Life in B Flat(Science and Spirituality): spirituality

Showing posts with label spirituality. Show all posts

Monday, November 19, 2018

Solutions to Spiritual Problems

It is very common for people to have spiritual problems that they can't seem to find satisfying answers to. For example, someone who is afraid of death may want to know what the evidence for the afterlife is. Other common problems are, "What is the purpose of life?" and "Why is there so much suffering in the world?" There are very good answers to these questions but this article is about a different aspect to these problems.

These questions are often verbal expressions that are caused by feelings. When a person has a feeling and tries to put it into words, it can seem like something that needs to be solved through reason and information. However, when the question is really an expression of a feeling, reason and information may not influence the feeling and so the person is perpetually unsatisfied with whatever answer he may encounter.

This is because feelings are sometimes caused by the levels of various chemicals in the brain. Information may not alter the levels of these chemicals and so information may not change the feeling and therefore no answer is ever found satisfactory.

However, it may be possible to eliminate the feeling by changing the chemistry in the brain through some combination of diet, meditation, and exercise. When that happens the question disappears and in that way the problem is solved. I have written another post about methods that may be used to change brain chemistry in my article: A System for Spiritual Development: Hacking Your Brain Chemistry Without Drugs.

Altering your brain chemistry can help you understand many spiritual truths that you might have read about. This is because many spiritual truths are feelings put into words. They have to be felt to be understood.

Sunday, April 15, 2018

A System for Spiritual Development: Hacking Your Brain Chemistry Without Drugs

Below are links to, and excerpts from, four related articles on my blog and website which together describe a set of practices that can produce positive feelings and reduce stress. This can help you live according to spiritual values such as love, kindness, forgiveness, and tolerance.

The subjects covered in the articles include:

How to use meditation to set up a feedback loop in the brain that increases production of dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins and reduces levels of cortisol.

A meditation technique is described that produces a relaxed mental state and a pleasant contented mood. Taken further, it can produce intense positive emotions and spiritual experiences. However, the main purpose of the meditation is to give you the skills you can use in daily life to maintain a pleasant relaxed mental state and contented mood between meditation sessions.
What it is like.

This is a description of extreme spiritual experiences that can be produced by the meditation technique described in the first article.
How to increase serotonin production in the brain through diet and nutrition.

This article explains how eating carbohydrates and protein in the right sequence and at the right times can help increase serotonin production in the brain. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that is involved in how the brain produces pleasant feelings. This can be helpful in producing the experiences described in the first two articles.
How to turn off the body's reaction to stress.

This article tells you how to turn off the body's reaction to stress naturally by stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system. This is helpful in learning to breathe in a relaxing way and can help you make more progress faster using the meditation technique described in the first article.

Links and Excerpts

How to use meditation to produce spiritual experiences by setting up a feedback loop in the brain that increases production of dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins and reduces levels of cortisol:
https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/meditation-1#meditation_serenity

Simplified Instructions

Sit comfortably in whatever way you prefer, in a chair or on the floor. No special meditation posture is needed. Close your eyes. Notice how you feel throughout your body. Do you feel anxious or tense? Try to relax your whole body. Take a deep breath and relax your whole body as you exhale. Notice the pleasant feeling of relaxation? Now breathe normally and relax your whole body as you exhale. Notice the same feeling of relaxation. Relax your whole body as you inhale and notice a similar feeling of relaxation. It might help you to relax if you slow down your breathing somewhat. Continue to relax your whole body as you inhale and exhale and notice the pleasant feelings of relaxation. Your whole body may begin feel heavy as you become more and more relaxed. While you meditate this way, also say to yourself, (inwardly not aloud) "in" as you inhale, and "out" as you exhale. Notice the absence of mental chatter as you focus your attention on the words "in" an "out". Meditate this way with the understanding that you are trying to have a pleasant, relaxing, calming meditation session. After a while, observing the pleasant feeling of relaxation as you inhale and exhale might make you want to smile.

If you feel like it, go ahead and smile, even if it's just a little bit, and notice the pleasant emotions that accompany smiling as you continue to meditate

...
Smiling causes the brain to release dopamine, endorphins, and serotonin, which are molecules that will elevate your mood. Smiling also reduces levels of the anxiety causing stress hormone cortisol. These chemical changes will produce a pleasant effect and may make you want to smile even more. This can result in a feedback loop that produces intense feelings of feelings of happiness, loving kindness, and connectedness.
What it is like:
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2015/02/joy-during-meditation.html#joy_trip

But this type of serenity meditation creates a feedback loop causing the brain to release endorphins, serotonin and dopamine.

It really is like a drug trip, maybe not a psychedelic trip but it's not normal meditation. Every breath you take is like a hit from a bong, but there's no bong. And it is hugely spiritual. It doesn't require super intense concentration so I think most people could learn to do it. I had to stop the other day because it was so intense I was getting nervous. How many people do you know who were feeling so happy, and connected to all things and feeling such intense metta that they were worried they might never get back to normal? And I felt the presence of non-physical entities too.

It also creates a kind of synesthesia where everything I see and hear I also feel in my body as if they are part of me. There is an effect like the brain is a virtual reality machine and what I see is really a movie inside my head projected on the unchanging screen of pure awareness, like my mind contains the whole universe including me walking around inside it. Other times I feel like my self and its boundaries are dissolving and I am expanding to merge into infinite space. It's not scary, it's like coming home.

This meditation changes the "energy" of your surroundings too. You could go to the filthiest shack in the poorest slum in the most miserable godforsaken corner of nowhere and meditating this way would make it a place of beauty and joy. These effects are not gross like a psychedelic trip they are subtle like a change in understanding. And these experiences are not restricted to sitting meditation, you can have them walking around town or out in nature. When you do this, you see it transforms reality because when you walk around smiling, people smile back. In that way, it doesn't just change you, it changes the people around you. It doesn't just make you happy, it makes the world friendly.

It also produces a state of mind where nothing can upset you because you find something within you which you can relax, and when you do, any unpleasant emotions flow away as soon as they arise. It's as if relaxing opens a door and unpleasant emotions go out through the door as soon as they appear. They just appear and go. Not just during meditation but during daily life.

It's not nirvana, I still experience some worries, annoyances, and emotional ups and downs, but this type of meditation showed me that happiness is a choice.

The best thing about this type of meditation is not the intense experiences, the best thing is that between meditation sessions I'm happier and I worry less.

