Is Peace on Earth Possible?

Kriyananda explains why the yuga cycle gives him hope that peace on Earth is possible in the future.



Now, Kriyananda is not some up in the air "crazy wisdom" guru who uses religion to disguise socialism. He does not go out and promote hedonism under the guise of tantra, though he has made a number of gross errors in his life sexually. He has stated that government spending is responsible for collapsing the economy, he has built several successful communities around the world that have thrived for decades, he is not a cultural Marxist or an economic Marxist, but he does understand the value of community and working together rather than competing.



How can we get peace on Earth? The realist answer is that the old guard of super rich super greedy New World Order elite need to die out. People like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and the Coca Cola Brothers and Mark Suckerface. People for whom there is not enough money in the universe. People who would sell their own mother for a penny and commit treason to get a no-bid contract. Then the younger people can learn from the example of Ananda and move toward communal living.

Suffering and The Meaning of Life

Fitting in with what I've written two weeks ago about reincarnation, I'll talk here about the meaning of life.



Michael Prescott has some speculations about why there is suffering in the world where an intelligent but not omniscient God created the world to gain life experience. Here's what I left as a comment.



I don't like the idea of God creating the universe to experience things. That seems like a cosmic version of the TV show Jackass. "Wouldn't it be cool to see what it would be like to get burned alive in a car crash? Maybe I could get out before getting killed? Wouldn't that be fun to see if I could?" It's a bit of an oversimplification, but it seems to reduce God or Spirit or even individual souls to adrenaline junkies, or at the very least people who are extremely bored with too much free time. Seeking experience for the sake of experience seems so very underwhelming to me. In its absolute worst form, as seen in some versions of "new age" literature, souls plan their lives beforehand in minute details, so you end up with a scenario where souls are basically masochists. A group of souls floating around planning their next life together when one soul says to the others "I'll be the child and you'll be my parents. At age five, no four and a half, I'll get cancer and die and break your hearts. Then, fifty years of misery later, you'll die and we'll meet up back here and I'll point and laugh and say 'fooled ya!' Then, the next go around I'll be the parent and you two can be the children who die. It will be rousing great fun!"

There are two explanations for this world of suffering that I see merit to. They both say primarily that our purpose here is to escape the world and only really differ in explaining how we got stuck here in the first place, to a degree.

In the perennial traditions and in A Course in Miracles, we individual souls exist because God needed someone to love. It's not loneliness in the everyday sense, because God lacks nothing. This is a higher level need based on over-abundance. God is so overflowing with love that it wanted someone to share it with. The world itself is seen as illusory, but even if it's not there need be no problem with suffering at all.

"Natural suffering" like volcanoes and asteroids and having to kill other creatures to survive is an easy one. The world is pretty close to as optimal as one can get. The photoreceptors in the eye can detect single photons, so they can't get any better, for example. There are trade-offs to everything because of the physical constraints of the world (which need to be unimaginably precise to permit the universe and life to exist). Humans have easily injured backs and knees, and narrow hips make childbirth painful, but those are offset by the greater benefits that are gotten through walking upright. So natural suffering can be explained through utilitarianism. Certain unpleasant situations must exist to permit much greater benefits.

The much bigger problem is human caused suffering, like rape and murder and war. That is traditionally explained through the free will defense. God wants us to share in the divine love voluntarily. Forcing us to love would be a form of metaphysical rape.

Even if the world is to an extent "real", more good is wrought through the way the world is than the bad caused by the suffering. We can share in love in more ways, even if we choose not to. Suffering then is no longer God's problem, it is a problem of our own refusal to be moral and treat one another as we should.

Of course, if the world is illusory, then we are tricking ourselves into thinking this suffering exists and our goal is to realize this and get out and back to the perfection into which we were created.

A Course in Miracles explains this wonderfully. God did not create the world, we did, and suffering exists because of our fear and guilt. Unsatisfied with the equal love God was giving to all of us in perfection, we (who find ourselves in this universe) demanded special love. We wanted to be loved more. When God refused to give in to our egoistic demands we then imagined this world up where we could be special. The dream of suffering and death "prove" we are more powerful than the God who refused us the special status we "deserve". Knowing we can't really hurt ourselves, God permits us to sulk in the corner until we get over our upset. At the same time God descended into the dream to remind us that we are dreaming and can wake up at any time when we are ready to return to the perfection into which we were created.

