"You Can Do No Wrong." What does that mean?

Sometimes during a near-death experience the experiencer is told by an advanced spiritual being, "You can do no wrong." Or, they are told, "Everything that happens in life is exactly the way it should be." Something like this happened to neurosurgeon Eben Alexander during his near-death experience when he was told:

You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.

You have nothing to fear.

There is nothing you can do wrong.

When some people hear of this, they may think it implies contradictions:

• After their experience, the near-death experiencers often are changed and make an effort to live differently than they did before. If everything is exactly right why do the near-death experiencers feel the need to change?
  
• If everything is exactly right, why is there so much suffering in the world?
  

In order to understand what "you can do no wrong" means, you have to understand it in its proper context. But before I go into an explanation, I want to point out one source of seeming contradictions in spiritual advice, which is that different people may need different advice. Some people might be too hard on themselves and need encouragement to stop criticizing themselves because of their mistakes. Such people need to learn that mistakes have a purpose which is that we learn from them. However, other people might be too lenient with themselves and need encouragement to admit to themselves that they have made mistakes. Such people may need to learn to consider how their actions affect other people. If someone tells what they were told during their near-death experience, some people may take it for an absolute truth and when they compare what different experiencers are told, they may think they are finding contradictions.

To understand what "you can do no wrong" means, you must understand that it doesn't really mean there is no right or wrong. The purpose of life is to learn. As spirits we plan the outlines of our life before incarnating but within those outlines we have the freedom to make decisions. Below is an excerpt of what "Denise" was told during her near-death experience when she was not told "You can do no wrong", she was told that decisions and actions have consequences:

Everyone has choices. Everyone has free will. How this interacts in your life, and death, and with others, is all by choice. The girl who came here at the same time as you. If the ambulance driver takes a different road to the scene, if someone decides to move her and doesn't know what they are doing and cause more damage, if her internal organs are too crushed by the accident by speed and timing, she will stay here. You are laying in your sons bedroom. Your one neighbor was given the responsibility to check on you. It is her choice. Her free will. Will she find you? Will she decide to take a shower first and be too late? Each of us always hangs in a balance, by decisions. Not only by our own actions, but by the free will and actions of others.

One purpose of life is to learn from the consequences of the decisions we make. From experiencing the consequences of our decisions, we learn what is right and what is wrong.

What "you can do no wrong" does mean, is that in the afterlife, you are not judged as a bad person because of your mistakes because all the causes of those mistakes are understood - the characteristics of your personality, the circumstances of your genetics, and the conditions and environment of your life. The purpose of incarnating is to learn from mistakes. Without mistakes there would be no learning, no purpose to incarnation. Those mistakes, those wrongs, are not really wrong, they are then necessary ingredients to learning.

However mistakes, wrong choices or wrong action, are still mistakes. If you don't recognize your mistakes in life, you may recognize them after death. If you don't recognize them after death, you may recognize them during the life review when you experience for yourself what you did to other people from their point of view. If you don't recognize your mistakes after the life review, you might reincarnate to live through someone else making the same mistake and you will experience the harm you caused to another person when you made that mistake. But you will not progress in the afterlife until you recognize your mistakes.

So, while you don't have to be afraid of eternal damnation or vindictive punishment, and everyone is dearly loved by God, you will experience for yourself all the help or harm you have done to other people so that you will learn that helping other people is good, and harming other people is wrong. You must recognize your successes and mistakes for what they are. While there is no punishment in the afterlife, offenders who recognize their mistakes often want to atone in some way, maybe by helping their victims or by helping victims of similar offenses, possibly as spirit guides. One can learn much about right and wrong by helping others.

When you experience the rewards of helping another person, you learn that doing good is much preferable to doing harm. This lesson is also something that is learned through incarnation. For example, a spirit who needs to learn this lesson might incarnate with a life plan that involves them in a career where they have the opportunity to help others. I have written a lot so far about suffering but I don't want to create the impression that the only purpose of incarnating is to suffer. One learns from doing good, and being helped as well.

The conditions you will experience in the afterlife depend on your mental state, you will naturally go to a place where there are other like minded individuals. This happens more through the action of natural law than by someone judging you. Kind people go to a place with other kind people. Cruel people (ie. undeveloped spirits who liked harming others and want to do more of it) go to a place where they are among other cruel people. But from the perspective of a cruel person, who would probably not like being surrounded by nice people while being the only cruel person, he is where he would prefer to be. The afterlife is permeated with love, but unloving spirits don't like love and there is less love in the lower levels and more love in the higher levels. So, "bad" people go where they prefer to be (even if it some might think it is not a very nice place) - until their mental state changes and they realize their attitudes are mistaken - then they can begin to work their way up to higher levels. Some might call it self-punishment, another way to look at is that as a spirit learns and improves, the conditions they experience improve - but they are earning those benefits by developing themselves.