And it doesn't cause vomiting or diarrhea like Ayahuasca does. It's 100% free. And as far as I know it's legal everywhere.
How to increase serotonin production in the brain through diet and nutrition:
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/p/occasionally-i-post-something-to.html#misc_diet_mood

It is possible to increase serotonin production in the brain by eating protein 20 to 40 minutes after eating carbohydrates. Eat at least 25-35 grams (about 120 calories) of carbohydrates, wait 20 to 40 minutes, and then eat protein. (The source of carbohydrates should be low in protein and fat.) A simple way to do this is to eat the carbohydrate portion of your meal first then wait 20 minutes before eating the protein portion...
How to turn off the body's reaction to stress:
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-parasympathetic-nervous-system-and.html

The sympathetic nervous system is involved in producing the body's response to stress. The parasympathetic nervous system is involved in turning off the body's response to stress.

Anything that activates the parasympathetic nervous system suppresses the sympathetic nervous system and helps you to relax.

There are many undesirable effects of stress on physical and mental health so learning to turn off stress can make your life better in many, many ways.

Learning to turn off stress is also helpful in spiritual development because when you are stressed, you are more likely to be thinking about yourself and your problems ie. being egocentric. But when you are relaxed, you are less likely to be thinking about yourself and more likely to be in harmony with spiritual values like love, kindness, forgiveness, tolerance etc.

...
The best way to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and turn off stress that I know of is to do exercises which involve gently moving or stretching your muscles while exhaling slowly as you count to ten. This technique is extremely effective because it combines four separate methods for activating the parasympathetic nervous system in one technique...

Tuesday, April 3, 2018

Turning Off Stress: The Parasympathetic Nervous System And Spiritual Development

Contents
Introduction
Turning off Stress
How to do the Exercises
Simplified Instructions
Anaerobic Exercises
Related Articles

Introduction

Your sympathetic nervous system produces your body's response to stress. Your parasympathetic nervous system turns off your body's response to stress.

The sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems work in opposition. Anything that activates the parasympathetic nervous system suppresses the sympathetic nervous system and helps you to relax, to turn off stress. In this article I will describe easy exercises you can do that will activate the parasympathetic nervous system, help you to develop it, and teach you how to turn off stress.

The opposite effects of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are similar to the way the analytical neural network in the brain and the empathic-intuitive network cannot both be in use at the same time (which I have written about on my web site). In our modern civilization, many people become unbalanced with their analytical network being overdeveloped and their empathic network underdeveloped. This can make them callous. Meditation helps to develop the empathic network bringing the analytical and empathic networks into balance. This is one reason meditation can be a helpful practice in spiritual development and psychic development.

Learning to turn off stress is also helpful in spiritual development because when you are stressed, you are more likely to be thinking about yourself and your problems ie. being egocentric. But when you are relaxed, you are less likely to be thinking about yourself and more likely to be in harmony with spiritual values like love, kindness, forgiveness, tolerance etc. And just like with the analytical and empathic networks in the brain, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems can get out of balance. In our busy modern society people experience a lot of stress and their sympathetic nervous system can become overdeveloped and their parasympathetic nervous system can become underdeveloped. Doing exercises like those described below can help you to develop your parasympathetic nervous system and bring it into balance with your sympathetic nervous system.

There are also many undesirable effects of stress on physical and mental health so developing the parasympathetic nervous system, learning to turn off stress, can make your life better in many ways.

Back to Contents

Turning off Stress

The best way to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and turn off stress that I know of is to do exercises which involve gently moving or stretching your muscles while exhaling slowly as you count to ten. This technique is extremely effective because it combines four separate methods for activating the parasympathetic nervous system in one technique:

Deep Breathing
Muscle relaxation
Body Awareness
Meditation

Some other relaxation techniques such as guided meditations, visualizations, hypnotic inductions, etc. work by making you sleepy or putting you in an altered state of consciousness, and when you return to normal consciousness, the stress comes back. This technique works by turning off the body's stress response, and the effect stays with you long after you are done. When practiced over a period of weeks or months it can strengthen your parasympathetic nervous system improving your ability to turn off stress and keep it turned off.

The sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems work in opposition. Anything that counters the sympathetic nervous system's stress response activates the parasympathetic nervous system and helps turn off stress. The stress response involves increased muscle tension, mental fixation on the source of the stress, and shallow rapid breathing. By moving slowly and gently and or stretching your muscles, you counter muscle tension. By meditating, ie. focusing your attention on your breathing, body movements, and counting, you counter mental fixation. By breathing slowly and deeply, you counter shallow rapid breathing. Deep breathing and meditation alone can be relaxing but when you combine them and add stretches or gentle slow movements you counter the stress response on multiple levels and together they form a powerful way to turn off stress.

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How to do the Exercises

Here are a few pointers on doing this type of exercise.

If you have back trouble or any other type of physical ailment, don't do anything that would be bad for your condition. Consult with a doctor if necessary.
You can use any combination of:
- Yoga postures
- Stretches recommended for use before a workout
- Tai Chi movements
- Qi Gong movements - For example, 8 Brocades or Ba Duan Jin (Baduanjin) can be done sitting or standing. There is a diagram at Tai Chi Village that is useful as a memory aid and Wikipedia has a brief description of each movement.
- Progressive muscular relaxation - This can be particularly helpful when you are tense or worried and you feel tension throughout your entire body which is hard to relax.
- Isometric exercises (Allow several seconds between exercises to let your muscles relax).
The type of movements and stretches should not be strenuous, they should be relaxing, and you should not stretch beyond what is comfortable, the purpose is to relax.
Remember to exhale slowly counting to ten as you do each posture or movement, or for simple movements such as those used in progressive muscular relaxation, exhale slowly counting five to ten repetitions of the movement. You don't have to count exactly to ten while exhaling - do whatever number feels most relaxing. If you find yourself counting too high, count more slowly. Or you can just say to yourself, "in" as you inhale, and "out" as you exhale.
Try to relax your whole body as you exhale and try to notice the feeling of relaxation in your whole body as you relax. Do the same as you inhale, try to relax your whole body and notice the feeling of relaxation in your whole body. This will help make turning off stress a conscious process. It can also be helpful to practice sitting in a chair, relaxing your whole body as you inhale, relaxing your whole body as you exhale and noticing the feeling of relaxation in your whole body.
Ten to twenty minutes of gentle stretches and/or slow gentle movements is an appropriate length for a session.
You can do longer sessions or multiple sessions per day if you want to.
If you practice the form of Serenity Meditation I describe on my web site, you can try to notice the pleasant feeling of relaxation as you inhale and exhale, and if that makes you want to smile go ahead and smile and notice the pleasant feelings that are released when you smile.
You can do some or all of the session sitting in a chair if you use postures and movements that can be done while sitting.
You can also use this technique during daily activities. Breathe slowly, move in a relaxed way, and notice the feeling of relaxation while you do daily activities like washing the dishes, walking, taking a shower, etc. It is commonly believed that people are tense and hurried because they are stressed. But if you put what you learn from these exercises into practice in daily life, you might see that it is also true that people are stressed because they are tense and hurried. When you relax and slow down you feel less stressed. This is because the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems work in opposition. Anything that reduces the effects of one system does it by activating the other system.

