It's not going to sound awfully consoling, but one way of squaring this issue is the view that it's ourselves that create the reality that causes such suffering.

At the level of ordinary life the issue is selfishness, ego, or inability to live through love. Specifically the grasping after selfish ends that it entails. Brought about by our separation from God or the true nature of mind, our higher self or the absolute. (choose according to your tradition) Which is our choice, and not enforced.

But free will means that having chosen separation we have to find our way back if that's what we want - and that's not so simple since as in the other thread the intense mental activity that's ultimately the result of the selfish ego fearing loss and death blocks the 'still small voice' that shows the way to live in love and tends to drive us deeper into delusion.

It's pretty clear that the vast majority of the suffering we experience flows from ego. Put another way - how can a society be anything but predatory when almost all its members are intent on getting ahead at the expense of others?

The unpleasantness that's not the result of this (some diseases, natural disasters etc) and which is apparently beyond our control is made much worse by our fear of death which amounts a failure to know or if we can't know to trust in the promise of our essential immortality.

This issue arises from the way we habitually mistake the ego (physical body and conscious mind - both subject to birth, old age, sickness and death) for self rather than the true or higher self or 'watcher' (soul in some traditions) that it's taught is immortal.

Even the apparently uncontrollable stuff and our total reality it is argued are the creation of the collective mind that comprises all the beings caught in this reality (samsara in Buddhism)  - that it's in a sense an imperfect creation precisely because it's not totally God's creation, and is based on selfishness rather than love.

It can be viewed as a learning experience (the more New Age view), or as a strategy for escape from delusion (the Buddhist view), but either way to get back to God (or to our true nature in Buddhist terms) essentially entails the death of ego or the end of selfish urges.

Which we mistakenly equate with true death (progress towards  dropping the ego feels much that way), when centuries of the enlightenment experience have shown that it is not.

As the ego is stripped away and we begin to live from love it starts to become clear that we in fact live in a blend of dimensions at once - that while the dog reality of the selfish view is realised if we choose to see the world through that lens and to live accordingly  - that equally when we start to live from love through our higher self we create a subtler but equally valid and much more pleasant reality.

This is not just a theoretical perspective but a totally practical one - when we start to live for others life really does change for the better - although it may take forms we might not previously have regarded as conducive to happiness. It's pretty counter intuitive given our conditioning to see things in selfish rule of the fittest terms. It's also the case that as we improve the way we live that residual karma may still be lurking around which can still cause us a lot of grief.

Even issues like illness can pretty convincingly be argued as emanating from karma or lack of wisdom in how we live, or from the way the consequences of our selfishness impact our health through the mind-body link.

So on suicide and having to re-live the lessons of life. Grace or whatever is there to help us back, but the one (almost) absolute seems to be that there's no cooking the books. We have little choice but to sort out our own mess.

Even that absolute seems to be own choice. We essentially end up split in this life - living as a selfish 'me' that does all sorts of harm - and are (following fading of the obscuration that left us unable to truly connect with our higher  self in life) confronted with this in the afterlife.

The need to unravel the resulting kinks in our psyche and/or the addictive quality (according to Robert Monroe) leads to an almost insurmountable urge to be reborn. Although Buddhism teaches that there are ways to transcend this - provided we have properly trained and our karma is not too severe.

http://www.thebigview.com/buddhism/

The greatest achievement is selflessness.
The greatest worth is self-mastery.
The greatest quality is seeking to serve others.
The greatest precept is continual awareness.
The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything.
The greatest action is not conforming with the worlds ways.
The greatest magic is transmuting the passions.
The greatest generosity is non-attachment.
The greatest goodness is a peaceful mind.
The greatest patience is humility.
The greatest effort is not concerned with results.
The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go.
The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances.

Atisha (11th century Tibetan Buddhist master)

It's nothing to do with what we think, more a matter of what we are or have become. The most basic Buddhist teaching on this is the 'Four Noble Truths': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths

Not too sure if such an intellectual sounding explanation can be of much help for what in a way is the universal angst of the human condition ....