It makes sense because real people do this all the time. There is nothing new that we can't test about what may or may not be the motivations of spirits who want to experience horrible things just to see what it's like. The psychology of the Course is real world human psychology and can be seen in child development all over the world. Children sulk. Adults sulk. We project our emotions and delusions onto the world. We punish ourselves unnecessarily out of misplaced guilt. It makes sense to suppose that if we do this on Earth than we would do the same on a grander scale in some higher dimension. There's nothing in it that resembles speculation about what stunts Superman would pull to see if he could jump off the Empire State Building or whatever.

Suffering acts also as a motivation to escape the world. It acts as a motivation to do good to others so that we can grow in wisdom and compassion. So we move up the evolutionary ladder from plants to animals on to humans, and while the capacity for suffering increases so too do the benefits increase at a much faster rate. So a plant suffers less than a cow but it gets less out of life than the cow, and the cow suffers less than a human but it gets less out of life than the human. And this continues until we realize that the world is illusory and then we can either leave it forever or we can take the path of the bodhisattva and deliberately return to the world and choose to suffer more to alleviate the suffering of others. We can grow into perfect expressions of morality rather than just being bored and bouncing around the universe to see what it's like.

And as I've written over a thousand words by now I'll end here.

A Tale of Two Rebirths

There are two main versions of the mechanics of reincarnation that I will call "old" and "new" for sake of simplicity.

The old system has been around for thousands of years. While the details differ slightly, it is the system of reincarnation taught primarily by Hindus and Buddhists, but also by some ancient Christian sects and in Judaism until about the fifteenth century. A good outline is provided in an essay by Ken Wilber called "Death, Rebirth, and Meditation". There exists some disagreement as to what survives and how long the whole process takes, but in general rebirth takes between 49 days and 200 years; some say personality and memories do not transmigrate and others do. All the differences are really pretty minor when viewed against the similarities regarding how the mechanism itself works. Human psychology is basically the same as what modern science has shown us. Our fears and addictions carry on with us where we have to deal with them in very real terms. Psychological traumas we suffer in this life must be dealt with in this life or the next, and if we cannot overcome our problems than we will be carried aloft by them into a new rebirth. Some say we meet up with people we've known in this life (or even other past lives) in the between life stage, and that certain souls transmigrate together, and others say we do this all alone, but every action in this life always has an equal reaction in the next. There is no escaping causality, the books must be balanced, full stop. We work through our troubles, gradually perfecting ourselves lifetime after lifetime until we finally break free from suffering all together and abide as Spirit forever.

In the new system, promulgated by certain spiritualist circles and "new age" movements, the whole old system is turned on its head. Rather than beginning in ignorance and spending lifetimes trying to end suffering, in the new system we all begin enlightened and we come to this life to experience suffering. Every soul is enlightened, we come to this world with a sort of willful amnesia, and when we die we are automatically restored to perfect knowledge. The lives we live are games we play with one another, and they don't really mean anything on the other side. When we die there is no balancing of good and bad deeds, because there is no good or bad, as we plan our lives out in minute details from the beginning. People who get raped or murdered make agreements with other souls who will be doing the raping and murdering, so there are no villains and victims, and not because the world is ultimately illusory, but because the world is a game we play for life experience. In the new system souls are basically masochists. You can't really know what something is like until you experience it first hand, so a soul living in perfection might have an idea what suffering is, but it doesn't really know until it experiences it for itself.

Why anyone would want to partake of such experiences I cannot understand. If I were Superman and I knew with absolute certainty I could never get hurt I still wouldn't care to know what it felt like to drive a car into a tree or get shot in the face. I wouldn't care to know what it was like to drown or get exploded. I wouldn't care to know what it was like to live in poverty on the streets, or for that matter what it would be like to live in a mansion eating lobster every day.

The new system is very distasteful and reeks of wish fulfillment. Imagine a group of souls floating around planning their next life together. One soul says to the others "I'll be the child and you'll be my parents. At age five, no four and a half, I'll get cancer and die and break your hearts. Then, fifty years of misery later, you'll die and we'll meet up back here and I'll point and laugh and say 'fooled ya!' Then, the next go around I'll be the parent and you two can be the children who die. It will be rousing great fun!" The idea infuriates me, to be honest. I think that's much worse than the materialist idea that when you're dead you're dead and there's no justice. I would much rather live in a universe where life is ultimately meaningless and there is no afterlife than have a universe where the Nazis made an agreement with the millions of people murdered in the Holocaust that the whole thing would be staged just to see what it would be like to gas eleven million people. Admittedly the grotesquery of such a scenario is not evidence that it is not true in itself, but it does not help the case either.

