Unpleasant Life Lessons

[vic smyth]

I know that it's a very popular paradigm to view our lives as an opportunity to learn lessons. But I don't buy into the idea that we have to choose unpleasant experiences to learn something. As I mentioned on another post, if I want to teach my kids not to play with matches, I don't set their rooms on fire.

Jesus/Yeshua taught us, "As you believe it shall be done to you. It shall be done to you according to your faith." My concern is that if we believe that our lives need to be filled with unpleasant lessons, we'll get exactly what we believe -- unpleasant life lessons.

And if it's our spiritual guides who are scripting unpleasant life lessons for us, fire them! Get some new guides that are upbeat and understand that learning should be challenging, but also joyous. Take charge and re-write your script with them. As long as we are looking for the greatest Good for everyone and not just for our self-centered desires, why not?

With Lovingkindness,
vic

[Redhawke]

I agree with you somewhat vic, however......I think it's important to remember that we cannot possibly know what is "good" unless we have something "bad" to compare it to. Using your example with children (I have 3, so I can relate)....no matter how much we teach them, they still have the choice to make and believe it or not, most of the time they will not take your word on it. They must experience life how they deem fit and they will experiment (as we all have), to find out the "truth" for themselves.....especially as they grow older.

This, I think, holds true throughout our entire lives on earth. I constantly make mistakes, some intentional, others not so much so, but I look at each and every decision to lead me to a greater understanding of myself and my life. And I do believe that this is necessary to make life interesting.......how boring would it be if everything went "just as grand as can be"?

I hope my post is making sense (I do tend to ramble), but the bottom line is (for me).....you cannot "know" one, without "knowing" the other. Light would not be light without darkness, without contrast......it would just be.

[Roberta Grimes]

Dear Vic, I appreciate what you are saying, but I wonder whether you might be thinking too narrowly. Here is what I understand to be true, based upon the afterlife evidence:

1) Your life is eternal, and the little bit of it that is this lifetime is just a bad day in school (if that!). Don't think of this one lifetime as being in any way really important. It isn't. So whether experiences that seem to you from this perspective to be either "good" or "bad" seem to happen, that doesn't matter any more than it matters that you might have had an annoying experience in today's trig class.

2) The lessons to be learned are not always obvious from the events that prompt the learning. You don't teach your children not to play with matches by burning down the house - true! But a burning house might be planned into your life at some point, and when it happens there may be a whole raft of lessons to come from it, from resolving other-life issues with the being who is your wife in this life, to overcoming a past- or future-life fear of fire, to better learning what is important (people and not possessions), to perhaps learning better forgiveness, to in some way learning how better to love. Most of the big events of our lives are carefully planned to yield a lot of lessons!

3) You and those who will be close to you plan your own life-lessons. No guide does it for you! And while you are in the Summerland, you feel so powerful and confident and eager to learn as much as possible in one lifetime that the worry isn't that you won't plan enough difficult lessons into your life. Rather, the worry is that you will plan in too many! As we become more advanced and more ambitions, we must have our life-plans reviewed by more advanced beings who will try to talk us out of planning - for example - to have our wife burn down the house with the children still inside, and - what the heck! - make me a quadriplegic too. The trick in doing a life-plan is to make it challenging enough for us to be able to grow from it but at the same time not so challenging that we will be broken by it.

4) You and your guides and your significant others probably are rejiggering this life-plan almost nightly. As you learn more or less well, or as you make mistakes that get you off track, during your nightly forays to the Summerland levels you and the others in your life and all of your guides will work out changes in the plan that you were born with. If you don't need the major auto accident that is about to happen, perhaps you and they will write it out; if you have married the wrong person, perhaps you all will agree that you need to get back on track or perhaps you and that wrong person and your guides will agree that there are things to be learned in staying together, and you will together rewrite both life-plans. But you are always in control! And the fact is that you are going to want to make it tougher rather than easier, dear Vic, no matter how things look to you while you are awake.

- Does this make sense to you, dear friend? You are a powerful eternal being, and you have lived and will live many lives which contain many events - both bad and good. But your real home is not here. All that matters here is learning as much and growing spiritually as much as you can!

[Andrew]

Hi all! This made me think of a quote by someone who dabbled in afterlife research (I forget who): "Everyone needs 15 minutes of hell, to fully appreciate heaven." I agree with Redhawke (welcome, dear Redhawke, by the way!) that we need to experience some bad to know what is good. Plus, as Roberta says, it's basically the equivalent of a bad day of classes. That's just my two cents though.