These kinds of exercises together with Meditation make up a very powerful system for spiritual development.

Back to Contents

Simplified Instructions

Here is a simplified form of his technique that is very easy to do: Sit comfortably the way you normally do, for example, when watching TV or eating dinner. Try to relax your whole body. Notice if there is any tension in your body such as in your jaw, or shoulders and try to relax it. Then hold your hands in front of your abdomen with your palms facing each other a few inches apart. As you inhale, slowly separate your hands by moving them apart a foot or two while slowly saying to yourself, "in". Then slowly bring the hands back together until they are a few inches apart while slowly saying to yourself, "out". Repeat this for ten to twenty minutes. Feel free to make slight variations in the movements of the hands or arms to produce a more graceful flowing movement.

You can do this lying down with a slight modification: Instead of moving your hands apart, keep your hands at your sides and gently and slowly open and close your hands as you slowly inhale and exhale. Any simple movement will work because the parasympathetic nervous system acts in opposition to the sympathetic nervous system. Any slow gentle movement in one part of the body activates the parasympathetic nervous system and helps to counteract muscle tension and other effects of stress throughout the mind and body.

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Anaerobic Exercises

Doing a few minutes of vigorous anaerobic exercises such as calisthenics (push-ups, pull-ups, squats, etc.), weight lifting, or sprinting can also be used to activate the parasympathetic nervous system. This is because these kinds of exercises create stress and when you stop this type of activity, the the body's mechanism for recovering from stress, the parasympathetic nervous system, is activated.

A few minutes of Anaerobic exercise may also increase serotonin levels in the brain.

Back to Contents

Related articles from my blog:

Spiritual Living: Hacking Your Brain Chemistry Without Drugs

Back to Contents

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Forgiveness is a path to non-attachment.

When you realize that it is much more pleasant to forgive than to let hate and anger poison the quality of your existence, it becomes possible to forgive. Forgiveness does not mean you trust someone who is not trustworthy, or that you allow people to harm others or yourself with impunity, or that you allow others to treat you like a doormat. Forgiveness means you let go of the unpleasant feelings that poison the quality of your existence. You can take appropriate measures to protect innocent people and help offenders learn, but you do it out of love not hate or anger.

Forgiveness leads to non-attachment. A large part of what some people call "enlightenment" is forgiveness. When you understand the power of forgiveness, you will want to forgive everything and everyone because it results in a more pleasant existence. At the root of all attachments is liking and disliking. When you want something you don't have or don't like something you do have, you might blame another person, fate, the universe, God, yourself, or some such object of blame. When you forgive that object of blame, you let go of your anger and desire and you develop non-attachment. Try to forgive other people for doing things you don't like. Forgive fate or God for bringing things into your life that you don't like. Forgive yourself for falling short as you try to live up to the expectations you have for yourself.

It can help you forgive others if you try to understand why someone would do what they did. How did they learn to be the way they are? Were they victimized in their past? If you can remember when you made a mistake, it can help you understand why someone else might make a similar mistake. Periodically reminding yourself, "Forgive everything" or "Forgive others, forgive fate, forgive yourself" can help too.

Meditating daily can also help you to develop forgiveness and non-attachment.

Revenge will not bring you advancement in the afterlife. Forgiveness will. Turn adversity into advancement by forgiving.

Saturday, April 2, 2016

Love is the Supreme Spiritual Realization

The way to be happy is to love others unconditionally. If you love everyone, no one can hurt you. Love is another way to get rid of the ego which can produce profound realizations. But love itself is the supreme spiritual realization. It is the lesson we are incarnated to learn, the purpose of life.

Love does not necessarily mean you try to please another person. We try to please another person when we want them to love us. Wanting to be loved is a completely different phenomenon from loving others unconditionally.

You can learn to produce feelings of love through meditation. When you experience reality through the filter of love instead of egoism, all the reasons for many unpleasant emotions, anger, hate, jealousy, envy vanish. Existence is transformed, and you will not want to go back to the old way of existing.

At first, meditation is a way to produce love intentionally. But after you experience how love transforms existence, meditation becomes natural because existence in love feels so much better than existence in ego. You will express love naturally because love is a preferable way in which to exist.

Thursday, April 16, 2015

Belief in religion and spirituality gives meaning to life in a way that atheism cannot.

Introduction
My Experiences
Empirical Evidence
Examples of Personal Transformation.
Atheistic Meaning is Conflicted.
Theoretical Knowledge is not the Same as Experience

Introduction

Atheists say the universe is meaningless. Here is how atheist Richard Dawkins describes it:

Richard Dawkins

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, and other people are going to get lucky; and you won't find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.
- Out of Eden, page 133.

Some atheists claim that they can find meaning in life without religion. But, personal experience and empirical evidence suggests that spirituality and religion give meaning to life in a way that atheism cannot.

Contents

My Experiences

Spiritual beliefs give meaning to my life in a way that atheistic beliefs which I once held did not. Spiritual development is an eternal process. In the afterlife, you go to a place and have things to do that are appropriate for your level of development. Life on the earth is about developing yourself so that you can progress in the afterlife and go to new places and have new things to do. This means learning to be a better person, being more loving, tolerant, forgiving, less selfish, less egotistical because those qualities are what make you fit for a higher level in the afterlife.

During a period in my life when I was an atheist, I read that if you treat others badly, if you act disreputably, then you will think of yourself as disreputable. To have self respect you must treat others honorably. This is a better reason to act ethically than fear of punishment in the afterlife or fear of karmic retribution. It had a major influence on me and I still consider it a valuable lesson that I could not have learned without being an atheist. So I think there can be a spiritual purpose in being an atheist. But ultimately that lesson was based on self interest not on concern for others.

