- just be honest with yourself about why you are doing it. If the celestial bureaucrats don't appreciate your efforts because you didn't have exactly the right motivation who cares?
LOL!! :)
- just be honest with yourself about why you are doing it. If the celestial bureaucrats don't appreciate your efforts because you didn't have exactly the right motivation who cares?
Imagine all the wonderful feelings you will experience during your life review when you experience all the happiness you gave to other people. The celestial bureaucrats will be scowling and shaking their heads and stamping their feet in frustration while you review all the wonderful things you have done for other people.
Hi Jim. The devil, as the saying goes, is in the details. While it may outwardly appear that we are helping others by engaging in various charitable enterprises, the "help" we are offering, if it is not coming from a good place, might actually not be as helpful as we imagine. Determining what is truly helpful, and what is not, may be more challenging we suspect. Dubious service, in other words, may tend to attract dubious recipients and dubious results.
And when it comes to "celestial bureaucrats," NDEs consistently report that we are the ones who are judging ourselves. Moreover, we tend to measure our successes and failures (both of which are important, btw) more by our intentions than what we actually thought, said, and did. Sincere and loving intentions ripple through the universe like lovely music; insincere and bogus intentions ripple through the universe like grating chalk on a noisy chalkboard...
There are some people who really are helping others ...
I'm just saying that outward displays of holiness may not be what they appear to be -- and may also not be received with the fanfare we expect when we leave this world and are confronted with an honest view of what really, deeply motivated us. ....
I agree with what you are saying. But I want to add that if people want to help others they shouldn't hold back just because they are human and have an ego. On the one hand it is useful for people not to delude themselves into thinking they are saintly when they are not, but is is also important for people to accept their humanity and that we have to muddle through life the best we can and it's okay to try to help others even though we are not all saints. We are here to develop spiritually. How can anyone learn the joys of helping others, the knowledge of which leads to truly unselfish acts of altruism, if they never try because they are still ego based?
There are many people here on the earth at different stages of development. They require different guidance based on where they are now.
Determining what is truly helpful, and what is not, may be more challenging we suspect. Dubious service, in other words, may tend to attract dubious recipients and dubious results.
And when it comes to "celestial bureaucrats," NDEs consistently report that we are the ones who are judging ourselves.
awesome... sent me to the dictionary more than once :)Be kind, rather than nice
Be genuine, rather than frank
Be ethical, rather than virtuous
Tender epoche, rather than doubt
Be a learner, rather than a student
Possess integrity, rather than appearance
Be merciful, rather than charitable
Dream, rather than fantasize
Lead, rather than draw attention
Observe, rather than assume
Risk, rather than suffer 'what could have been'
Communicate, rather than speak
Run, rather than race
Laugh, rather than mock
Joy, whether people are near or absent
Serve, before being asked
Leave a legacy, without trying to do so
These have been my gut feel for some time. The problem is, that I fear I am so miserable at attaining these objectives (and I have no idea the goal), that I am hesitant to even say them.
agreed... and I don't think Christian's have fully processed this absurdity... nothing "beyond the devil made me do it."While I was a Christian at university, there were a number of really keen Christians who used to bombard me with books and ideas that were supposed to shore up my faith. One idea was that Jesus had to actually die for our sins because God was a just God, and so couldn't forgive people without some balancing 'payment'. That idea struck me as being so absurd, it propelled me towards non-belief. Another book, "Who moved the Stone", took a sort of forensic approach to trying to prove that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead. This also seemed absurd to me, because you can't really take a 'who done it' approach to a killing that was 2000 years old, and encrusted in myth! I think those incidents coloured my view of all non-materialist ideas.
And welcome David, thank you for taking the time to engage with us.
But on the flip side - there is no such thing as a perfect action. In my personal experience thus far, I've not yet been able to ascertain what is an action bereft of selfish intent, nor any action of significance which did not end up harming someone in the end. Not one thing of larger significance anyone around me has achieved, could they divorce completely from the realization that they or their family have gained from it - and even in my best laid plans, wherein I meticulously made sure that everyone was going to win in the outcome - someone ended up getting hurt. This bothers me endlessly. Solving this, would be metaphorically like inventing anti-gravity or changing the Planck constant. I do not bear the skill, nor the DNA founding in order to surmount this as an issue.
And if I quit and do nothing but trivial kind actions, so that my selfish intentions and ability to harm are kept in check - that is worse than the former state, I have found.
So are you contending that we have a circumstance wherein - psychopaths end up placing themselves in afterlife paradise and people who struggle against their own realized depravity end up sentencing themselves to difficult realms? <--- this is a purposeful tongue-in-cheek straw man, I know you are not advocating this - but how do we address this angle? If an external us-agent then evaluates us, how do we distinguish this from a God argument (other than in name only)?
