ThankS Tim,
I would like to pin that down because the concept of a "career" of various developments and service rendered is often presented as antithetical to religious reincarnatiionism, in which postmortem existence is presented as a phase of preparation for future reincarnation until one escapes the rebirth cycle,


My main point to Kathy is that the various afterlife models are hard to evaluate experientially because many of the contradictions may be due to a confusion of astral states wtih lucid dream states and their conscious equivalent. Jesus advocates a more sophisticated version of the principle of like attracts like: e. g. "The measure you dish out to others will be dished out to you (Matthew 7:2)."  So his presumed model seems more compatible with the Monroe-Moen model than most models that seem to contradict it.  But Pat E's suggestion that the overall scheme may be far more complex than simplistic models can address may be correct. Based on astral experience, we may make simplistc models that shape future expectations and therefore impose limitations on future astral experience.  We just need better clarification of how bogus astral visions can be identified as lucid dreams, etc.

Don

"In this instance, I can only say - get lost.  You crossed a line, and nobody wants to hear that here."

Pure unconditional (get) lost. Well done, DocM.

Carl,

I second what Matthew and Rondele said.  Please take your mean personal attacks and disdainful sarcasm elsewhere.

Kathy

BobMonroe,

Just so we are clear, cultivating PUL does not mean that we take no action.  You imply that my telling Carl to get lost is unloving.  Trying to cultivate PUL does not signify that we allow any degradation to other people, because (as some might say) "hey, live and let live."  Or, you could say "its not my problem if someone is implying that a man drove is significant other to suicide - let's hear more!  No, PUL is a feeling.  It is not contingent on anything.  But you misinterpret its meaning if you feel that someone who cultivates love will stand by and let another be attacked or savaged.  Do I wish the attacker ill?  No.  Do I think he should stop the attacks (which are numerous and frequent) by getting lost?  I do.  That is my opinion.  If, as you imply you feel that PUL means giving up on any opinion or action in defense of another, then no, I have not reached that advanced state yet.  I am not sure I want to - but it may be right for you. 

M

from Carl
{Don. So all those all those "Christian Experiences", are true, and most "New Age" experiences are false!..Why don't you admit that your former girlfriend committed suicide because you constantly tried to 'convert' her into your "Pauline Christian Fundamentalism"..Carl.}

Carl, please understand that there is no rational reason why someone commits suicide, and the blame cannot be placed on another person. What to one person is intolerable is to another a learning experience.

Eventually, if possible, a person can learn to move away (emotionally or physically) from ideas/people which leave one feeling off balance. A person can always return to them with a different perspective later, if he/she is still in this world.

That is the importance of being patient, and trying to resolve differences. It's not an easy thing to do, for sure. It's especially hard if your emotions are highly charged.

To sum it all up, how can a person learn to maintain or to change personal boundaries without practicing that skill? Just a thought.

Bob-

Here is a timely example of a legitimate difference of opinion:

Matthew says "PUL is a feeling."  I would say that it's really a state of being.  It's not something that can be "sent" to others or something that can be cultivated.

It simply IS.  It is inviolable.  Our actions can neither increase it nor decrease it.  As a matter of fact, it just might be what some people would call God, or All That Is.  If it were to disappear, I think we'd all disappear along with it.  Just my opinion.

It's easy to confuse PUL with an emotion.  Some people have described it as the feeling a new mother has for her baby.  But that feeling is really an emotion. Thing is, emotions change.  PUL never does.

And btw, I'm not posting this to start a whole new discussion about PUL.  Just an example that Carl might decide to follow.

R 

Hi Matthew-

I never really paid too much attention to PUL in terms of definition until I came across this quote I had posted a few months ago from Guy De Maupassant, a 19th century French writer, about the word love:

"To love 'very much' is to love poorly: one loves -that is all- it cannot be modified or completed without being nullified."

"It is a short word, but it contains all: it means the body, the soul, the life, the entire being.  We feel it as we feel the warmth of the blood, we breathe it as we breathe the air, we carry it in ourselves as we carry our thoughts.  Nothing more exists for us."

"It is not a word; it is an inexpressible state indicated by four letters."

I said then that to modify love in any way diminishes the true meaning of the word.

After all, Love cannot be impure, nor can it be conditional, otherwise it really wasn't love to begin with.  Those 2 modifiers were really irrelevant.

I agree with you that genuine love cannot come and go.  It is there, all around us, like the air that we breathe.

R

Carl, Janet was already a professing Christian when we first met.  I met Janet at a  church "grad group" in Boston. In some sense, it seemed like divine fate that we met in Boston because she had just moved from her apartment nearby my dorm in Princeton, New Jersey.  We never formally met there, but we must have encountered each other a few times in passing. 

And Carl, you do need to read more carefully.  I said that the Monroe-Monroe model is similar to the biblical model of afterlife realms by virtue of the shared principle of like attracts like.  Indeed, St. Paul makes clear that the first and second heavens are realms that contain Christians who have made miminal progress in their manifestation of PUL.  I have always been struck by the parallelism between biblical portraits of the first 2 heavens and Monroe-Moen portrayals of Focus 25-26 and the parallelism between the Park of Focus 27 and the Park of the biblical "Paradise," a term meaning "park" or "garden."   

Consider the relevance of my analogy posed to Rondele of a little green man visible through a telescope, apparently only by me, a man who hovers in the air, eating toasted cheese sandwiches.  No matter how often R protests that, when he gazes through my telescope, he sees no such man, I find bogus reasons to explain away his failure.  At a certain point, my claim to see this man is untestable and therefore meaningless, since nothing even in principle can count against my claim.  Similarly, conflicting claims about astral plane structures approach absurdity, if rationalizations are always offered to rebut the complaint that acknowledged adepts routinely contradict each other in their professed insights from astral exploration. 

R's suggestion is a good antidote.  Two explorers agree to contact the same discarnate spirit.  The first asks this spirit to express a thought or display an object that will then be expressed or displayed to the 2nd soon arriving explorer.  If such synchronized quests for common ground cannot be established, then the authenticity of the alleged spirit's realm can be plausibly challenged. 

OBE and NDE descriptions of the "geography" of heaven's planes cry out for such attempts at verification.  Residences are described in detail and located in communities in the heavenly equivalent of specific spatial relationships.  Now Swedenborg makes it clear that this "space" is merely apparent because the "time" required to traverse that space is relative to the core similarities of the spirit who is the target of the visit.  But despite the problem of separating fact from interpretation, different astral explorers should be able to replicate much of their astral journeys to shared destinations if the astral  territories are real.  The contradictory PE claims of attempts to work with the crystal in TMI-There illustrate the problem. 

I am not trying to debunk this.  On the contrary, I need to believe these astral territories are real.  But if astral travel does not transcend the level of lucid dream consciousness, then our inability to find common ground in our continual quest for mapping progress seems a telling objection against the genuineness of these realms.   There will be no breakthrough in our knowledge until someone develops a method that enables a progressive learning curve and until different explorers can contact the same spirit guide and independently gain the same detailed information from that guide.

Suggested Expeiment:
Astral Explorers A and B contact a spirit guide to arrange for a joint retrieval attempt of the same discarnate spirit.  A and B project to that spirit at the same time and interact with that spirit.  Later they report back on their shared experience.  If few of the details about the course of the retrieval are jointly experienced and if even the outcome of the effort is not the same, then the reality of the attempt should be dismissed in the same way I dismiss my retrieval of Janet, though I desperately wish my initial perception of success were valid.  But utimately what matters is Janet's wellbeing and progress, not my need to make a difference in her spirit life.  And presumably when I die, I'll have another crack at checking out on her wellbeing. 

Don