Knowledge of the afterlife makes a huge difference in life and it is not remotely comparable to being an atheist. When you know the universe is benevolent, that you are loved by God and your spirit friends who are rooting for you and helping and guiding you to meet life's challenges, life means something different than if you are just trying to be a good person until you die at which point everything is over. You know there is an eternity in which you can have fun and be happy together with your loved ones so any sacrifices, losses, or unpleasantness in this life are mere bumps in the road, lessons to learn from. Suffering teaches you compassion for others who are suffering. Doing wrong teaches you forgiveness for those who may wrong you. These lessons have value to you throughout eternity. When you are a materialist, every second that is not pleasant is a second you are cheated out of from your short life. When you are a materialist any character development that occurs because of hardship is useless after you die. As a believer in the afterlife, you want do what is right because you understand we are all in this together, some are less advanced some more, you want to help others to be part of the system that brings help to you. You know you will have to live with the knowledge your decisions for eternity. There is also the prospect of a life review where you will experience how you influenced people from their perspective.

Contents

Empirical Evidence

My experience is just one data point. However empirical research shows that belief in religion and spirituality do make life more meaningful:

Andrew Sims past president of Royal College of Psychiatrists explains:

The advantageous effect of religious belief and spirituality on mental and physical health is one of the best kept secrets in psychiatry and medicine generally. If the findings of the huge volume of research on this topic had gone in the opposite direction and it had been found that religion damages your mental health, it would have been front-page news in every newspaper in the land.
In the majority of studies, religious involvement is correlated with well-being, happiness and life satisfaction; hope and optimism; purpose and meaning in life; higher self-esteem; better adaptation to bereavement; greater social support and less loneliness; lower rates of depression and faster recovery from depression; lower rates of suicide and fewer positive attitudes towards suicide; less anxiety; less psychosis and fewer psychotic tendencies; lower rates of alcohol and drug use and abuse; less delinquency and criminal activity; greater marital stability and satisfaction… We concluded that for the vast majority of people the apparent benefits of devout belief and practice probably outweigh the risks.

Knowledge of the afterlife deters suicide. Lessons From the Light by Kenneth Ring and Evelyn Elsaesser p.257-258:

As far as I know, the first clinician to make use of NDE material in this context was a New York psychologist named John McDonagh. In 1979, he presented a paper at a psychological convention that described his success with several suicidal patients using a device he called "NDE bibliotherapy." His "technique" was actually little more than having his patients read some relevant passages from Raymond Moody's book, Reflections on Life after Life, after which the therapist and his patient would discuss its implicatins for the latter's own situation. McDonagh reports that such an approach was generally quite successful not only in reducing suicidal thoughts but also in preventing the deed altogether.
...
Since McDonagh's pioneering efforts, other clinicians knowledgeable about the NDE who have had the opportunity to counsel suicidal patients have also reported similar success. Perhaps the most notable of these therapists is Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist now at the University of Virginia, whose specialty as a clinician has been suicidology. He is also the author of a classic paper on NDEs and suicide which the specialist may wish to consult for tis therapeutic implications. (14)
Quite apart form the clinicians who have developed this form of what we migh call "NDE-assisted therapy," I can draw upon my own personal experience here to provide additional evidence of how the NDE has helped to deter suicide. The following case
...

For more information on research that shows the benefits of religious and spiritual beliefs scroll down to the References section at Skepticism, The Big Lie. Activist Skeptics and Atheists are a Danger to the Health and Well Being of Believers.

Contents

Examples of Personal Transformation

I've never heard of an anyone saying that materialism, or "scientific ethics" or humanism, transformed his life. But many people who convert to religion do say that it transformed their life for the better. All the atheists' talk about rational ethics is just talk. But when you come to believe God, that is something completely different. It is not theoretical it is something practical that changes your life for the better.

Many people (examples below) find that while believing in atheism, life is bleak, lacks love, and is ultimately selfish. When they come to believe in God life is about love and caring for others and not about yourself and that makes people happier. Logically, an atheist could believe in unselfishness and love, but it seems that for practical reasons there is something about belief in God that makes it work where mere philosophy doesn't.

This is not just a psychological phenomenon. It is evidence that God exists. John Lennox pointed out that it would be strange if beings on a planet without water became thirsty, similarly it would be strange that people are drawn to God if God did not exist.

As I wrote above, I've never heard of atheism helping anyone to turn their life around the way religion has done for many people. Here are some other examples of how religion transforms lives:

Dan Conway

Neither of professional musician Dan Conway's parents were religious and he was an atheist until he felt his life was going in the wrong direction...

The relevant part of the video starts at 9:38

In some way's I guess things were going well. As you said I got to perform on Australia's Got Talent. ... I'm no stranger to the music business so ... I had a record deal when I was 16 with Sony and another one sometime later I think with EMI. So I was no stranger to all that. But, I was actually really unhappy. And I was only growing more unhappy. And I wasn't living well. The more time went on the more I was hurting myself and others. It wasn't pretty. I came to a place where I just want to think ... maybe there's something to this God thing and maybe I missed it. So I thought, I want to know. I want to know I don't really want to be into what feels good or what suits me I actually want to know what's the truth.

This was an from an atheist from birth, born to atheist parents being skeptical about atheism: "I don't really want to be into what feels good or what suits me. I actually want to know what's the truth".

And so I committed I'm going to figure it out. I'm going to commit to following the evidence wherever it leads. I became a regular debate viewer on line and read books on God and his existence. When I got real radical I'd listen to a sermon or two. All as an atheist. But the most crucial part of that was really when I examined my own heart and did that the very last. But when I saw what was in there and when I considered who Jesus might be that led me to believe in God. Everything changed at that point. I guess I had a really a change of being. Somewhere deep I don't even know where. And that changed my thinking my desires, my outlook, so I guess it was natural that my music changed with it.

I've heard and read a lot of stories like this and it is one of the reasons I have a generally favorable opinion of religion. This type of evidence shows that there is something good in religion and rather than rejecting all religion because some of it is bad, we should try to understand what is good in it and figure out how to use that in a practical way to improve people's well being.

Lee Strobel

Religion has also helped Lee Strobel.

Strobel is a journalist and his research into the authenticity of the Gospels transformed his life. He started out as an atheist skeptic but when he used his credentials as a reporter to get access to the worlds leading historians, the results of his research made a believer out of him.

"... [believing] began a transformational process for me where over time my philosophy and my attitudes, relationships, parenting, world-view, all of that began to change over time for good. Really for good."
"When Lee became a Christian his whole life started to change to the extent that our five year old daughter who also saw those changes went to her Sunday school teacher and told her that she wanted Jesus to do in her life what He had done in her Daddy's life."

Contents

Atheistic Meaning is Conflicted

Atheists may claim they find meaning in life but there are logical problems with such claims.

The quote by Richard Dawkins in the introduction to this article explains the atheist view of the universe as having "... no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference."

The section Materialism is not a Rational Philosophy in my web page on Skeptical Fallacies explains why materialism is incoherent and no materialist can trust his power of reason and so under materialism any meaning a materialist might find in life cannot be considered rational.

