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.

Evil and God (Post 600)

Supposedly what I call the Non-Problem of Evil is the strongest argument against the existence of God. Boston College Professor of Philosophy Peter Kreeft explains that the concept of evil, both human willed action and natural evil, only makes sense in the context of God's existence. Without God setting a benchmark for goodness evil is reduced to nothing more than personal preference. Rather than serving as an argument against the existence of God, the existence of evil is an argument for the existence of God.



Runs 4:50

Mind in Tibetan Buddhism

At death you can no longer lie to yourself. You cannot rationalise away all the negative aspects of your life and your personality. The state of mind you have at the moment of death determins what you will experience, so it is vitally important to prepare now, while you are in this body, for what is to come. Lama Ole Nydahl of the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism explains the mind and the bardos.

The Myth of Cultural Relativity

Why is it that on every video about Egypt, or archaeology in general, there has to be someone who leaves a comment about racialism? "You don't think [insert minority here] was smart enough to create something on their own! You're racialist!"

The truth of the matter is, most people in the world were not smart enough to do things on their own. People from Eurasia, and Egypt, did invent a whole lot, and had achieved a whole lot, and everyone else in the world was pretty much stuck in the stone age until the 18th century when they were dragged kicking and screaming into modernity.

People in North America did not have wheels, few had any form of record keeping, and those who had a limited usage of metal used it for ornamental purposes, not for anything practical. However impressive the accomplishments of the Maya or the Peruvian peoples, those accomplishments were all equivalent to things Eurasians had done many thousands of years earlier. Megalithic cairns dating back over 10,000 years map out precise astronomical alignments. While Egyptian pyramids were made from enormous blocks of cut stone, Mesoamerican pyramids were mostly made of rubble, only faced with stone. There were people in the Americas who built tumuli (earthen mounds), even up to probably 1500, while Eurasians had advanced beyond this thousands of years earlier. Not all cultures are equivalent, not scientifically, not technologically, not philosophically, not artistically, and not morally.

I don't think there is anyone who would argue that all breeds of dog are equivalent. Some dogs run really fast, others are exceptional at hunting waterfowl, others are useful for military work. No one would argue that all dogs are equivalent. And yet, somehow, there are some people who manage to think that all humans are equivalent. Some humans are exceptional at metal work, and philosophy, and construction, and hydrology, and navigation, and agriculture, and science, and they almost all come from the same areas. And some humans are great at making mud huts, and they pretty much live everywhere else.

The mistake is to separate humans from the natural world and make equal that which is not. As groups of humans separated geographically breed, just like dogs, different traits are passed on. Some breeds of human accumulate more beneficial traits than others, just like dogs. Some dogs (created in modern times by sick humans) have severe physical deformities that are a terrible detriment to their health. Some dogs are so deformed they cannot even breed without human intervention. The same is true with humans. Certain groups of humans are really short, others have developed the ability to digest milk into adulthood, some can run for days without tiring, and some groups of humans are incredibly smart. But for some reason while it is perfectly fine to talk about how breeding affects dogs, people get up in arms when anyone talks about breeding in humans.

I'm not talking about intrinsic human-ness, I'm not saying other groups of people should be enslaved or exterminated, as people who feel instead of think have already assumed my argument is and have stopped reading. Stupid people are just as human as smart people, just as small deformed dogs are just as dog as reasonable-sized healthy dogs. It's just that stupid people are not as smart as smart people, and so one would find it a lot more difficult to believe that a group of stupid people would be able to create more advanced structures than a group of smart people. That's what the whole issue is. It is easier to believe that certain cultures with long histories of great achievements could create certain monuments with their technology than it is to believe another culture could do the same with much more primitive technology and no suitable record of achievements. It's logic, not feelings. Try using it.

Meditation Problems and Benefits

Here's a Daily Mail article about the supposed dangers of meditation and how it's evil and you should just take a pill. There's a bullshit study out in the Lancet about all of seven prisoners who used some sort of mindfulness practice.



Inmates at seven prisons in the Midlands took 90-minute classes once a week and completed tests to measure their higher cognitive functions in a ten week randomised control trial.

The prisoners’ moods improved, and their stress and psychological distress reduced - but they were found to be just as aggressive before the mindfulness techniques.



Aside from the uselessly small sample size, mindfulness is not designed to target aggression. Mindfulness deals with getting above feelings, thoughts, and perceptions. Mindfulness is a way of developing
wisdom, which is only the ability to recognise Emptiness. There are
separate practices for compassion and shadow work to deal with
aggression. From the perspective of the Absolute NOTHING is arising,
no thoughts, no perceptions, no emotions. It is impossible to deal
with relative issues from an Absolute perspective because there is no
relativity to deal with! 



The guiding principle of mindfulness is to live more ‘in the moment’, spending less time going over past stresses and worrying about future problems.



The guiding principle of mindfulness is to notice the moment-by-moment arising and ceasing of conditions so as to disidentify with them. You have thoughts, but you are not your thoughts; you have feelings, but you are not your feelings; you have sensations, but you are not your sensations; you have perceptions, but you are not your sensations. You are the Witness of all things that are arising and ceasing, and as Witness you cannot see yourself.



It is a secular practice that is said to help people recognise and overcome negative thoughts while noticing small pleasures.