Most people will spend some of their time in the afterlife studying their past life, planning their next life, and acting as spirit helpers or guides for incarnated people. However those spirits who are unrepentant even after their life review where they experience for themselves everything they did to other people and who won't "get with the program" may be put into another incarnation so that they will learn from hard experience that harming people is wrong.

The second contradiction, "if everything is exactly right why is there so much suffering in the world?" is hard for many people to understand. It is complicated because suffering exists for many reasons.

• We learn best by solving problems, life is intended to give us problems that we can learn from. Suffering prods us to find solutions to our problems. If life was too easy, we would all be selfish, stupid, and lazy.
  
• Sometimes someone who did something wrong in a past life needs to experience being a victim of that type of mistake to learn why it was wrong. A perfectly nice spirit might also agree to incarnate in order to harm them so they might learn the needed lesson.
  
• Sometimes a person needs to learn why someone would harm another person and will incarnate to experience causing harm.
  
• Sometimes a spirit wants to make rapid progress and may desire to have a hard life that they will learn much from.
  

There is no single answer that explains why any given person may be experiencing a particularly difficult life.

It is important to remember that we are immortal and no matter what happens during life, it is not permanent. Existence will be better in the afterlife. Also, no matter how real this life seems, when you are a spirit the earth life seems more dreamlike and less real than the reality in the afterlife.

It is also important not judge others. It is impossible for an incarnated person to tell if another incarnated person is ignorant or advanced based on their actions. You cannot tell if a soul is undeveloped because they are suffering or causing suffering. Sometimes one spirit needs a hard lesson and another spirit agrees to incarnate to teach them that lesson.

In summary, people who harm others are not judged as evil and damned, they are loved just as much by God as everyone is, but they also do not get a free ride through the gates of heaven. They must recognize their mistakes and improve themselves in order to get into the higher levels of the spirit world. If they don't recognize their mistakes they will experience the harm they did to others to help them learn right from wrong. This is not done as vindictive punishment but to help them learn.

Here is some information about the life review reported by near-death experiencers at near-death.com

Characteristics of the Life Review

The life review is an amazing experience that has many interesting characteristic - not all of which are found in every life review. The following is a list of some of those characteristics.

(a) Instantly becoming everyone you came in contact with in your entire life (feeling their emotions, thinking their thoughts, living their experiences, learning their motives behind their actions).

(b) Reliving every detail of every second of your life, every emotion, and every thought simultaneously.

(c) Re-living the way you dealt with others and how others dealt with you.

(d) Viewing a few special deeds in your life.

(e) Replaying a part of your life review to focus on a particular event for instruction.

(f) Viewing past lives and/or your future.

(g) Feeling a strong sense of responsibility.

(h) Feeling a sense of judgment or self-judgment (often these feelings transform from judgment to self-judgment).

(i) The review is a fact-finding process rather than a fault-finding process.

(j) Your motives for everything will be as visible as your actions.

(k) The negative events you expected to see did not show up because you had a change of heart.

...

During the life review, while in the presence of the Being of Light, it is impossible to lie to yourself or to others or to the Light. In the Light, there is no place for secrets to hide. But it is not God who judges us after we die. In the presence of the Being of Light, some people may judge or condemn or punish themselves. There is no judgment except the judgment we might level at ourselves and even this we shouldn't do. God's standard is pure love and our lives will be compared to this standard in the light of God. Pure love is serving God and others without having self-centered motives for doing so. The life review is the perfect experience for the Being of Light to reveal to people how they have measured up to this standard and their mission in life. The following is a list of characteristics of the Being of Light during life reviews. Sometimes the Being of Light is accompanied with other light beings and for this reason the so-called "Being of Light" will be referred to as "they".

(a) They can fill you with a love that is beyond description.

(b) They can eliminate any negativity you may feel from viewing your life review.

(c) They may ask questions concerning your life and how you felt about it.

(d) They may rejoice when love is displayed in your life.

(e) The entire heavenly hosts may thank you in unison for your deeds done out of love. The entire heavenly hosts may thank you in unison for your deeds done out of love.

(f) They may applaud you and let you know that God approved of your acts of unselfishness and caring.

(g) They may suffer and/or feel sorrow for you about something you did.

(h) They can pause the review for awhile if you are upset to strengthen you with love.

(i) They witness everything you did in secret.

(j) They take into consideration various aspects about your life when it comes to evaluating your life; such as, how you were raised, what you were taught, the pain inflicted upon you, and the opportunities missed or not received.

After reading this long post, some people may still think the system is flawed. Some may feel that evil doers need more punishment, some may feel that the system is already too harsh and people suffer too much. Everyone will naturally have their own opinion but I suggest people keep an open mind and wait until they get to the afterlife before they decide if the system is good or bad.

The subject of this post can be a little bit disconcerting. If you find it makes you fearful of the afterlife, please have a look at this post: People who Meet God. Also keep in mind what Eben Alexander was told during his near-death experience:

You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever. You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong.

Copyright © 2013 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.