I agree. That's why it is helpful to spend time in our lives on earth in meditation and finding our own connection to the universe. It is very easy to get lost in the rat race where our lives are dictated by ego urges to earn more money than our work colleagues and we are a slave to these 'wants'. This lifestyle creates a mentality of desperation that we always feel we are in competition with others. I do not believe we are in competition with others as we all have our own paths. They may be mapped out for us but we still have free will and free choice to determine our path. As far as being 'forced' to re-incarnate, the majority of sources that I trust say that noone can force us to do anything. The choice is yours. Remember that the perspective of your ego in the earth realm is quite different from that of your soul essence in realms of spirit. Where the ego is strong and fearful of moving on to the next realm that is how we have ghosts and stuck souls.

Hi Again,

The notion of God came up in the Seeker's post....quote:

.....on that site, Angie Fenmore's in particular is a very very Christian-oriented NDE.  at the end, God even shows her that the time of the Second Coming of Jesus is near!!!!  i refuse to believe that.  she describes God's voice "encompassed such ferocious anger that with one word it could destroy the universe."  umm, why would God be mad at the very thing he created?   it makes me wonder how much of the NDE experience is kind of "made up" to fit the beliefs of the experiencer.....

I think this is a really valid point you make and it is worth considering . It seems that when many people have an ecstatic experience they need to identify with it in the only way they know how - in human terms. Most religions have endorsed this because it gives them power, but in real terms, what is God? Indeed what is the sourse of this ecstatic feeling  so many of us have experienced? Is part of our consciousness that is suddenly tuned in to higher vibrational levels?  Do those existing at these profound levels live in this state all the time? By the way, I know that this state of supreme esctasy can be expereienced in NDE, OBEs or ordinary earthbound states. It's too simple to attribute everything to the human notion of God and I think it is a pity that people like Angie cannot take us further, higher, wider, and deeper than the limits of her Christian doctrine.

I'm  privileged to have moved into this state of esctasy on more than one occation so I do understand how when we want to discuss these wonders we are limited by language, nevertheless as you say Seeker, we should all be aware that our belief system does distort our reality.

love to all

lyn

Seeker- By the number of responses from a usually very literate group, you've obviously asked one of those embarrassingly pertinent questions that we all try to overlook. But I want to try it anyway.

As I drive down a highway, I tend to expect that even if there is a crack in the pavement, the road will continue on the other side. So I goto sleep with expectations of waking. Perhaps really big cracks like dying will be filled in with bridges - "afterlife experiences" that continue today's adventure into tomorrow. - That gives one basis for believing that more is coming, since all of us have generally been directly or indirectly exposed to soul retrieval or a similar type of spiritually oriented therapeutic activity.

But in the more general case, what you ask is very difficult to answer. I like Vajra's recitation of virtues (I'm gonna steal it to quote) - I have something of the same type over the WC in the rest room of my office where men are forced to look at it (hopefully while confining their business to the proper receptacle, rather than a shoe or the floor), and a few similar quotations on the opposite wall where ladies are equally lined up for reading as they contemplate what it is passing through their minds while otherwise passing that which remains unspoken. This is good. However, for those who look one layer deeper,  these are only useful guidelines, and not answers. It might all be smoke and mirrors, so that when the purple smoke runs out, we're done.

I'd like to  turn your attention to the physics of black holes for a moment - Maybe a fairly long moment, if you have patience.  Else, my apologies.

As we are generally aware, gravitational effects increase with the size of an object, and also as we approach an object of fixed size. The result is that an object must attain some minimum speed to overcome gravity and leap off the Earth into orbit. Black holes are big lumps of stuff that have so much gravitation that even the speed of light is insufficient to escape from them. There are also some relativistic effects that cause time to slow to a total dead stop at the edge of the "event horizon", which is the point at which gravitational effects overcome escaping light. Physicists Hawking and Penrose have argued that if we had a sufficiently large black hole, nearing the size of the universe, for example, we could fall into it and never know it. We'd just fall forever into what seemed to be an infinitely vast space.