It is also not helped by the types of evidence that are available to support either system. The old system, which recapitulates everything we know from earthly psychology, is attested to through near death experiences that reveal our mental state and personalities are pretty much the same after death as before, and through spontaneously remembered past lives of children that often turn out to be phenomenally accurate when later investigated. Enlightened sages also attest to the veracity of the old system through the remembrance of their past lives.

The primary evidence for the new system is through hypnosis of adults, that sometimes does produce highly accurate results (which could be more akin to a form of remote viewing), but a lot of times these memories are false, crafted by the imagination of the subject and the leading of the hypnotist. The new system is also, sometimes, attested to by channeled material, but by no means all. Some channeled material flatly denies the existence of reincarnation, other spirits admit they don't know, and some affirm the old system. The spirits that talk about group souls, of instant enlightenment following death, of coming to Earth to experience things no sane person would ever want to experience such as disease, disasters, and war, and flat out deny the existence of good and evil, seem to me to be lower spirits. Whether malicious or simply tricksters (like Internet trolls of the spirit world), they will say whatever gets them the most attention, and earthly interlocutors receiving confirmation of their desires pass it along in books that say you can literally create your reality and that morality is for squares. As John admonishes in his first epistle, we are to test the spirits to see if they are of God. Anyone from the other side can say they are advanced spirits with brilliant insight into the workings of the universe, and that is why we must use our reason and intelligence to see if what they say makes sense.

In the light of the evidence and the moral implications I would have to say that if reincarnation does exist it seems far more likely that the old system with a gradual progression from ignorance to perfection is correct.

The War Against Cold Fusion

This is the ultimate green energy. The capacity exists to supply all of humanity's power needs for the next two billion years virtually free of charge and with no pollution output. With this all things are possible. Whole worlds open up and the stars themselves are available for colonisation. The ultimate freeing of humanity from all material limitations is available.



You had better believe the power elite are moving Heaven and Earth to kill this.

Exploring the Near Death Experience

Someone called TheSurvivalIndex has put out a 15 minute video detailing the cultural phenomena associated with the NDE. He says three main groups of people form the bulk of the popular presentation on the NDE:
1. Fundamentalist Christians,
2. New Age Haberdashers, and
3. Fundamaterialist Skep-Dicks.
Group 1 latches on to the pro-Fundamentalist Christian NDEs as proof of their beliefs and ignores or even denigrates NDEs that are favourable to other religions or to no religions at all (like atheists who have NDEs that tell them part of their life's mission is to be an atheist). Group 2 extrapolates from the NDE to believe all sorts of stuff that most likely is untrue (Loch Ness Monster, Fairies, Vampires, etc.*) and often tries to profit large offering spurious services to unknowledgable people. Group 3 likes to come up with bullshit just-so stories to explain away the NDE because they are committed to materialism, even when those stories blatantly ignore real facts, are based on illogic, and other fundamaterialists disagree and tear apart opposing stories. All three groups are able to thrive because the general populous doesn't actually read the primary material - actual NDE accounts and the reports of NDE investigators. Even though all three groups are contradicted by the evidence that doesn't bother them because as long as the vast majority of people are ignorant of that evidence they can still come off looking like authority figures.










*I'm not necessarily saying things like the Loch Ness Monster and fairies are not real - they may be - but I have looked into the topics and can't really find any good evidence for them. Loch Ness almost certainly can't support a single large creature, let alone a breeding population. There were biosonar signals detected in Lake Champlain though, indicating that, while not a "monster" there has to be a freshwater equivalent of a cetacean, something that has never before been seen. Things like fairies, gnomes, and other little people stretch my credulity a might, but they may have something to do with some spiritual force, I don't know and am open to the possibility. Vampires, either corpses reanimated by evil spirits (as the original vampires were), people infected with a virus that compells them to drink blood, or these psychic vampires who are real people who claim to drain people's energy in some way they never quite explain, are probably one of the least likely of these "paranormal" phenomena. If vampires reproduce like zombies there should have been a "vampire" apocalypse by now. The vampires in the Blade movies kept changing to suit the story and the Underworld vampires were never really explained very well, so I don't know how they stayed in hiding all these centuries. Psychic vampirism appears to be a lifestyle choice, like hippies or bikers other such groups, and probably aren't vampires at all, although they get happiness from playing a role. There are people who are difficult or depressed or assaholic and drain your energy that way, but there's nothing "paranormal" about that.

