My friend wrote:
I have often contemplated the nature of evil, along with the pervading ‘system’ in this world, the predator vs prey system of life.
No matter what dietary choices one makes in life, life in this world exists by the living consuming the living.
For humans: pescetarianism may be more humane than eating animals. Vegetarianism may be more humane than eating fish. Veganism may be more humane than eating dairy products…. but each and every diet on Earth, including veganism, consumes the living. Plants are living and are more aware than ever previously understood or recognized, as scientists are beginning to discover. The living must eat the living in order to survive on this Earth.
I wrote back:
“Life Eats,” my mythology professor wrote on the board. He wrote it several times during that semester. He made us contemplate it and write about it. It made a huge impression on me. Class after class I began to realize the deep meaning of this rule of life.
He further explained: Â “Life also longs for itself.”
This longing for itself is what makes men and women want to have children, drives our biological urges. “Bio” means life…. our LIFE-ological urges of reproduction and eating are part of Earth’s wonderfully organic life-system. The other extreme is Jainism for instance, where they will go hungry if the cooking fire is harming insects. The Shakers decided all biological urges (except eating) were “unholy”, and so they stopped reproducing completely. They no longer exist among the living because of that choice. They chose not to “play the game of life,” but every day they were alive they were part of the LIFE EATS system.
My friend also wrote:
It only makes sense that as we pulled further and further away from Our Mother, the higher vibration of the Pleroma and the higher realms, our world and our bodies would become more and more dense. This density requires a more dense fuel or nutrition hence, the predator vs prey system.
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Now don’t go all Gnostic on me. Our Heavenly Parents in the Pleroma were spiritual beings but also had bodies. Â They wanted physical bodies for their spiritual children. They had experienced, and wanted us to experience, the amazing intersection of spiritual and physical, divine and human, the THEOSIS — of becoming like the Godhead. So they created an organic planet, a petri-dish, a “school”, a “garden” where things can grow. Earth is an organic garden where physical bodies can grow — and hopefully house wonderful spirit-bodies that experience theosis and “eternal life”, that someday experience a resurrection when divine-evolution takes the next leap. So-called Judgement Day, really Decision Day, and the “End” of “Time,” are the end of existence bounded by imperfect bodies. Someday we will have perfect bodies that are not dense, but are real bodies, not the spirit-bodies we had in the pre-existence. We will have light-bodies, resurrected bodies — it brings to mind all the teachings both exoteric and esoteric regarding The Body of Light and Transfigured Body, etc.
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We spirit children agreed to come down and go thru this growing process in this garden. We passed thru the veil into the physical realm to this dirty place. Gardens are so dirty. Muddy and gross with worms. But oh the life they yield up! Life is dirty until the physical becomes transfigured and merged with the divine. We knew there would be predators. We agreed to it. Although it has no consciousness, has no amazing human brain (most differentiated object in the universe) the plant kingdom “agreed” to help. So did the lesser animals such as livestock. They help meet our nutritional needs willingly. We made a covenant with them to absorb from their numbers only what we need. Many have broken that covenant by wasting food. I never let my children waste meat. I remind them the animal Kingdom agreed to work with us in this LIFE EATS LIFE LONGS FOR ITSELF system, so we do no dishonor that. We do waste plants sometimes and try to put it in a compost. Recycling.
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Yes, there are predator vs. prey situations all over this planet. But Life does not prey on itself. It rather consumes and recycles the energy of lifeforms WITHIN itself. Perhaps we are all one big Gaia-organism, as some philosophers have considered.
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Evil, the absence of Good, Spiritual Darkness, the absence of Light does work against us — against the LIFE EATS-AND-RECYCLES SYSTEM. It perverts our LIFE system into the Predator vs. Prey in which no recycling occurs, such as cultural bankruptcy, violent crime, and even mental abuse. This is the cesspool, the mud-pit you mentioned. Civilization does seem to be in a decline. But I’m not sure it’s “the End”.
The Christians in Iraq and Syria think this is the end of the world. Christians in Egypt are starting to believe “this is it,” too. I wonder if the Romans felt the same way during their “end” as the invaders and barbarians came in wave after wave.