Science cannot explain how the brain might produce the subjective experiences of consciousness. In order to avoid the conclusion that consciousness is non-physical and not produced by the brain, many atheists say that consciousness is an illusion. In that case any meaning an atheist might find in life would have to be considered an illusion too and how can any one have meaning in life if they believe their feelings of meaning are illusions?

Materialists may say they can create meaning from nothing but that doesn't mean they do.

John Lennox on the problem of evil and suffering.

John Lennox points out that according to materialism the 9/11 terrorists, Stalin, or Hitler, cannot be blamed because they were "dancing to their DNA", so it is inconsistent to believe in materialism and then to criticize God or anything else on moral grounds. But materialists do recognize morality despite their philosophical views that good and evil do not exist. When materialists claim that there are scientific grounds or humanistic reasons for morality, it is just another example of materialist incoherence, another weird thing people believe. If you believe there is no good and no evil, but you believe some things are good and others are evil, then how can you trust your faculties of reason and believe anything?

Richard Taylor
The modern age, more or less repudiating the idea of a divine lawgiver, has nevertheless tried to retain the ideas of moral right and wrong, not noticing that, in casting God aside, they have also abolished the conditions of meaningfulness for moral right and wrong as well. Thus, even educated persons sometimes declare that such things as war, or abortion, or the violation of certain human rights, are morally wrong, and they imagine that they have said something true and significant. Educated people do not need to be told, however, that questions such as these have never been answered outside of religion. He concludes, Contemporary writers in ethics, who blithely discourse upon moral right and wrong and moral obligation without any reference to religion, are really just weaving intellectual webs from thin air; which amounts to saying that they discourse without meaning.
...
Dennis Prager
To put this as clearly as possible: If there is no God who says, "Do not murder," murder is not wrong. Many people or societies may agree that it is wrong. But so what? Morality does not derive from the opinion of the masses. If it did, then apartheid was right; murdering Jews in Nazi Germany was right; the history of slavery throughout the world was right; and clitoridectomies and honor killings are right in various Muslims societies.
So, then, without God, why is murder wrong?
Is it, as Dawkins argues, because reason says so?
My reason says murder is wrong, just as Dawkins's reason does. But, again, so what? The pre-Christian Germanic tribes of Europe regarded the Church's teaching that murder was wrong as preposterous. They reasoned that killing innocent people was acceptable and normal because the strong should do whatever they wanted.
In addition, reason alone without God is pretty weak in leading to moral behavior. When self-interest and reason collide, reason usually loses. That's why we have the word "rationalize" -- to use reason to argue for what is wrong.
...
In that regard, let's go to the empirical argument. Years ago, I interviewed Pearl and Sam Oliner, two professors of sociology at California State University at Humboldt and the authors of one of the most highly-regarded works on altruism, The Altruistic Personality. The book was the product of the Oliners' lifetime of study of non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.
The Oliners, it should be noted, are secular, not religious, Jews; they had no religious agenda.
I asked Samuel Oliner, "Knowing all you now know about who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, if you had to return as a Jew to Poland and you could knock on the door of only one person in the hope that they would rescue you, would you knock on the door of a Polish lawyer, a Polish doctor, a Polish artist or a Polish priest?"
Without hesitation, he said, "a Polish priest."

Lecture by John Lennox Explains why Atheism is a Delusion Incompatible with Science.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.”
Viktor Frankl
... “If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone. “I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment; or as the Nazi liked to say, ‘of Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers

Because materialism is incoherent you can't trust the reliability of any belief such as "meaning":

Francis Crick
You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.
John Polkinghorne
If Crick's thesis is true we could never know it. For, not only does it relegate our experiences of beauty, moral obligation, and religious encounter to the epiphenomenal scrap-heap. It also destroys rationality. Thought is replaced by electro-chemical neural events. Two such events cannot confront each other in rational discourse. They are neither right nor wrong. The simply happen ... The very assertions of the reductionist himself are nothing but blips in the neural network of his brain. The world of rational discourse dissolves into the absurd chatter of firing synapses. Quite frankly, that cannot be right and none of us believes it to be so. "

Lecture by John Lennox Explains Some of the Scientific Evidence for God.

Albert Einstein
You are right in speaking of the moral foundations of science, but you cannot turn around and speak of the scientific foundations of morality.
Nietzsche
Indeed, only if we assume a God who is morally our like can “truth” and the search for truth be at all something meaningful and promising of success. This God left aside, the question is permitted whether being deceived is not one of the conditions of life.

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Theoretical Knowledge is not the Same as Experience

The difference between meaning contrived by atheists and the meaning that comes from religious belief is like the difference between book learning and experience. You can't really internalize spiritual love without feeling that the universe is ultimately benevolent and that you are loved. The atheists can say what they like about meaning but unless they've had a religious or spiritual experience they don't understand what it is. Giving up a bad religion and becoming an atheist is not equivalent to finding a good religion and giving up atheism. And religion doesn't necessarily guarantee this experience. Some people go through the motions of religion out of habit but it doesn't mean much to them in daily life. It's a sad fact that bad religion drives many people to atheism. But some people do have a transforming experience, either by learning about religion or from a personal experience like an NDE, where they recognize that God exists, He loves us even though we may be flawed, and God is for us not against us, and they live with that understanding every day and that seems to be central to this type of transformation. If we are made in God's image or if the stuff of our soul is the stuff of God, then if you don't love God you don't love yourself. Recognizing that God loves us releases something inside us, it helps to rid one of feelings of fear, self-hate, anger, and guilt. It's like having a great weight lifted off your shoulders, it is liberating. The truth sets you free, free to be happy and loving. You don't get that from ethical humanism. This is why organized religion, done right, can be beneficial - besides teaching about God, being able to go to the right kind of church once a week, being surrounded by like minded people, helps a person to maintain this understanding in the face of the many messages we are bombarded with many times a day encouraging us to be selfish. I know many people get this from some Christian churches, I know from my own experience you can also get this from some Spiritualist churches.

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Tuesday, April 15, 2014

What happens when we die? A conversation about fear of death.

I recently had a conversation with a friend on the subject of fear of death and what happens when we die. I think readers here may find the discussion interesting so I am posting it below. I've edited it to remove personal information and to make it easier to read. I've inserted some text that I only referred to in the conversation and I added a few things I wish I had said during the conversation. I also reordered some of it to put similar subjects together. So, it is not a verbatim transcript, but it is representative of what we discussed and it conveys much of the same information.

I would like to thank my friend for asking these questions and permitting me to post our conversation here. I think there will be other people who have the same questions and reading this may be of some help to them. I could not have produced this post on my own because I don't know what questions other people have, so I am grateful for my friend's participation.

