Tag: reincarnation

Are Evil People Born Without souls?

Are evil people born without souls?  One of our long-time Seminarians, a smart fella, played Anne Frank’s father in a dramatic production recently.  He wrote me today with a theory that maybe Hitler was born without a soul.

Rev. Randy wrote:

As to the Holocaust, I truly believe there are those out there who are born without a soul.  My Priest always said “even Hitler could be forgiven since all our tickets were already punched,” (spoken like a true Episcopalian).  But I don’t buy it, I think the SOB was born without a soul.  It’s the only explanation how anyone could be that unfeeling.  Of course there are those who would say I could say the same things of slave owners, but to me it’s still different. Charles Manson falls in that category also. How’s that for Esoterica LOL.  Yeah, I know your Right Reverendness is cringing.

I wrote back:

Oh, not cringing at all!  I spend a lot of time pondering what as you know, philosophy and theology dub, “The Problem of Evil”.  See earlier blog posts like this one for such ponderings and gripings.  Well.   The theory that some are born without souls does speak to the Problem of Evil.   Hmmmm.  Will have to ponder that…  I already chew on the way people get souls in the first place.  Are they reincarnated? Or are they newly stirred clumps of drops of soul-stuff — like everytime you pour a glass of water you get drops that may not have yet been together in the same place before.  So much water has been thru the atoms-created-in-stars, evaporation/rain back down system.  Maybe souls are made of soul-stuff and we are a hodgepodge of a bunch of other people, I sometimes wonder, not the same exact soul passed down.  Maybe reincarnation doesn’t happen, but we have ancestral memories in our DNA and therefore we have all kinds of “flashes” of DNA memory of people in “past lives”.  Okay, so if a person is born without a soul…. how does that happen, how does he live, etc.  Wow.  Food for thought.

Eckhart Tolle, whose work we are now requiring for our most advanced Seminarians (those in the Holy Orders program) says evil people are buried in layers and layers of dark unconscious ego.  Their false mind-made self (the ego) is running their body and resorts to violence and perversion to keep its control.  When such a one gets in power like Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, heads roll.  Unconsciousness, complete lack of awareness, complete lack of sensing the Presence, causes this crap. I am currently designing a study course of his book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.  This book is chock full of our type of alternative, esoteric “Zen” Christianity. Love it, love it.

Tolle’s earlier book is The Power of Now, but I recommend reading A New Earth first and then The Power of Now.  The goal of a Seminary student is to become a spiritual teacher, A New Earth is truly a manual for spiritual teachers.

Katia

Why do Innocents Suffer? We are God, The Shack, etc.

Thanks to all of you who commented on my previous entry about the suffering of children and the Problem of Evil.  I appreciate all your thoughts on this perplexing mind-bending theological, theodicy, philosophical (annoying!) cosmic question. I often ruminate on this puzzle, more-so lately, and so it came up last night at the weekly Eckhart Tolle meeting I attend.

There was a new guy at our meeting, a new author named Carlos Garcia who has just published a SciFi book called Unknown Contact where he converses with a god-like being via cellphone text messaging(!) and discusses cosmic questions, kinda like Conversations With God, but in a fiction setting with a Sci-Fi attitude.  Carlos was easy and fun to talk to and our group got into quite a gab session around the table, waving our arms, completing each others’ sentences, etc. Two laptops looked mutely on.  One belonging to Tad the shaman played a very cool video of Peruvian Shamans protecting Barack Obama with awesome dancing, smudging, and skull rattling(!).  And my laptop showed a paused Eckhart Tolle talking to Oprah.  (But I am still voting for the other guy, because despite my religious liberal progressiveness, I seem to be anti-big-government and mistrusting of anyone friendly to Marxism or terrorist “causes”.  Just don’t like bomb-throwers or Big Brother and will never understand why anyone would want to sympathize with, shake hands with, or even sit at a table with bomb-throwers to “Let them have their turn to speak, they are people, too” Ick.  But I digress…)

As I was animatedly putting forth my Big Question about suffering children, putting it forth like I did in the blog post before this one, Carlos interrupted, or rather completed my sentence, with something profound. He voiced a solution I already knew, something simple and obvious, but yet … one I hadn’t let sink in, was resisting.  You know how it is when you are grappling with something like this for years and answers to your pain just won’t click until suddenly after all the blows to the rock with no results, the 100th blow breaks the rock. (I think that’s a Shankara metaphor).

