgement that the men were evil. So, in order to deal with the rage and to release the pain I asked her how she had come to have that experience, whether she had ever done it to anyone else. She was silent for a few moments, and then overcome with remorse (and a lot of denial), "Yes. But I didn't mean it. It was an accident." So, she had raped and murdered, experienced rape and murder, and through hatred had damned those who had done it to her, and clinging to the pain she had made this life uncomfortable as well, just as she had projected toward the others who had raped and murdered her.

Her lesson in living here seemed to be one of learning to be compassionate, forgiving, and to abandon the idea of evil, and replace it with an awareness of human frailty and the horrible urges that people feel that force them to do horrible things. Through her grasping at "evil" she drove herself out of Eden.

I suggest that there is neither "Good" nor "Evil", but just that some things work, and some things don't. What we're doing here in the Kindergarten world is learning to love in spite of all of this.

To ask "Why is there Good and Evil" seems to me to be the wrong question in the sense that it presupposes that those terms exist in their own right. Why we FEEL that there is Good or Evil seems to be more to the point, and I'd answer that it's because we forget to love.

dave

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Good point.  I tend to agree.  The Christian concept of "original sin" in my opinion has been proved by modern study of genetics which shows that some basic personality traits are passed on in the genes, including the instinct for revenge, etc.  Yes, we all have these traits dormant within us, but probably to a differing extent for each individual.  The state of the soul, as well as childhood experiences, circumstances in life, and so forth, can either bring out these primitive violent instincts or keep them suppressed.  One way to suppress them is to "struggle against the flesh" through the willpower of the spirit.  As Apostle Paul teaches, "all are sinners and fall short of the glory of God."  Basically, there is not anyone who is totally righteous, because we all have the evil inclinations lurking within us, and we are called to fight against those tendencies and try to become better people through developing the spiritual side of our being.

Freebird

Justin said:I think ultimately that even this absence of Love, is really an illusion since we can never get away from the fact that all things are connected at the most intrinsic energy levels-
_______

yes I believe this is true from my experience that the absence of love is an illusion we buy into. after reading ACIM which is about miracles, I went out to test it for many years. to test what was theory in the book for me. it held water. lol. it worked. ACIM said something about revealing love behind the illusion, or to quote part of the profound introduction: "this 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 be summed up very simply in this way: Nothing real can be threatened
Nothing unreal exists.
herein lies the peace of God.

yes, well, the idea then was to go forth and test it, then put the experience into my own words. then I started meeting up with all sorts of strange characters. lol. I had to find the love or reveal the love that I could not see, feel, or touch. felt like I almost got shot once for doing my little tests. lol. I was protected, or guided. the love is there. your nose must be exceedingly large to sniff it out, your eyes propped up with toothpicks so you keep them open, your ears have to learn to vibrate to heavy silence, your hands have to feel from a distance but the love is there, make no mistake. it makes the world go round and the first time I realized love survives death while unlove does not, was when hubby died. all I could remember was the love. while the "unreal" part of our relationship, the negative things, disappeared and ceased to exist.

then if you speak of all things being connected you're starting to get scientific. those connections are like holographic patterns of mind, we think of ourselves as separate beings when all it takes is a thought to connect us to another; then watch them pop up in your dream world, saying "you called?"  u mite say, I thought I was having a private thought but now that you're here let's chat.  this is the dawn of the future; get ready for mental telepathy to return to us. all will be known in the time it takes to think about it. it's exciting!

Hi JG-
To respond to your hypothetical question, recently one of my youngsters' husbands went off on a special needs grand-daughter. Her Mom turned him in and he's now in jail.

Family responses ranged from my wife's "I'd like to cut off his cojones", to her sisters' "I feel terrible that I didn't intervene" , the child's father (divorced) who already threatened to rid the planet of him if he ever touched either her or her Mom, and my feelings, that this dude is sick, angry, has low self esteem, and I'd prefer him to be elsewhere. Jail's OK. He got drunk, lost control, and committed mayhem. The kid's Mom has filed for divorce - Child Protective Services said that he could return to the family home OK, but that they'd remove all the children if he did. She got the picture.

Assuming that he survives being jailed, what he needs is psychotherapy. In his next life, which may come sooner than later, he'll get another chance, and hopefully, if he learns in this life, he'll do better. Meanwhile, because I occasionally do forensic counseling (usually with rape, abuse and molest victims), I just might wind up with him as a patient. If I can help him improve his attitude, then everyone will benefit, including him, and especially the other people in the world that might interact with him.

It's not quite as drastic as you suggested, JG, but this is a real-life incident. Emotionally, I'd really like to see him go elsewhere, and I'm not especially fussy as to how. If someone else helps ... well, that's not my department. "Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord." It ain't up to me to argue. But neither is it up to me to be the modus operandi.

dave