What happens when we die? A conversation about fear of death.

An Overview of the Afterlife
How Do We Know About the Afterlife?
What Should You Do In This Life To Make Sure You Will Be Okay in the Afterlife?
Preparation for Death
Who Will We be with in the Afterlife?
Connecting with Loved Ones Who Are in the Afterlife.
Fear of Death.

An Overview of the Afterlife

Q. Hi, how are you? I need a little help please.

A. What's up?

Q. I'm scared of dying. Can you tell me about the afterlife and is there a hell?

A. There is a lot of information about the afterlife that comes to us from people who have had near-death experiences who have visited the afterlife and returned to tell us about it, and there is also a lot of information from spirits who have communicated through mediums.

There is no eternal damnation and there is no free ticket into the highest levels of the afterlife (i.e. heaven) because of faith. Your religion, your beliefs or lack of them doesn't matter. What determines where you go after death is your level of spiritual development.

There are various "levels" in the afterlife and spirits at a similar stage of spiritual development are together in the same level. Each level has different areas within it. Assuming you are an average person at an average state of development, after death you will go to a place in the afterlife that is similar to the environment you lived in during your earth life. An American will go to a place that looks familiar to Americans. A person from a primitive, non-technological society will go to a place that looks familiar to them. This is to help you feel comfortable as you adjust to being a spirit. You will have a body, there will be natural areas and also buildings. You will also find yourself among people who are similar to you. This is to prevent conflicts. As spirits develop they become more tolerant and associate with more and more different types of people. But spirits are telepathic. You can take average incarnated people and mix them up in nonhomogeneous groups and they can get along. But if they were telepathic and everyone knew the cynical stereotyped thoughts of everyone else, they might not get along so well. This segregation into levels of the afterlife and regions within each level occurs more through natural laws than judgment. You "gravitate" to the place where you belong. The higher levels are nicer, they are more brightly lit, the flowers are prettier. A person who is nasty and likes being nasty and wants to do more nasty things, will go to a lower level in the spirit world where he will be among other nasty people and they will have the opportunity to be nasty to each other. It is not a very nice place but it is not punishment. He stays there only until he figures out that being nasty is not really such a nice way of being and then guides will help him to develop so he can rise to a higher level.

You can find out more about afterlife from these links:

Near-death.com has information about the afterlife brought back by people who have had near-death experiences. See the section on Notable NDEs.
Spiritwritings.com has free e-books about the afterlife as told by spirits communicating through mediums. Scroll down to the section: Future Life in the Spirit World.

I also have some articles on my blog and web site that provide more information:

Q. And what about people who say there is a hell?

A. Well, it depends on what you mean by hell. Eternal damnation is not true, you can change your ways anytime you choose to, here or hereafter, and start working your way up to the higher levels in the spirit world. As I said above, in the afterlife, people find themselves among people who are like themselves. A nasty person will find himself among nasty people and it will not be a very nice place because it is full of nasty people. But it is only until he figures out that being nasty is not a very nice way to be. And when he wants to change, guides will come to him to help him advance. But there is no punishment in the afterlife. For example, you won't go to hell just because you did or didn't practice a certain religion, or because you did or didn't believe a certain doctrine. For example, when I was taking classes in mediumship, I communicated with a spirit who had committed suicide and he was not in any type of hell in the afterlife. Suicide doesn't solve any problems, you cannot escape your karma, but they don't send you to hell for it.

Q. What about reincarnation? I don't believe in it.

A. There is a lot of evidence that reincarnation occurs, but some people believe that it is actually different members of a soul group having different lives not the same individual reincarnating. Personally, I do think we reincarnate, but I suggest that you do not change your beliefs because of what I think, there are good arguments either way. The links below discuss some of the evidence for reincarnation and the reason for uncertainty about it. I recomend that you learn about the subject and make up your own mind.

Q. Is there anything to be afraid of?

A. No.

Q. Am I still going to be myself?

A. Yes you are going to be yourself. I and many other people have communicated with spirits through a form of mediumship called mental mediumship. When we do this we have mental contact with the spirits and their personality comes through. Spirits are people. When someone gets a reading from a medium they often find the spirit use words and phrases that were characteristic of them in life. When I was taking classes in mediumship, during a reading, I would sometimes use gestures that the spirit used in life. Your personality survives death. Spirits are people with normal human personalities.

Q. And from what you know? You know ... is it better there?

Yes, it is better in the afterlife. You don't have to slave to make a living to get the necessities to life. You take classes, help other people, if you like music or art or gardening or whatever, you can do that also. The atmosphere is permeated with love. When you are near God, you feel love. That is what they mean when they say "God is love", when you perceive God, it feels like love.

Q. If you die and then go on to the spirit world, doesn't that mean that everything that happens during your life is meaningless?

A. No, because you learn things from life that help you to advance in the afterlife. The earth is a school which prepares us for things we will do later in the afterlife. There are many levels there and things to do. When we finish with the earth school, there is a whole universe out there to explore.

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How Do We Know About the Afterlife?

Q. How do you know this is all true?

A. Many people who have near-death experiences visit the afterlife temporarily and then return to their bodies. When they regain consciousness, they can tell us what they learned about the afterlife. Also, spirits communicating through mediums have told us about the afterlife. These communications corroborate each other. I posted the web sites where this information can be found above.

I have also taken classes in mediumship and I have experienced communicating with spirits. I have written about this on my web site and blog:

Q. But how do you know you are not wrong?

A. I explained, the source of the information comes from many people who have had near death experiences and spirits who have communicated through mediums. Near death experiences are real experiences (more here) that people have when their body is dead (more here, and here, and here ). None of the attempts by materialists to explain near-death experiences actually explain the phenomenon. I've done a bit of mediumship myself so I trust what other mediums have done. If a medium can tell a person things about their deceased relatives that they would have no ordinary way of knowing, that indicates they may be somewhat reliable and there is reason to take seriously what they say about the afterlife.

Read some biographical books by mediums, such as John Edward or George Anderson. When you understand what they experience, it will make things clearer.

Q. Were you ever scared of dying?

A. When I was in my 20's and just out of school and started working I was a afraid. But somehow I got involved with work and life and I don't remember exactly why or how or when but I stopped worrying about it. At that time I was a skeptical atheist.

