Philosophy Things

Philosophy Things
Various thoughts I find fascinating in this world

Near-Death Experience

The Problem of evil from Epicurus posits that:

If God cannot prevent evil, He is not all-powerful.
If He can, but does not, He is not all-good.
If He is both willing and able, why does evil exist?
And if He is neither, why call Him God at all?

I have thought about this, albeit read less about it, and these are my current conclusions for the possibilities:

- God does not exist.
- God does not care.
- God cannot stop evil.
- Something is being done (Miracles?)
- Something is being done but we cannot see it. (Subtle miracles?)
- Nothing needs to be done. (Fate?)
- Not all that is evil has to be prevented.

I was never a very religious person; I was brought up as orthodox christian, but I found those teachings always lacking, constricting and unemphathetic. I could not believe in a God that seemed less good than I felt I could be, and strived to be, and the core tenets of this faith forbid me from making up my own version of God's goodness; what was written was how it was.

In the most improbable of places I discovered purpose, although I give it far less credit in shaping who I am in this life than it deserves: I was scouring 4chan's /x/ board which is an anonymous imageboard of some disrepute. Among the general trolling and huckstery, the paranoid and schitzophrenic posts about spiritual conspiracies and such I discovered a mention of Gnosticism, and in particular that of Gnostic Christianity. I watched a video by hochelaga about the subject, and while this subject was of interest to me, what youtube suggested for me from this video's recommended list opened a path for me: there was a link to a testament of a person who had clinically died and had been resuscitated, and who retained his memory of what he saw beyond this world when he returned: these are called Near-Death Experiences (NDE).

I watched hundreds of these videos, fascinated and in awe - too by how uniform the features in these stories were no matter the religion or cultural background of the person who had experienced such traumatic event. I believe this is the first video I saw. During the NDE, those who experience it describe often:

- Intense feelings of peace, joy and unconditional love
- Out of body experience (existing in spirit form)
- Altered sense of the passage of time
- Meeting one's deceased loved ones
- Meeting spirit guides
- Meeting a being of light (possibly God)
- Life review (seeing or experiencing all you did from the point of view and emotions of everyone involved in all situations you found yourself in during your life so far without egoistic judgment of your actions, without the ability to lie to yourself any longer)
- Access to eternal knowledge (often described as knowledge being "uploaded" into you, and you being able to process that data much more efficiently than as in human form)
- Point of no return (often the person is either told to go back or given a choice to remain alive, which all of the people who give this testament obviously do choose)

After researching the subject in length one thing became apparent: no matter what the NDE-phenomenon was - be it a mere mirage or hallucination upon the moment of death, or something supernatural and real, it had a profound effect on the person who had gone through it, and almost without fault that person became a better person as the result of it, and no longer feared death.

For me, learning of these NDEs made a click in my head, a shift of gear. Suddenly so much I had battled with made sense. These testaments, to me, represent just about the only proof of afterlife, of a world beyond the one we currently inhabit. More than that, though, to me the essential teaching was vital, and something I feel like I somehow knew before I heard it, and had lived with all my life too; this is the teaching that the folks who return with an NDE often tell:

We have all chosen to come here into this life, and together we must endure the trials and tribulations of this hard world. You are here to make choices, experience different things, depending on what you chose before you were born, for the purpose of the growth of your soul. The most exalted thing you can do is to ease the journey of all the souls here with you, despite how hard it may sometimes be.

The teaching is only partial for now - I am convinced there is even more. Questions remain; I continue to study this intriguing phenomenon.

Higher Dimensions

In NDEs time is often described as not existing in those realms where the spirit travels into after death. The time we experience on Earth can be stopped and rewinded at will to look at events past, although traveling to the future is more complex due to the mechanics of how choices work.

In this NDE testament, there are descriptions of the higher spiritual dimensions which I found of great interest. I will list them here:

Fourth Dimension
A basic property of Heaven is the mastery over the passage of time, existing in all times all at once, and having infinite time. I believe this is what is often described as the fourth dimension.

Fifth Dimension
Here the mastery of time evolves into a mastery of possibilities. One can pick any point in the life that is being viewed and see all the branching possilities of what different decisions would have made that life look like.

Sixth Dimension
At this stage, not only do you see yourself for what you really are, you see everyone else, their souls too, what they are like and what they long for, and how all of these souls and their desires and choices are connected to each other, and how each decision any of them makes would affect the others.

Perhaps there are higher dimensions even still beyond these - in some of the testaments it is alluded that a soul's stage of development determines how much it can process of these. It seems that the higher the soul can perceive into these dimensions, the more it detaches from the idea of self and can see itself and everything else without any self-deception or haze of subjective perception. This trajectory suggests that the highest dimension of all is perhaps the total detachment from self and ego, from being an individual, and becoming one with everything else.

Amount of evil

In some NDEs, Earth is described as one of the hardest realms that a soul can travel to, to gain experience and empathy. They say that as we return home to Heaven, we are regarded as some sort of champions and welcomed home, no matter how bad we failed (in fact, no one judges us for anything, other than ourselves as we review our life), since the life here is so harrowing at times, wrought with pain and suffering and loss and all terrible things. There is plenty of evil here, not many deny this, and apparently we are veteran souls that we are let loose here, and even then many of us fall during our stay and make bad choices.

If the world as we know it is one of the toughest places a soul can come live a life to, we can infer a few things:

- After a certain point, more evil does not propagate empathy or growth of the soul, since the world could be much more evil than it is.
- For the above to work, either the souls here need to ensure that the world does not become even more evil, and/or there needs to be intelligent guidance of us from beyond, which I believe happens in the form of spiritual guides and messages we receive.
- Or God does not want us to experience horrors beyond a certain point.
- Or we as sensible souls would not agree to come live lives here if it was truly without light. The contrast of good and evil here makes this experience so powerful.
- Or the degree of harshness of this world is something said as cope for us poor souls...

Hatred of others

For me, this begun at a very young age, when being bullied by kids who did not know any better due to not understanding or caring about the pain and fear they would inflict, which would spiral into a propagation of hatred unless consciously stopped.

Hatred of others from this sort of source is a very irrational feeling and can weigh you and everyone close to you down the rest of your life until you recognize the source was a bunch of idiot kids doing whatever to each other. They did not realize what they were doing, and neither do you, until you do. There's a reason we don't prosecute children - they just don't know what they're doing. If you can, you should let your hatred go and learn to love mankind for what it's worth.