I have the suspicion that neither applies. If reincarnation is a valid concept then there has to be some payoff in returning to the corporeal body otherwise what would be the purpose? My own theory is that life, at the spiritual level, is not as glorious as we are made to believe; indeed, it could be more mundane and lacking in colour and in most of our known senses. It seems to me that this Garden of Eden of our hopes and dreams is this planet that we inhabit. Our main problem is that we do not recognise it. I would suspect that the purpose of physical senses is to enable us to enjoy and appreciate what we have but along with this we are endowed with the element of choice, possibly to make our lives more interesting and more valuable, if not, more complicated but, that same element of choice appears to be our Achilles Heel.

Interesting thoughts..

I think we can perhaps experience what we choose to experience there.  I know that astrally, I've experienced pleasurable sensations..so why not pain also?  I don't suppose there would be lasting effects to whatever brings the pain..such as the pain of a broken leg..in the here, would/could cause issues years down the road, whereas there, it wouldn't?

Hi Wonderful27,

wonderful27 wrote on Dec 19^th, 2006 at 6:44pm:


From my own explorations I haven't any doubt that we can experience physical pain in our afterlife existence.  Of course, as you say we don't actually have a physical body there so how could this be possible.  Within nonphysical reality thoughts can be things.  If I am unaware of my death, perhaps due to a sudden unexpected death or other reason, my normal expectation of being in my physical body can create what I will experience as a physical body.  The expectation or memory of physical pain can create that pain within my experience.  The pain is not actually being experienced in physical reality by a physical body, but from the perspective of the person experiencing the pain it feels the same.

In my first book, Voyages Into the Unknown, I recounted the experience of retrieving an aspect of self, Joshua, from a previous lifetime.  I/Joshua was trapped within a reality in which I/he was experiencing the pain of the infection in my/his liver, from a spear wound, that killed me.  The pain had been so intense at the time of death it was all I/Joshua had all of my attention focused on as I/he died.  I/Joshua was stuck after a death by continuously experiencing the pain at that death that occurred thousands of years ago.  As readers of that story know in my present lifetime I developed a medical condition in my liver that was caused by I/Joshua being stuck in that state.  After retrieving that aspect of myself, over a period of several years, that condition is no longer a problem.

It's experiences like these that drive me to continue teaching the Art of Retrieval.  There are many of our fellow human beings stuck after death in simply awful conditions.  And many will remain stuck until one of us provides the assistance necessary retrieve them so that healing can begin.

Bruce

I'm with you, wonderful27. The more I hear of this stuff, the more leery I become of dying. It truly does sound like a jungle in there. What surprises me is that since people have been dying forever, I'd like to think the afterlife would be more highly organized. But getting stuck in pain for hundreds of years? Until some passerby happens to stumble upon me?  Yikes!

In regressions people generally report that when they die their pain ceases and they feel great. BUT-

Bruce cites a case of carrying pain along for a few lifetimes. This kind of thing seems to be quite common, and is especially common when people also carry guilt, blame, anger or other strong emotion (including desire with some issues of attachments) - the emotion binds the pain so that both have to be released at one instant. As a past life worker I get lots of these, and they are essentially as Bruce recounted, just a matter of letting go.

My "worst case" example is a young woman with anxiety about death who insisted on going through the entirety of a cardiac infarct - pain in shoulders and arms, angine pectoris etc - the whole schmear. And then she was done with it. Meanwhile she put herself through a great deal of what seemed to her to be very real agony.

The uisual :"pain" reported by those without physical issues is sim[ply to recognize (1) the waste of their lifetime, (2) how badly they have acted in the face of PUL (3) recognition of themselves in those whom they had hurt and the sense of vilation of their own love. While these seem minor to us, when all you are is an opinion of yourself in the spirit world, they seem insurmountable catastrophes, and that motivates people into selecting "curative future lives" by carrying karma into their next incarnations to "teach themselves" etc. Usually we're awfully hard on ourselves at such times.

dave