Q. What made you believe?

A. I didn't have any philosophical objections to belief. I was just ignorant of the evidence. When I read a book about a medium, it seemed genuine so I started to read more and what I read made sense to me and the authors seemed sincere and credible. Then, when I took classes in mediumship, it became real to me at a much higher level

Q. Did you ever have an experience that removed all doubt?

A. Communicating with spirits in class and having my classmates confirm what I was perceiving about their dead relatives was pretty amazing. And to do it once a week month after month puts you in a frame of mind where you have no doubt. And getting readings in class from the other students and during Spiritualist church services is also very convincing.

After my father died he came to me. I was lying in bed one night when I felt his presence in the room, and I felt him touch me on the shoulder. It wasn't like a dream it was like it was real.

Knowing about other smart people who believe that consciousness exists independently of the body helps too. My web page on Eminent Researchers discusses many Nobel prize winning and other brilliant scientists who believed the evidence that consciousness exists separate from the physical body.

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What Should You Do In This Life To Make Sure You Will Be Okay in the Afterlife?

Q. What should you do to make sure you will go to a nice place in the afterlife where you will be happy?

A. During your life, desire to be a good person and try to be a good person. By good person I mean be nice to other people. I don't mean follow some religious doctrine or religious rules. And you don't have to become a slave to helping other people and you should respect your own limits and boundaries and needs also. Just live a normal life, take care of yourself too, but do your best to be nice to people.

I think meditation helps me to live more in accordance with my spiritual values, but it is not something everyone has to do. Near-death experiencers are not coming back from the afterlife and saying, "Everyone has to meditate". They are saying that you should just try to love other people and be nice to them.

Q. Do you need to be religious?

A. You don't need to be religious. But if you like religion, be aware that there is no "wrong" religion. The religion that brings you closest to God is the best religion for you. What the sources of information about the afterlife say is important is that you try to be nice to people as well as you can. There are many circumstances that make life hard, some beyond our control, so just do the best you can. If you desire to be a good person that is the most important thing. Everything else can be corrected and atoned for, but the most important thing is to desire to be good.

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Preparation for Death

Q. What if you are really scared of dying, does it matter? Does it mean you'll go to a bad place in the afterlife?

A. No, it won't cause you to go to a bad place. As people approach death, spirit guides prepare them for crossing over. They have visions of the afterlife and deceased family coming to visit them. These phenomena are called Death Bed Visions

The more you learn about the afterlife, the more your mind will be prepared, the easier the transition will be because it will be easier for spirits to help you. So it is good that you are asking these questions now. The knowledge should make your transition very easy when the time eventually comes for you to cross over. Understanding the principles of spiritualism is all anyone needs to know to make their transition easy.

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Who Will We be With in the Afterlife?

Q. Will we be with our relatives? My aunt died 3 months ago. Am I going to see my aunt one day?

A. It is very possible that you will meet your aunt in the afterlife. Usually when you die you are met by your family and friends that have preceded you and they will help you adjust to your new life as a spirit.

Q. Are you afraid?

A. No, I think the afterlife will be much nicer than the earth life.

Q. But doesn't it bother you that you will be alone?

A. I don't expect to be alone, why do you ask that?

Q. What if you are not in the same level as your friends and family?

A. But we have friends in our own level, and we have our soul group. We don't remember, but most likely some of them are people you know in this life. You can also visit with spirits in other regions of your own level and spirits in other levels if they are not too far above or below yours.

Some of the evidence for reincarnation indicates that spirits incarnate together with different relationships each time. One time you are the mother, another time the son, another time a family friend. Before you incarnate, you meet with your spirit friends and plan your future lives. You will know the same people in life and in the afterlife.

There will also be spirit guides, more advanced spirits that have advised you in the past, who you will remember when you cross over.

Q. But i don't like changes!!!! And I want to be with my friends and family for good!

A. You will have friends who make progress at the same rate as you. Some of these are probably people you consider part of your family now. As you advance you will make more and more friends. Eternity is a long time. You will want new things to do.

Q. And what about love?

A. Spirits love each other as friends. They don't have to keep to marriages because earth relationships are only for the earth life. But if two or more spirits want to stay together they can. One spirit can delay advancing to a higher level while waiting for a less advanced friend to catch up. Some people say spirits have something like sex but there isn't a lot known about it.

Everything in the earth plane corresponds to something in the spirit world but the earth version is a pale shadow compared to what it is in the afterlife, including love. One time when I was in mediumship class, the spirit of a woman communicated through me. She wanted to tell to her boyfriend, who was one of my classmates, that she still loved him. She did this by causing me to feel the love that she felt for him. It was very powerful. All I could think of was, "I wish someone loved me that much." I tried to tell my classmate, "She says she loves you ... a lot", but human words cannot describe the feelings of pure spirit.

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Connecting With Loved Ones Who Are Already In The Afterlife

Q. Is it going to be okay? What about my aunt?

A. I don't see any reason to think you or you aunt will have any problems. Is there something in particular that concerns you about her?

Q. She had problems with anxiety for many years.

A. I am sure she is much happier now that she is disconnected from her physical brain.

Q. Do you think she can still see me?

A. Very probably. If you want to tell her something just talk to her.

Q. Do you think she knows that I still love her and miss her? I don't feel her presence.

A. Yes, she most likely knows. But you can tell her if you want to. Spirits also like it if we pray for them, something positive, for example, that they may be happy in their new environment and among people who love them.

If you want to try to communicate with her, have a look at this article: How to Communicate with Spirits. You don't have to try it, but you might find it helpful to understand some of the ways we can communicate with them.

If you are interested, these links are about my experiences communicating with spirits:

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Fear of Death

Q. I'm so Jealous that you aren't scared. I cant do anything because all I can think about that its all going to end.

A. When you get a chance, read some of the material I suggested and it might help you feel better.

Q. The thing is that there are a lot of scary stories so how do you know what to believe?

A. A lot of scary things happen to people while they are alive. Do you live your life in fear?

Q. I know that a lot things happen here, but I don't know about the afterlife so that's what's scared me ... if its going to be worse than here.

A. The people who have near-death experiences and the spirits who communicate through mediums say that it is much, much nicer in the afterlife than in the earth life. Often, near-death experiencers don't want to come back to the earth, they would rather stay in the afterlife. They say the atmosphere is permeated with love. Those that do want to come back usually feel that way only because they have children who need them.

I went to a workshop once on trance mediumship. That is a different form of mediumship than I was learning in my classes. In trance mediumship, the spirit comes into the body of the medium and speaks in his own words through the medium. I was a new student at the time so I was not allowed to participate I could only observe. But most of the other students were well known to me because they were in my mediumship class and were members of my church. When they each took at turn at trance mediumship, the spirits who were communicating through them were asked by the teacher of the workshop if they wanted to come back and live another life on the earth. None of them said they would like to do that. They all preferred the afterlife to the earth life. It is much nicer there than here. I knew these students, I saw what happened, they were not hypnotized or faking.

