Lou Gold wrote: ↑Thu Apr 20, 2023 3:18 pmLet me be certain that you understand that I do not resist the truth of reincarnation. I was only noting that I have memory gaps concerning my personal past lifetimes and for this reason I don't speak of them. I just like to hold my speculations to areas where I'm confident of the details of my personal direct experience.AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Apr 20, 2023 2:53 pmLou Gold wrote: ↑Thu Apr 20, 2023 12:15 pm Aloha, Ashvin,
Certainly it's a process and sometimes a so-called "evil" behavior or experience brings an individual to profound spiritual evolution as has been reported as evidenced among some life-long prison inmates. Or, in the case of Maté, it is precisely the trauma he experience as a child that drove him to the wisdom of trauma that he discovered and is now sharing as an adult. I find it a joy to actually discover now, under the influence of dying, how often I was wrong in the past. Expanding awareness is truly a lovely blessing. One might even hope to continue to be "wrong" in one's interpretations. It's made me a happy camper.
And, I agree with what you say about reincarnation, which is why I say nothing about it. I'm not there yet.
And that's the real issue we are always pointing to here, Lou - the topic of reincarnation or Karmic laws isn't only a separate domain of knowledge we can acquire about reality, but an integral aspect of understanding everything which manifests in our current body-soul-spirit nature, including our understanding of who we are. So a view which speaks to the nature and sources of psychic trauma, along with proposed methods of dealing with it, without also accounting for the ongoing rhythms of incarnation, is mostly blind. It can stumble upon insights like a person bumping into objects in a dark house, but one object can easily get mixed up for another and most rooms and levels of the house can be left unexplored.
It's understandable why this holistic approach is so heavily resisted. If we can't reach definitive conclusions in one domain of experience without grasping the living currents which animate practically all other domains, then we don't know what to do with ourselves anymore. The mostly fragmented approach to knowledge is the only thing we have been doing as civilizations for hundreds of years now. That's what the modern intellect was adapted to do and what it does best. It's more convenient, easier, 'cleaner', and more immediately satisfying and gratifying. But with the holistic approach via strengthened spiritual activity, entirely new avenues of exploration are revealed to us and we find a higher satisfaction in resisting the definitive conclusions and simply experiencing the animating inflow of new cognitive currents.
I understand. I was speaking more to Mate and others in a similar position, although we all have this tendency to some extent or another and we shouldn't lose sight of that. Actually one of the reasons I found Peterson so inspiring to begin with is because he resisted such premature and sweeping conclusions about our be-ing yet still managed to provide much food for thought. He focused on the most proximate areas of our spiritual activity where we have intimate experience and freedom of action, hence the 'shut up and clean your room' approach. I haven't really been following him lately, though, and I know that the longer people keep the further deepening and enlivening of their own thinking in the blind spot, the greater the risk of stagnating and defaulting into conceptual abstractions about fundamental questions of existence.