Reincarnation and learning lessons on earth

[Green26]

Let's not throw too much to disease being spiritual or eastern mysticism working better than western medicine. I am not diabetic because of some reflection on how I feel about my own life. It's because it's a genetic condition for the women of my family and I am beating it back down through excercize and western medicine. My husband's destroyed back has nothing to do with misaligned chakras and everything to do with an abusive, drunken father, and all the stick-pins in the world aren't going to reverse the damage, nor did they do one iota to ease the pain. Once again, Western Medicine to the rescue with an internal TENS unit. What disgusted us was that the insurance company was more than happy to pay for someone to wave their hands over his back and chant in some made-up language and tell him to wish it away, but we had to fight like rabid pit-bulls to get the surgery, the one thing that actually worked.
Don't even suggest that it didn't work because he didn't want it to work, as some have done. We were ready to sacrifice goats at any altar of your choosing just to end the pain and/or stop the damage from getting worse.


Now I've probably stuck my nose where it doesn't belong so I'll take it back out. Rest assured it's nothing personal about your beliefs, but I have very few "buttons" so to speak, and the "eastern medicine is better that western medicine" is one of them. It failed my husband, it failed my father, it has failed everyone I personally know who tried it.

I am not maintaining that Eastern medicine is better than Western per say, I think there is merit in both systems and it would be foolish to pledge 100% allegiance to either one (the same would be true for religion IMO). It is probably best to pick and choose from each one and see what works best for you. Regarding chakras etc, I am not speaking from beliefs from reading too many new age books, but rather from personal experience, having witnessed an enlarged goiter shrink back down to side in a matter of minutes, something that Western medicine could never have achieved with radio active iodine or thyroid medication. I also know how this condition came into existence on an energetic level before it became physical.

 

[Shiftkitty]

Of course we learn, but I do not believe that learning is our purpose here. I don't believe that some force somewhere keeps sending us back until we get it right. I think we keep coming back because we want to for whatever reason. We may not see it now while locked in the mortal coil, but once we're off the dance floor, we decide to go back and try it again for any number of reasons, some not known to us from this perspective.


As for eastern medicine, I agree. I'll stay with what my experience shows me works. If it works for someone else, more power to them. Sadly, fanatics seem to be writing the policies now. One administrator refused to send my husband's case on to the next level because she believed he just wasn't putting enough faith in it. (It was accupuncture, BTW.) Fortunately, a neuro-surgeon who practiced eastern medicine on the side stepped in and b-slapped the system for us, telling them in no uncertain terms that he needed surgery "not magic" (his words, not mine).

 

[usetawuz]

My belief, gleaned from guidance, meditation and some really good readers is that this three dimensional existence is an opportunity to provide us perspective. From perfection, we come to an imperfect world for a period of time and it enables us to gain perspective and wisdom through a lifetime of events enabled by said imperfect world. Lessons are simply a byproduct of our living through these events. Free will trumps all, as it does in spirit, its just that while here on earth we cannot see the full effects of our decisions until after they've been made. And therein lies the fun. There are no certainties; there are no absolutes; the world is our oyster; we must make of it as we will.


To shift gears a little, guidance has discussed with me how when ideally lived, our lives here are a game, a play, an opportunity to act out and create anything we can imagine. Death is simply the end of our latest play, and then we plan another one. We hope we live these lives through the golden rule, but sometimes that is not an option. The emphasis, though, is always on having fun, enjoying this opportunity, do the things we planned to do prior to incarnating, and if something looks like more fun, deviate from the plan and do something else.


Based on this insight, I find it hard to get bent around the axle regarding efforts to prove one belief over any other. While it is interesting reading and every different viewpoint brings with it both reasonable and unreasonable points, I tend to want to focus on trying to live the best life I can instead of focusing on a need to know. And I want it to be fun. Don't get me wrong, I love this website and all the theory, insight and rationales being discussed...I just can't bring myself to need to know for dead certain anything that is going to become completely clear as soon as I transition to spirit.


I once read a message from someone's guidance and I think it is incredibly appropo: "Don't you see? Don't you see how brief it is? It's over in the blink of an eye...there is no time...never be scared of anything."


I know this isn't completely on point, but I felt I should write it anyway...I think it is therapeutic as I am having fun doing it and it helps me to focus my thoughts and temporarily takes my mind away from big life decisions I am going to make soon. No offense intended and love to all.

 

[Lia1992]

I did not mean to imply that I no longer believe in reincarnation, or that reincarnation or life has no purpose or meaning. What I meant to say was the idea of souls planning car accidents, life threatening diseases, murders etc from the afterlife is something I find highly questionable for many reasons.


I think where the problem arises for the idea of learning lessons (and this applies for religions as well with the idea of karma in Hinduism and Buddhism and Sin in Christianity) is basically that many people project human attributes onto the afterlife, duality in other words.


People assume that because we must learn in a linear fashion during life here such as going to school and university the same must be so in the afterlife and that there is a progression of learning from one life to the next.


However, the afterlife is not a state of duality like earth, it is a point of singularity that contains everything, and anything can be experienced just by focusing on it, I can have the first person experience of somebody else's past life in the afterlife as well as re-experiencing my own. So if my soul needed to experience what it was like to starve to death as part of an important "lesson" (hypothetically) it would not be necessary for me to come to earth and create that experience from scratch as I would be able to access that experience somebody else had created and learn from it, thus no need to come to earth and create that experience a new. Like I said, I think it comes from projecting human attributes onto the afterlife.


Here, if I want to experience being a world class tennis player, I would have to practice tennis for many years to create that experience myself as well as the linear process of training to reach that experience of a world class tennis player. In the afterlife I can have the first person experience of living somebody else's life, such as a world class tennis player.


Newton presents the theory that souls do not have sufficient understanding, compassion, knowledge and therefore have to spend many incarnations collecting the right knowledge as part of their soul's growth, whereas in reality, in the afterlife everything is known at once and all knowledge, information and experience is available to everyone, thus no need to come to earth and learn lessons.


Anyway, that's the basic reason of why I no longer believe in what Michael Newton has to say. I am sure this will confuse some people and I will have to provide further explanations, but that's okay. I have spend years researching NDEs and communicating with NDErs which is how I realized that what Newton has to say doesn't make that much sense.

I would agree with you on that! I think people are projecting their lives onto the afterlife with their hiearchies and lessons learning (school in its present form is, after all, a micro-version of our society intent to prepare us for the job life) which is an arrogant position to take because not everyone enjoys a comfy life of the western world, even inside the western world (minorities who are descriminated, for instance!).

Then there are those people suffering from war, dictatorships, famine etc. To say that these are all lessons tells of the privilege that the people have who think like that.

Also, there are socieites right now who don't have hiearchies or states. Many of the indigenous societies have a totally different culture than we have (and also believe in reincarnation by the way which is still not accepted by the majority in state cultures) so it's simplistic to project a western-civilization-like afterlife as in Nosso Lar (Astral City: spiritual teachings about life after death - YouTube) with ministries and nuclear-family houses (something that's also not universal and really new in humnanity's history as the nuclear family with mother, father & child(ren) only arose in the 19th century as the result of workers being crouded into small spaces and that family moel slowly spread into the middle-class).

I believe that the afterlife is something we cannot imagine when we're on this physical plane. It's also possible that some of us don't even go to the astral plane or spiritual realm after they died like this member suggests here (Do you choose your incarnations? | Reincarnation Forum).