If life is worth of living and a gift of God.  Then why do our deceased loved ones have to leave us?  And if the hereafter is beautiful and peaceful then why can't we join them? Why do we have to be here in this life to learn since we can learn in the afterlife?  It is never too late to LEARN.  ???

Bravi

Bravi, it seems we must experience Earth vibrations for a while, before we can be ready to live fully in higher spheres.
A bit like the necessity to go through primary education to fit us to fully participate in adult life.
(not the best analogy, of course)

Our loved ones do not have to leave us because they have 'died' - they can walk with us everyday if they choose to.

Another reason is because there's usually a delay between thought, action, and effect in the physical, whereas without a body we manifest our thoughts immediately. Being physical gives us a chance to reconsider before causing an effect or reaction.

Rob

Dave,

I like what you say here.  Only thing is, I'm trying to reconcile it with other ideas from the New Age that have been spoken of here on the board.  If there is really no right or wrong, good or evil, but we are all one, and people doing bad things are "exploring their dark side," but may come to see the light, then we are here, incarnate to merely and simply be aware, the conscious spark of God knowing and being.

Elias, a channeled entity (oops I think Elias prefers to think of his appearances not as channelings but as a shared consciousness - my bad), has said to paraphrase  "you are not in school, you are not here to learn; you are here to experience."

I understand both schools of thought.  On the one hand, if we become more loving, and are of more service to others, then in one way of thinking, we become more in tune with your "symphony."   The other school of thought is  (and I bet Kyo might side with this one) that the symphony has dissonance in it and foul notes, but they make the music that much more interesting. 

The problem with the notion that we are hear to learn something, is that for most people, they will fear "getting it wrong."  That will allow guilt to fester when mistakes are made.  I for one, do believe that the evolution of the spirit is about constant learning, but I don't think that  it is about correcting mistakes, so much as the knowledge gained along the way.


Matthew

Good insight, Matthew. - However, I see no extreme "New Age" philosophy here. At a superficial level we are in a group of critters that develops progressive talents for homogeneity, using them for collective evolution. Hence the "social symphony" can be viewed as a pathway for growth that begins in our most distant past, exists now, and extends into the distant future of whatever we ultimately become. We see new members entering the group, older members being promoted, and a few sent back to start over. This recognition requires nothing but a momentary look at the direction of social and interpersonal progress.

This observation is simply recognition that chaos is inferior to coordination of resources, human and material. In this sense, life is a patterned development that leads isolated minds into a collective awareness, participatory support and mutual enjoyment. The problem of life is to learn how to do this before we make mistakes that cause us harm or death. At the same time, we learn to avoid mistakes, and eventually we are stuck with a level of tolerable risk that sort of condemns us to the mediocrity of a "safe" future, or the dangerous excitement of adventure.

New Age ideas enter when we seek the universal panacaea. My favorite perspective is to view the three aspects of an event, following the style of ancient rishis sitting in innumerable caves and on endless river banks in meditation. We have (a) the dynamic, (b) the substantives that are brought forward from the past and change by the dynamic as they are projected into the future, (c) the relationals that are superposed on the substantive locii to give them their character as they are altered.  That's all we need for a complete here-and-now analysis.

These three aspects correspond to the three classical yogas, karma yoga, bhakta yoga and jnana yoga, respectively. The way out of a life dominated by negatiove karma is to perfect our involvement with these three aspects in every event of our experience.  If we extract the yoga ideas and project them into the social milieu by seeking comparisons, we discover that that's how people actually perform in order to make their lives work.  Or, if we intellectually examine these concepts, we can see how inappriopriate actions are harmful to the actors.

Sour notes in life's symphony are acceptable when they are clearly part of growth. When they require me to carry a club for self defense, that's getting a bit too sour.  I'll take my philosophy elsewhere. For example, those rowdy bars, the ones where people would get punched out amidst the peanut shells on the floor, were fun in college. They lose their thrill as we age, and we eventually we prefer a "high class dining experience" (at least my wife does!) where we don't have the guy at the next table spilling his beer down our necks.

If we adopt the yoga philosophy, we go to the same places, but we alter attitude by redefining values deliberately. In the end, we have to do the same thing anyway.  That realization is, in my estimation, at the core of the New Age idea. After that it's all a matter of technique.

dave