[OrichalcumEye]

Okay... I can handle, for the sake of argument, accepting that we are operating on "life-plans" meant to teach "spiritual lessons." And I can live with the idea that many of these plans will involve some degree of suffering or pain as a result, or an incentive, of the learning process. What doesn't make sense, even with all that taken for granted, is that the sheer magnitude of suffering that goes on in this world, and its pervasiveness, is somehow acceptable as part of any kind of learning process. Whatever justification you might come up with for the misery of a 10-year-old land-mine victim, a would-be mother who just learned that the embryo accidentally implanted on her kidney, or a child with a congenital degenerative neuromuscular disease... would it really be enough? Would you really say it to their faces?

The existence of "unpleasant life lessons" can by (hypothetically) justified. Forcing millions of innocents to experience lifetimes of pointless, meaningless abject misery cannot, and it seems heartless and insulting to even try.

[Andrew]

Dear OrichcalcumEye, no one is forcing anyone to learn this way. We can learn most of these lessons without suffering in the Summerland, but it will take a LOT longer that way! Everyone chooses to come here. There is no force compelling them to. We choose to suffer the way we do because we know that the end result will be worth it and that we'll be one hundred times better than before! What's so bad about that?

[Annie]

I agree with Vita and Redhawke that you need bad times to appreciate the good times.

The thing about choosing to have difficult life lessons...well, I really like to think that most of us try to not make it too difficult. I really would hope that my spirit in the afterlife had some common sense and discretion in planning out my life, and I think I did. I notice that when I'm starting to feel terrible and the going gets rough, something good usually happens to pull me out of feeling down for too long.

Putting too much on our plate could really backfire I think, because if life gets to be too hopeless then that's when people commit suicide. I don't know how some people have so many terrible things happen to them and my only explanation is that those people are probably more resilient than I am. Part of me thinks how lucky I am not to have such a rough life, but the other part of me envies them a bit for being so spiritually advanced.

I guess it still sometimes baffles me that people would take on such difficult lives. I know that from heaven, life is over in a blink of an eye, but that's no consolation here and now because it doesn't feel so quick and painless here. Are we naive enough to forget how real this illusion feels when we're not living it? The thought is kind of scary.

[Andrew]

Actually, dear Annie, most people report just the opposite! Advanced beings have to help calm us down because we almost always are a little too ambitious and try to take on way too much in one lifetime. I guess the thinking goes something like this: "Well, I'm going to become paralyzed to learn patience anyway, so why not lose my family in to a murderer and learned about forgiveness while I'm already there. That way there's no need to reincarnate again." It sounds weird, but that's apparently what happens quite often!

[vic smyth]

I thank everyone for their comments. I understand what everyone is saying; We need to experience bad to appreciate the good; Getting through a bad experience helps build character; Seeing people suffer brings out compassion in us. But as OrichalcumEye said, so much suffering in the world seems heartless. It's why Gnostics referred to the creator of this world as an idiot. I mean, with a world like this, you don't need hell.

So I guess that my questions is, at some point I "get it" -- being loving, kind, gentle and non-judgmental is better than being self-centered, help others less fortunate than myself, etc. -- can't I just tell my spiritual guides, "Yo guys, I get it, now lighten up a bit"?

My own life has been blessed (I'm grateful), nothing but the usual share of ups and downs, but when you live in a world where 1 billion people go to bed hungry at night, half of them innocent children, if that ain't hell what is?

And so, with all respect to anyone who differs, I'm not going to acquiesce, I'm going to petition the gods to lighten up a bit, or else I'm going to find me some new gods. With age of Aquarius dawning, maybe it's time for a new paradigm?

With Lovingkindness,
vic

[OrichalcumEye]

Dear OrichcalcumEye, no one is forcing anyone to learn this way. We can learn most of these lessons without suffering in the Summerland, but it will take a LOT longer that way! Everyone chooses to come here. There is no force compelling them to. We choose to suffer the way we do because we know that the end result will be worth it and that we'll be one hundred times better than before! What's so bad about that?

I wish I could make you see how much the above statement sounds like "it's your own fault that you're suffering, you chose this" from the perspective of a person who doesn't already believe in your afterlife philosophy. I realize that's probably not what you mean to get across, but you have to take that perspective into account if you don't want to drive people away by appearing callous or dismissive.