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. \u00c2\u00a0Cooperating 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.<\/p>\n
Maybe it went something like this.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 We could have been told something like:\u00c2\u00a0 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.”\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
But back to the mundane unconsciousness. It can lead to horrors.\u00c2\u00a0 Unconscious people do despicable horrible things to others.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 You will get angry, desperate, suicidal.\u00c2\u00a0 It ain’t gonna be a picnic.\u00c2\u00a0 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!\u00c2\u00a0 (Read Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth<\/a> for the best explanation of this awakening from little me unconsciousness).\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 That is the closest I can come to “solving” the Problem of Evil.\u00c2\u00a0 <snort> And I have been grappling with it for many years.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 (The problem of suffering is a part of the Problem of Evil in philosophical\/theological discourse).\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Okay, painful as hell but we can see the logic of that.\u00c2\u00a0 HOWEVER, what about this, God?:\u00c2\u00a0 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?\u00c2\u00a0 What about THAT suffering?\u00c2\u00a0 It wasn’t caused by Free Will.<\/p>\n So yeah, evil.\u00c2\u00a0 Ugh.\u00c2\u00a0 Suffering of the innocent, double Ugh.\u00c2\u00a0 That is the one I am grappling with now, solitary philosphical arguments going on in my head.\u00c2\u00a0 <laugh> \u00c2\u00a0 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<\/a> and Dinesh D’Souza’s What’s So Great About Christianity<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Suffering of the innocent from flooks of nature like cancer and horrible lingering fatal diseases, is another thing that forces us to go DEEP.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 This suffering would then force us and those around us to think, think, THINK and to go deep and WITHIN to find cosmic answers.\u00c2\u00a0 Some of us might even awaken while observing such hells, others would get into despair and curse at Universe\/the Powers that Be, etc.\u00c2\u00a0 But some would use the suffering as that window — actually nice big door — of opportunity for awakening.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n Still working out the kinks of this one.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ll check back in a few years (!) which is usually how long I chew on each of these elements.\u00c2\u00a0 <laugh>\u00c2\u00a0 Thanks to all the spiritual writers and bloggers who pose such dilemmas and write about them, thus giving fuel to my fodder of pondering.<\/p>\n Smiles,<\/p>\n Katia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. \u00c2\u00a0Cooperating with each other and with the Universal Consciousness (God?) and choosing, AGREEING to incarnate on earth does seem logical and more sensible than … Continue reading Problem of Suffering, Cooperative Pre-incarnation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,2],"tags":[41,16,268,106,103,265,104,102,105],"class_list":["post-102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-problem-of-evil","category-what-sunday-school-wont-teach","tag-a-new-earth","tag-dinesh-dsouza","tag-eckhart-tolle","tag-karma","tag-pre-incarnation","tag-problem-of-evil","tag-reincarnation","tag-theodicy","tag-whats-so-great-about-christianity"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":107,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions\/107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}