This has caused a great deal of controversy, which is the heart of my remarks. The information by which we describe the relationships between objects can be measured and quantified, and is called "entropy". A nice paper (years ago) by a Bell Labs engineer Claude Shannon has even extended this connection to include the relationships between words, and other work (my own area) has extended it to ideas.

By definition, a relationship represents the structure of basic reality. There is nothing more abstract than the relationships by which space is defined. In fact, when we point to a place in the air, or in space as we look at the night sky, we describe it in terms of nearby objects. "There is a point in space about 10 cm above my desk, 2 cm to the right of my monitor, and a meter from the rear wall." Without nearby objects by which to define such places, we can't talk about them. They effectively have no basis to be viewed as "real".

In passing, we must also notice something called virtual particles. These are relationships that pop up in otherwise empty places, exist for a tiny moment and vanish. They define points along the relationships between objects by collecting all the entropy of that location into a single location, which appears for perhaps 10^-44 of a second as if it is another physical object, and then fades away. The collected result of this general tendency is thought to be the ultimate nature of both "dark matter" and "dark energy", which is the stuff that makes the universe expand.

So in a very realistic manner, empty space is filled with the relationships by which it defined. (This used to be called Mach's Principle, although the general cases Mach touted have been largely rejected.) Phrased concisely, space is filled with entropy.

So far so good. We have space, we have entropy by which it is defined, and we have big lumpy objects that get extremely massive and form black holes. But the black hole literally captures mass, since the core object that has all the gravity appears, from one perspective, to be receding from reality at the speed of light, and worse, it takes along with it all the space and time by which it was defined, leaving only a cold spot. (I doubt that this is exactly the same cold spot that we find in the ancient hallways of Blarney-on-the-Bog and other ancient castles, but they may be related.)

So this black hole forms, spacetime freezes and entropy is lost. With it we lose part of reality. The idea of a non-constant universe seems to be very upsetting to physicists. First, we don't know where it goes, second, we don't know where to go for a refill. 

Stephen Hawking stepped introduced a new idea to help save the universe, which is the notion of creation of reality by virtual particles. (This is where they crank up the purple smoke generators.) He suggested that a pair of ordinarily cancelling virtual particles, one positive and one negative, might be created on the edge of a black hole, and by virtue of one of the pair being trapped by the gravitation, they might be pulled apart. Thus, instead of cancellation, we suddenly have two new particles. The universe again starts to fill up.

Now, please turn your attention to the nature of the Hawking phenomenon. Notice that it occurs because of all the relationships that make up space. Ideas such as polarity, color forces of quarks, and so on, are nothing but ways to deal with entropy. In fact, matter is just a region in which the total amount of entropy is locally confined, so that what oozes out (arrowlike, not wormlike, Alysia) looks like the relationships of that location relative to other locations. Entropy is the collection of properties of matter, as well as what fills "empty" space. Gravitational and electrical fields are just patterns of the distribution of entropy of various kinds.

In exactly the same manner, our personal existences are patterns of entropy, patterns of relationships by which we are defined, and changes in relationships by which our activities are defined, and the relationships filling spaces between us and other of our kind. These have two properties of interest. First, they are rooted in Everything. Nothing is left out, nor can anything new be added, because everything can be reduced to relationships. Second, relationships are polar. That is, You relate to Me in a manner that is reciprocated by the way that I relate to You. We have to have both parts.

Now let's see what happens when I die. I take all my inner awareness and go into a sort of spacetime tunnel into the "Spirit World". In essence, there is a great similarity to a person's death and turning into a human black hole. That means that all my relationships are dragged in after me. What is left over is my "history", the memories that others have of me, the works that I have accomplished, the garbage that I generated, and the opinions of others. These focus on the place that I used to occupy, and through that space, they imply that I must still exist. However, since I have passed into an inaccessible place from which light seems not to emerge (with a few ghostly exceptions and meditative methods that bypass those limits), these relationships form a potential field of entropy, a collection of relationships by which my existence was defined, and by which it presently is recalled. These are rather like the virtual particles of Hawking's world.