This right here is the problem. It is not a secular practice to lower blood pressure or anything else they claim it to be. It is a spiritual practice to recognise Spirit as such. Just because there are side benefits does not mean that those benefits are the main, or even a significant, focus of the practice itself. Without a proper framework any realisation will not stick. You can get into certain states and make the mind unmovable, and then as soon as you get out of them you are back to who you were before you started. If you were a jerk before meditation you will be a jerk after meditation. The other areas you work on are to stop yourself from being a jerk in the relative world so that when you stop meditating you don't go back to being a jerk.



There are five different practices that must be used in conjunction to hit the mind from all angles if you want to do everything you can go guarantee enlightenment:



1. Wisdom

The ability to recognize Emptiness. Absolute Truth. Worked at through state training, concentrative or insight. (e.g. praying without ceasing, visualization, "the Terminator thought", awareness of the breath)



2. Compassion

The ability to manifest morality in the world. Relative truth. (Sila, radical forgiveness, tonglen)



3. Shadow

Unconscious aspects the self does not identify with. The source of attachment and projection. (Psychoanalysis, dream analysis, 3-2-1 process)



4. Framework

Thinking. Philosophy. Stages of development. This is what makes realization stick. Without it you've just had an experience that can be interpreted as anything, agita, a drug trip, hallucination, demons, messianic status, etc. (Retreat from untruth, Integral AQAL model, A Course in Miracles text, Socratic method)



5. Body

Physical exercise and nutrition. This is to maintain the body so you can be healthy and fit enough to do the mental work in the manfiest world. Having a healthy body allows the mind to transcend the body more easily because the fewer physical problems there are to serve as distractions (hunger, pains, fatigue, illness), the more effort can go into training the mind. (Calisthenics, weight lifting, hatha yoga, tai chi chuan, proper diet, vitamins)



Meditation and mindfulness is promoted by celebrities including Gwyneth Paltrow and Russell Brand, who boast of its power to help people put stress out of their minds and live for the moment.

But the treatment can itself trigger mania, depression, hallucinations and psychosis, psychological studies in the UK and US have found.

The practice is part of a growing movement based on ancient Eastern traditions of meditation.

However, 60 per cent of people who had been on a meditation retreat had suffered at least one negative side effect, including panic, depression and confusion, a study in the US found.



Those mediation "retreats" are ridiculous. Spend three days stroking your own ego and you'll become enlightened.



With regard to bad drug trips, some people take drugs to try to short cut enlightenment. And when they get taken above the mundane and see that life as they know it is all illusion and time doesn't exist they cannot handle it all at once and some commit suicide. You shouldn't take dope looking for pretty lights and sounds because you might get all of Beethoven downloaded into your brain in a nanosecond.



Dangers exist because we've spent countless eons living with reduced consciousness, practically unconscious compared to the great heights we are meant to attain. Change requires a great many steps that one must necessarily traverse. That's why most change is gradual. So gradual, in fact, that most people don't even notice it, like aging. Abrupt change requires going through all those steps all at once and usually looks like getting struck by lightning. One cannot bench 500 pounds having never exercised before, the muscles need to adapt. And if one were to attempt such a feat it would be very painful. The same is true with trying to force all of cosmic consciousness into a brain that is hardwired to focus on food and reproduction and the egoic pursuits.

Problems only arise when people try to force too much current through a wire that is not rated to handle it. In most people there's little current, but some people spend years getting the current to expand to the point where they can handle it. Sometimes, usually when people do something they're not supposed to, there's too much current and people have bad experiences, but that's not some jerk God doing it to be mean, that's someone who has only lifted a pool noodle trying to bench 500 pounds all at once.



That's why there's so much secrecy surrounding mystical initiation. It's the same reason calculus or sniper training aren't taught to kindergartners, there are a lot of prior steps that must be learned first because there are a whole lot of ways to mess things up even with simple mistakes.



The average person is nowhere near ready to find out the inner workings of one's own mind. It would be like taking someone from the middle of the Amazon forest who has never had contact with the modern world and putting that person in the middle of Hong Kong and expecting the Amazonian to become a millionaire in a weekend. It's impossible. That's why the eightfold path does not begin with samadhi, it begins with the intention, or determination to follow the path through till the end, and then it immediately moves to morality. A moral framework is necessary to get a person to become receptive to these higher realities.



If you're using meditation as a means of blissing out or lowering your blood pressure you're trying to fly a kite during a thunderstorm and hoping that lightning might produce a really cool sensation when it strikes you.

Uri Geller's Tricks?

If y'all remember the early days of The Urban Mystic, there was probably the biggest, and maybe the only, controversey in Urban Mystic history when Bob Couttie tried to spam the site! I let him post his comment and then eight months later he posted the same comment and I deleted it and then he accused me of censorship. That led to some work by a reader/guest contributer countering Couttie's claims regarding Uri Geller and nitinol. I purchased a very old copy of Couttie's book (which is out of print), read it, and wrote a 16 page refutation that so far is up only in PDF format. One day I will turn it into a separate page on the site as well as a video series.

That was 2010. The crux of the matter is does Uri Geller use trickery to bend spoons or not? I don't have an answer, and I've made clear on The Urban Mystic many times that I think it could go either way. Some of his feats are probably tricks, but there is good evidence that he has genuine powers as well. Remember, Uri Geller became a multi millionaire not by bending spoons, but by dowsing for oil, and he has been very successful at finding oil and minerals just by pointing at spots on maps. There is also the experiments performed at SRI with dowsing that appear legitimate.



The reason I bring this up is that I have discovered a video of Bob Couttie talking about Uri Geller, with some evidence of what might be trickery. I'll leave any interpretation up to you, my valued couple of readers. Enjoy.