All of this is a lot to absorb at once, particularly if you haven't come across this information before. You can't change your whole world view instantly. Try reading some of the material I suggested, biographies of mediums and accounts of near-death experiences. Maybe over time you will absorb the ideas and feel better. But I can only give you information, I am not trained to help you with emotions as a therapist or psychologist would be. If your fear remains, there are therapists who specialize in spiritual issues you could try. A therapist might help you with grief for your aunt as well.

Sometimes people may fear death, or experience excessive grief, or question the purpose of life, due to psychological factors and in that case no amount of knowledge about the afterlife or any answers to spiritual questions will help them. In such cases, a person might do better by seeking answers in psychology either through self-help books or seeing a therapist.

It's like when someone is afraid to fly in an airplane. They know thousands of people fly everyday and the chance of a problem occurring is next to zero, but they still panic when they think of flying. The problem is not knowledge, it is something psychological and the solution will be found through psychology rather than through studying information about flying.

I have to go now, if you have more questions send me a message and I will try to get to them later. My main suggestion is to try to read some biographical books by John Edward and George Anderson or other mediums. There are also some free e-books at Spiritwritings.com see the section "Future Life in the Spirit World". Or read about people who have had near-death experiences, try this web site: Near-death.com see the section on "Notable NDEs"

Bye for now.

Q. Thank you very much for your time.

A. You're welcome.

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Sunday, September 15, 2013

The Purpose of Life: Incarnation and Reincarnation and Suffering

Someone on an internet discussion forum recently asked about the purpose of life and why there is so much suffering in the world. Here is how I answered....

We are here on the earth plane for spiritual development. "Spiritual development" means becoming fit for a higher level in the spirit world. That means developing character traits that make us more loving, tolerant, forgiving, and also more persevering, cooperative, and wise.

In the afterlife, you can pursue many of the same interests you had in life such as music or art. There are also entertainments and subjects to study. We study our previous life and prepare for our next life. But eternity is a long time and after a handful of incarnations on the earth plane, we move on to other challenges. What are the tasks we attribute to God? Creation of the universe, creation of life on earth, responding to prayers. In our future, we will be doing similar tasks as agents of God. In order to do them well, we will need to be loving, forgiving, tolerant, persevering, cooperative, and wise. We incarnate to develop traits and learn lessons that we will need to do the work of advanced spirits.

Sometimes a spirit will incarnate to help another spirit learn a lesson. That might mean being a victim or victimizing another person. Everyone needs to experience all sides. You need to experience being a nasty person yourself to understand why someone might harm another person. This will enable you to forgive people who harm you because you will understand why they do what they do from your own experience doing nasty things. You also need to experience being harmed so you can understand why it is wrong to harm other people. If you know what it feels like to be harmed, you will not want to inflict harm on anyone else. Also, it will make you more sympathetic to people who are suffering and you will want to help them.

One of the most important lessons we learn is that helping others leads to joy and happiness. In order to learn this lesson, there have to be people who need your help. In order for others to learn this lesson, you need to be in a situation where you can be helped by other people. This is another reason lives are full of difficulties: so we can learn to help each other.

Sometimes learning does not occur until after death during the life review when you experience how you influenced other people from their perspective. The memories of the life review will be like your own memories. The joy you caused will be like a memory of joy you experienced. Suffering you caused will be like a memory of suffering you experienced. If you haven't learned it during life, then from the life review you will learn that doing good is desirable and doing harm is not desirable, that we are all one, that when you harm another you harm yourself, when you help another you bring joy to yourself.

You should not judge other people because you can't tell, by how a person acts or what happens to them, what a person's reason for incarnating is. Wealth doesn't mean anything. A new soul might be attracted to material things, an old soul might not be materialistic. However an old soul might need wealth to accomplish a higher purpose of changing society. Or, an old soul may be be serving the poor in some out of the way, unseen, thankless job. A successful businessman might be a new soul who wants to experience wealth. Or, he might be an old soul who wants to help our civilization develop a higher standard of living. But he also might have depression or have been abused as a child and may hate his life. You can't tell from outward appearances the spiritual nature and purpose of another person's life.

Rewards for good actions might come in the current lifetime or in the afterlife. You prepare the conditions you will experience in the afterlife by what you do in this life. From a spirit's point of view, the rewards in this life have very little value compared to the possible rewards in the afterlife. The positive character traits you develop in this life will stay with your throughout eternity. They are their own reward.

Before a spirit is born he plans the outlines of his life. The plan is made in consultation with advanced spirits. So whether some action will lead to adverse consequences in the afterlife depends on what the plan was and why that plan was made. If someone has a life plan and he agrees to harm another person so that person can learn why harming people is wrong, there would not be any adverse consequences of those actions.

Saying someone is "punished" in the afterlife is not correct. There is no vindictive punishment. The life review and reincarnation are done for learning not punishment. People experience the natural consequences of their actions. Good actions have good consequences, bad actions have bad consequences. Where you go in the spirit world, to a nice place or a not so nice place, is determined more by natural law, like gravity, than by judgment. There is no purgatory where souls are sentenced to specific punishments for certain crimes. You have learning experiences: the life review, reincarnation, levels in the spirit world where similar souls interact with each other. Anyone at any time anywhere here or hereafter, can decide to change their ways and start working their way up to the higher levels by trying to help others.

A nasty person, who doesn't recognize hurting other people is wrong, who won't "get with the program" and start helping other people in order to earn his way to the higher levels in the spirit world, may finds himself, after death, in a lower sphere with other nasty souls doing nasty things to each other, as is reported in hellish near-death experiences. That is not the same as God ordaining a specific punishment for a specific misdeed. It is simply putting similar souls together in the hope they learn from their experiences. The purpose of the suffering that occurs when such souls are allowed to harm each other is to help them in their spiritual development. Sometimes a particularly nasty, aggressive, cruel, arrogant spirit needs to learn humility and why it is better for us to help each other rather than harm each other and that we should act together for mutual benefit rather than act individually in pursuit of selfish goals. This understanding can come from the suffering that people observe happening during hellish near-death experiences. Sometimes it takes great suffering to lose pride, arrogance, and hate, and truly desire assistance, to do what is necessary to let go of egotistical attachment to the belief in individual power and self-sufficiency - to recognize the necessity of, and ask for, assistance from a higher power. Such souls have to recognize that they alone are not all-powerful, they need the good will of others to have a pleasant existence. For some souls, this realization will only be made after great suffering.

The Principles of Spiritualism

Also see last paragraph
here.

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

"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.

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