Hello all, I really enjoyed the discussion. Shared it on all my social medias. As an ex-sceptic the words God and Jesus have always made me cringe (Eckhart Tolle was the first person to get me to even hear about the topic without rolling my eyes) and I personally have only ever known a type of spirituality that has stemmed from the intellect not the heart, but I decided to share it anyway since I could absolutely tell that there was so much more depth there than the typical xtian/catholic accounts... something much deeper going on. The language used was as precise as they could make it for such a nebulous topic and you can tell they wanted to convey as much detail as possible.
Yesterday I had to leave work with an upset stomach. A lady gave me two Tums on the way out and by the time I got home I felt a bit better. It was a calm lovely spring Massachusetts day and the windows were open. I bought the book on kindle, started reading. There was a link to the videos. It's a completely open link -- I could link it to the forum right now if I wasn't in fear of offending the author (although I have an inkling he didn't do this to appease capitalism, he probably had a higher calling.) If you don't buy the book you at least have to see those videos / NDE accounts. They were very well-chosen excerpts.
I was reading and watching videos one after another, making great headway. I hit Chapter 12, Mary, "Everything is made of LOVE" and when it first started I was already judging her - her voice, her appearance, her references to jesus/god, etc.. I think I was just distancing myself, but as her enthusiasm built up by the second half her language moved from a 'woe is me' story to this interconnected universe thing, TEARS CAME OUT OF MY EYES. This may not seem incredible to you, but I haven't properly cried since... a long, long time. The last episode of six feet under was the last time I can really remember crying properly. I've asked gurus how to cry, therapists, I've asked facebook to give me lists of sad movies and none of them even budged me (funny enough, I seem to be more apt to cry at happy things, not sad things.)
Anyway, I "got it." A tiny seed in my heart got it. As stupid and terrible an ending as this is to the human mystery, the universe is just like the show LOST: at the end we are all together and laughing and hugging and it was all just an experience between us and god, and god is whatever we aren't at the time and we are everything that is and shadowboxing it all like mad. THAT is the answer to all the UFO mysteries, and bigfoot, and aliens, and conspiracies, and human nature, and telepathy, and death, and hallucinogens, and all the rabbit holes I've been down since I was changed by my telepathy experience - God.
After my telepathy experience in college I said to my friend, "was that God? was that aliens?" and didn't know why I had asked him that. As an atheist it didn't even make sense to ask that. I was asked by a telepathy researcher recently if it felt like there was someone else involved in the telepathy besides myself and my friend and I said yes. As silly as it sounds it might have actually been a prompt from god. It's crazy, but it's like each person's life is a bespoke experience... trending towards the transcendental object at the end of time, which is the reunion of us with god. We cast ourselves out of the garden of eden, and then came scrambling back through time. We always knew what the ending was going to be, it was the journey we wanted.
I've been a dirty new ager hoping for a "new earth" and wanting to leave this plane of existence so bad. Disgruntled with everything, "the energies" (emotional weather patterns of humanity) have been especially hard this past 2-3 weeks. Then this book told me to shut up and start appreciating the things around me. Forget trump, forget all the nonsense of the world. Be the secret agent in corporate america, carrying this energy and distributing it in the corporate world. My heart has already learned these lessons so it's easy for me, I'm already service-to-others oriented. I'm still saving the ants and the spiders that accidentally find their way indoors, I still send love to the flowers and the plants.
But I feel more at ease about it now. Something clicked. This is all much more personal than I realized.
Also I can't remember where I found it on the IANDS youtube channel (I'll go chase it down if desired), but I remember a lady telling her NDE and she said she was brought to hell and she was able to witness all the people being tortured and screaming, but she realized that all of them could get up and leave at any time. None of them were held their against their will -- they all believed they DESERVED torture. When they were done torturing themselves, that's when they were ready to forgive and change and move on.
Also, David, are you aware of all the interesting evidence for re-incarnation, and do you have a take on it?
David
These are universal themes in hellish NDEs -- and in the hellish realms and experiences we experience in this world...
I read that page, and Bruce Greyson's comment that there were cases of two children remembering the same past life - I had not heard of that before.Reincarnation is another topic that needs to be examined more carefully. While most of the people in this forum probably know there is strong evidence that supports the case FOR reincarnation, it's important to know that there is equally compelling evidence that suggests reincarnation does not actually exist the way we commonly imagine it does. I have a page up on NHNE's Formula website that includes some down the rabbit hole comments from Bruce Greyson, Howard Storm, and myself:
https://the-formula.org/greyson-storm-reincarnation/