In the Spirit World, I retain all of these potential relationships as well. They are the essence of my spiritual experiences and remain the essence of my identity. The Hindu calls them the "samskaras", or seeds, from which my karmas will later emerge. I usually summarize them as my "attitude", meaning the collection of my tendencies for formation of new relationships through future actions.

At this point we can see that there are two copies of the identity that once I claimed while alive. One definition is with me, as I roam otherwise empty space in spirit, and the other set remains in the world. These are similar to virtual particles of information, one of each polarity, one set in-looking, and the other set out-looking from my position. Further, these are tendencies carried by virtually everything in my universe that has time to form a relationship with me, or with my historical residues.

So when a couple of people get together and interact on a fundamental level, they can mix these tendencies together as they combine genetic material. That gives rise to new object to which all (or at least some) of my prior relationships attach. Since my existence is captured totally in my relationships and the manner in which I manipulate them, I am reborn.

And just for completeness' sake, on the universal level this suggests that when enough virtual particles get together, they too form a "white hole", an exceptionally rare event, which just might be one of the sources for "gamma ray bursters".

dave

Greetings,

This part of the reply, Seeker, is most related to Vajra's ideas, I suppose:
Your question leads to this possibility---
that we chose some difficult lessons for our souls in this life, because we were
thinking that the physical side of life is being more easily dealt with at this 'time.'
We look around and think it  all should be easier, but we are basing our values
on the material side, thinking that just because we have 'plenty,' we are in good
shape, so why should we suffer.
But the point we are being taught is that
soul's needs differ from our material needs
and we cannot rely on relative physical well-being
to satisfy the soul.
Also I'm wonderring if the term 'free will' must  not  mean 'free everything'
or even 'free every choice.'
It must mean something less ego-based. Will apparently has its limits, and maybe
Will is useful only within those limits, perhaps only related to ego and not to soul.

In other words, we've got a misunderstanding here instead of a true conflict.

Well, you are getting a variety of responses! 

Betson 

One way out of the 'purple smoke' or ultimate reality conundrum Dave mentions is the PUL experience during meditation. It's variously reported and differing terms are used but one description might be a sense of being space - with lots of light around, little sense of self and this incredible feeling of being love or being loved.

It's not even slightly intellectual or thought based, is wholly experiential and can be very convincing as an indicator that we're a lot more than the physical body and discursive mind. It tends to still a lot of the urge to try to intellectually make sense of it - it just is.

That's not to say that afterwards in weaker moments when the mind gets cranked up again that we can necessarily remain free of doubt or of the urge to try to validate it by intellectual means, but it's pretty effective.

It could I suppose be a purely physical/brain induced phenomenon (what if it turns out that enlightenment is just some sort of reboot of the physical brain??) but it doesn't feel that way...

Quote:



I'm not sure to what extent I've experienced this. I guess the odd fleeting moment, but no major "cosmic consciousness type experiences. Then again I am not a great meditator. I have experimented with a few types but am not not entirely convinced of the benefits or maybe not found the right method (I was most disillusioned by TM, for example, and consider it a bit of a scam to be honest - also the technique, which is not a "focus" type but more of a "drifting off" type probably did me more harm than good in my mental and physical state, I believe) . As has been said before, "meditation"seems to mean different things to different people, also while some will see it as essential, others think it is not at all, like Elizabeth Kubler Ross who used to say she'd had all sorts of mystical experience without ever sitting down and meditating, and while eating meat and drinking coffee and alcohol , and not being anything like the typical mystic or yogi..

By the way, how do you interpret these moments of bliss, or judge their significance?  Do you see it as a taste of what you would feel all the time if you were enlightened?