The New Age

On this day in 1945, just before dawn, the world entered the atomic age. The Manhattan Project cost $2 billion ($20 billion today) and involved the largest group of brilliant minds ever assembled. Not too long after two bombs would be dropped on Japan, turning the largest science experiment in history into largest weapon of war ever used. It was estimated that in order to defeat the Japanese the largest invasion ever would have to be conducted, resulting in one million American casualties. Five million Japanese would have to be killed reaching Tokyo and forcing the government to surrender. The Russians would have invaded from the north, resulting in millions more dead and dividing the Japanese islands in two, one communist, one capitalist. The divided nation would eventually go to war to reunify the islands in a conflict that would make Korea look like a school yard squabble. For saving countless millions of lives and ending the war more than a year early, the overwhelming impetus toward world peace that was born on 16 July 1945 cannot be underestimated. There has not been another World War since. There has not been anything close to one, and we have the threat of nuclear annihilation to thank. It seems we humans are so primitive that we have to be scared straight, or at least less crooked.




Clip from "Trinity and Beyond"



Clip from The History Channel

Many Lives, Unconvincing Masters

I just finished reading Many Lives, Many Masters by Dr. Brian Weiss, and I must say it was a lot like Random Harvest: the exciting final chapter didn't make up for the several boring ones that preceded it. The Masters part of the title is a reference to spiritual "masters" whom the author speaks to throughout the past life regressions of his patient. I am disappointed for a number of reasons, mostly relating to the lack of science (Weiss admits this was not a scientific study, unfortunately he does so half way through the book so any potential readers wouldn't know this until after having bought it). There is one test subject (a neurotic hospital employee with supermodel good looks), and none of the information from the rather vague past life regressions was ever checked for accuracy! Yes, when certain lifetimes were recalled months apart the details were the same, but that doesn't make up for any of the previously mentioned lacks.

I am struck by just how many times Weiss must mention his patient's physical attractiveness. Isn't there an ethics issue involved here, and isn't he married with children? Does a book about reincarnation need passages like "I knew she was smoking hot before, but now that she's cured..." (not actually in the book).

The revelations from the "masters" seem like fancy new age-isms that never once struck me as profound (definitely not as profound as the author claims them to be) and many contradict the findings of the past 150 years of mediumship research, NDEs, and what genuine spiritual masters have told us over the centuries. For example, one of the "masters" says that we are not all created equal, to which Dr. Weiss casually muses, what would the founding fathers have thought about this? Well, if you're talking spiritually all souls come from God and to God they must return. All souls possess the same potential for enlightenment. If you're talking physically we all start at ground zero as infants, completely helpless, unable to do anything. Certainly we all possess different talents which set us apart from one another (Mozart was a musical genius and Hank Aaron could hit home runs better than anyone until steroids came along), but if, as the book mentions several times, the point of life is to grow more godly over several lifetimes then shouldn't we look past these transient talents at the soul within?

In fact the good doctor seems to contradict himself on this point at the very end. In what was my favourite part of the book, he recounts a dream he had months after the regressions:

On another night, in a different dream I was asking a question. "How is it that you say all are equal, yet the obvious contradictions smack us in the face: inequalities in virtues, temperances, finances, rights, abilities and talents, intelligence, mathematical aptitude, ad infinitum?"

The answer was a metaphor. "It is as if a large diamond were to be found inside each person. Picture a diamond a foot long. The diamond has a thousand facets, but the facets are covered with dirt and tar. It is the job of the soul to clean each facet until the surface is brilliant and can reflect a rainbow of colors.

"Now, some have cleaned many facets and gleam brightly. Others have only managed to clean a few; they do not sparkle so. Yet, underneath the dirt, each person possesses within his or her breast a brilliant diamond with a thousand gleaming facets. The diamond is perfect, not one flaw. The only differences among people are the number of facets cleaned. But each diamond is the same, and each is perfect.

"When all the facets are cleaned and shining forth in a spectrum of lights, the diamond returns to the pure energy that it was originally. The lights remain. It is as if the process that goes into making the diamond is reversed, all that pressure released. The pure energy exists in the rainbow of lights, and the lights possess consciousness and knowledge.

"And all of the diamonds are perfect."

The book is slow, repetitive, and unconvincing. I would recommend giving this one a pass.

-Dee