Here’s how my simple epiphany went. I was saying something like, there’s a little girl in the children’s hospital terminal ward with maybe cancer or some other fatal wasting-away painful disease.  She is one of dozens of suffering innocents in hospital.  She’s crying and full of IV tubes, and knows which substances sting when they come thru the IV tube and which ones don’t.  Once pretty hair she used to like looking at in the mirror while her mother combed it and put cute little hair ties in, is all gone.  She is in a lot of pain today and is sick of taking the painkillers, and had to turn the TV off because it showed kids running around doing kid things now denied her.  Sometimes she likes to watch kids playing and being “normal”, but not today.  She says to her mother sadly, “Oh I was thinking, I sure wish I could go to school tomorrow.  I miss Mrs. Johnson (her teacher) and the rest of my class, especially Jill, Chelsea, and Debbie who sit at my table. I miss school, it is so fun. Even riding on the bus is fun.”  Her parents think, but don’t say, “Mrs. Johnson was your teacher 2 years ago, her class has long ago moved on.  You’ve been here suffering far too long. But yeah, how nice it was when life was more like you and we hoped it would be.”   The small girl tries to be brave, her parents try to be brave — and do a damn good job of it. (I have witnessed this kind of exchange many times during my several visits to various childrens hospitals these past 5 years with my kidney-disease daughter, age 5, who has never had to stay more than a week, thank god-ess, and is going to be just fine).

So anyway back to last night’s meeting. I get to the part where I say, Why does this little girl have to suffer? No human being made a free will choice that caused her suffering, such as when a vicious predator tortures and kills a child.  Much physical suffering of innocents was caused by a flook of nature, not by mankind.  She just happened to be born with this, like my own daughter was born with destroying cysts on her kidney.  Why is pain and fear happening to this innocent kid full of IV tubes and body wracked with pain?

It’s her Karma, some say. She “chose” this in another life.  Although this looks to you like a sweet little girl, an innocent human being, it’s really someone who has lived before and done selfish or bad things….  I was saying all this at the meeting last night, and was about to say the line I used in my previous blog entry, which is: this isn’t really an innocent person you are looking at, this “girl” was a guilty person in a previous lifetime, did awful things, so she came back and decided to suffer this time to pay that karmic debt. But I never got that line out because the new guy, Carlos, completed my sentence by blurting out just after I said, “this is not a sweet innocent little girl you are looking at”,

“Right, SHE IS ALMIGHTY GOD,” and nodded his head like we were in perfect agreement, like this was common consensus.  I stopped for a half-second (amazing to render me speechless for even a half-second!) as the innocent victim’s godhood sunk in. I said, “Omg, yeah. You’ve really helped me with this puzzle.”

We all of us went on to discuss how each person is a fragment, a holographic miniature expression, of the Absolute (aka God).  We humans decided and re-decide to incarnate as all these many billion people to express our (divine) consciousness, our (divine) self-ness, or something(!) thru ourselves.  We are God.  We are God, the Universe, having relationships, becoming conscious and aware of Itself.  We are the One, the Divine One, blasphemous as that sounds.  That fits in with what Eckhart Tolle teaches in his book, his “Bible”, the best “scripture” of our time, in my opinion, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.

I also badgered the guys at the meeting (I was the only woman there last night for some reason) about individual reincarnation, which I am not sure I believe in. They gave impassioned answers, and the two hours fled by.  I think we individual “souls”, individual fragments of the Divine ONE, all get stirred up together after death, and so different and unique pieces break off of the whole each time and “re-incarnate” into bodies of new babies.  There is no specific Cleopatra piece, no separate Napoleon piece that keeps getting reborn. The Cleopatra pieces are all stirred up and mixed with other pieces of the Whole. It is like water molecules, perhaps.  They evaporate out of oceans and rivers, rain down to the soil, join the aquifer, enter your well, or the water supply, and several clumps of these water molecules end up in separate glasses of water on your dinner table.  They will never be in the same glass again after this. Those water molecules don’t go away, as the laws of physics prove, but they don’t “incarnate” in exactly the same glass (personality structure) ever again.  Yet each day we are pouring more glasses of water, there is an endless supply of soul-stuff, but it doesn’t appear in the same exact chunks.

We ALL have been Cleopatra, Napoleon and even Jesus, said Carlos and Tad the shaman at the meeting last night.

Once I got home and my family all went to bed, I picked up and read an entire Christian fiction book called The Shack. If you have lost a child, or like me you ponder the problem of innocents suffering, the Problem of Evil, you must read The Shack. It has swept the Christian circuit.

It’s also a good read for people who view God as a woman, the Holy Spirit as a woman, and ponder the existence of Sophia. It is a mainstream Christian book, yet approximately half of Christian pastors call The Shack blasphemy and dangerous, and the other half of Christian pastors (the progressive liberal Christians!) think the book is awesome.  I tend to agree with the latter, and found a lot to validate my alternative beliefs, and much to help me with solving the suffering-of-children dilemma.  I enjoyed The Shack immensely, altho some of the author’s treatment of Jesus was a bit corny for me, “sophisticated” alternative esoteric Christian that I am. <snort>  I just reminded myself the author was using metaphor and most of all allegory, wonderful colorful allegory, to get his point across. Since he does it so masterfully, I can suspend judgement thru the few corny parts to get to the cosmic questions, the theological, philosophical “meat” I so crave.

Katia

Problem of Suffering, Cooperative Pre-incarnation

I often ponder the Problem of Evil (known in theology and philosophy as Theodicy) and have many times considered the “cooperative pre-incarnation movement” someone mentioned in Kathleen McGowan’s Magdalene forum recently.  Cooperating with each other and with the Universal Consciousness (God?) and choosing, AGREEING to incarnate on earth does seem logical and more sensible than the rather loose karma-reincarnation theory.

Maybe it went something like this.  We were a group of volunteer souls about to be sent onto this egg, this earth-planet, and were gathered together for a sort of briefing, a great gathering of souls about to fill the Hall of Souls on Earth.  We could have been told something like:  You will have minds capable of full consciousness, but your bodies and physical surroundings will constantly distract you, keeping you in a kind of mundane every-day unconsciousness. Your spirit will be asleep in this unconscious state that you will be in. If you can wake up, if you can figure out you are not your body, not the thinker inside your head but the higher soul watching all this thinking going on, you will become fully conscious, “awakened.”  By waking up from the mundane unconsciousness you are one more mind in the critical mass to help the Universe become conscious of Itself — the purpose of humanity in the first place. 

But back to the mundane unconsciousness. It can lead to horrors.  Unconscious people do despicable horrible things to others.  Some of you will fall into those traps and do awful things, others of you will be victims of these horrors and not understand why or what the heck is going on.  You will get angry, desperate, suicidal.  It ain’t gonna be a picnic.  But all that pain and suffering forces your mind to go deeper, deeper until it finally says hey wait a minute, I am not really this little me, I am the field of awareness in which “me” happens!  (Read Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth for the best explanation of this awakening from little me unconsciousness). 

Okay, so anyway, I like to think we were given the choice, asked if we could handle going down into the flesh and going thru incarnation after incarnation where we would sometimes be bad guys, sometimes be victims, sometimes be both, but always trying to make our way thru suffering and bewilderment, thru fear, greed, power-lust, pain until we finally looked long and deep enough to find what is really going on.  We then figure out the REAL reason we are here for — which is to wake up as individuals and thus help Universe wake up, achieve full awareness of Itself.  That is the closest I can come to “solving” the Problem of Evil.  <snort> And I have been grappling with it for many years.  The standard solutions offered by philosophers and religionists such as, ‘God gave us Free Will so we end up with some people perpetrating evils,’ do help me somewhat, but they fail to answer why God allows suffering.  (The problem of suffering is a part of the Problem of Evil in philosophical/theological discourse).  We can say that because of Free Will some men choose to do evil and that is why your little girl got molested and murdered.  Okay, painful as hell but we can see the logic of that.  HOWEVER, what about this, God?:  What causes the same little girl to be born beautiful and healthy but then get cancer when she is in first grade, drop out of school, end up bald and lying in a cancer ward frail as a waif, body racked with pain, wasting away wondering what happened to her life?  What about THAT suffering?  It wasn’t caused by Free Will.

So yeah, evil.  Ugh.  Suffering of the innocent, double Ugh.  That is the one I am grappling with now, solitary philosphical arguments going on in my head.  <laugh>   The closest I have gotten recently, and I have not yet gotten it into words (thank you list-friends for triggering yet another session) is some very wispy realizations while reading Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth and Dinesh D’Souza’s What’s So Great About Christianity.  Suffering of the innocent from flooks of nature like cancer and horrible lingering fatal diseases, is another thing that forces us to go DEEP.  The parents of that child and the child herself (or in the case of adults dying of fatal diseases, the person and their loved ones) are given suffering as this huge doorway, not just a window, into the Awakened Realm.  Back at the beginning when we had our cooperative pre-incarnation briefing we were also told that the system was set up so that some of us would suffer from flooks of nature, from physical waste and excruciating pain.  This suffering would then force us and those around us to think, think, THINK and to go deep and WITHIN to find cosmic answers.  Some of us might even awaken while observing such hells, others would get into despair and curse at Universe/the Powers that Be, etc.  But some would use the suffering as that window — actually nice big door — of opportunity for awakening. 

Still working out the kinks of this one.  I’ll check back in a few years (!) which is usually how long I chew on each of these elements.  <laugh>  Thanks to all the spiritual writers and bloggers who pose such dilemmas and write about them, thus giving fuel to my fodder of pondering.

Smiles,

Katia