[Vicariously Yours]

I am grateful to you for taking your time in leaving this blog. Yours is one of the truly sane, calm voices here, and I learn a lot any time I read any of your thoughtful responses. I hope you continue to drag your feet somewhat as you leave...

I recall a brief passage from one of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' last books, and it has served me well over the years to keep in mind. As you might recall, Kubler-Ross began her career from a purely clinical standpoint, preferring to objectively observe and record the impressions of people as they experienced their own deaths. Obviously, she wasn't too successful staying strictly clinical, and she eventually entered her "new-agey" phase, convinced that the soul is eternal and that we are far more than our bodies. Kubler-Ross tells the story of a conversation she claims to have had with a nonphysical being she describes as one of her guides. The guide told her, "When I’m born again to a human body, I want to die of starvation as a child." Never one to believe in the ennobling effects of suffering, Kubler-Ross responded with brutal frankness: "You choose to be born to die of starvation!? What kind of idiot are you?" To which her guide remarked, with great love: "Elisabeth, it would enhance my compassion."

The point is clear: we all choose our experiences, and all of our experiences have divine value. Period. From the supposed beginning of our lives until the very (supposed) end. Which means that, yes, the Jews did ask for (and receive) the Holocaust. I was tempted to say, sorry about that, but I am not. Read the Abraham-Hicks material (or the Seth material, or Conversations with God, or any of hundreds of other texts on the subject), and it will tell you that we all have set the circumstances of our own deaths. Shall we be sorry for that? Rape victims (and I can, in a fashion, include myself in this category, so I know of which I speak) did ask for (and receive) their rapes. Starving children asked for (and received) their god-awful conditions (are we really so naive as to believe that the infant is just some mindless thing without a guiding "higher self" who knows, in glorious detail, everything that's going on?) And Bill Gates asked for (and received) his billions of dollars. I'm sorry that some (if not most) people can't or won't accept this. They prefer to relinquish their responsibilities and blame others whom they perceive as outside their control. It's simpler that way, I guess, just floating along, experiencing "by default" rather than with conscious intent.

Unfortunately, these same people will never be able to improve their lot in life, simply because they don't believe they can. Worse, they can't even bring themselves to "pretend" the LoA might work, as you have suggested. Too bad.

I many years ago subscribed to the notion that God is the All That Is. Meaning, there is nothing (and nobody) that is not God. Read this again: there is nothing that is not God. Now, if one subscribes to that notion, how then is it possible to believe that anything happens by chance? How is it possible for one part of God to be (genuinely) ignorant of, or at odds with, another part of God? How is it possible to view any of the horrible things that are happening in this world as anything other than an elaborate game, a cosmic theater production we (as parts of God) have constructed for our own amusement and/or instruction?

And how is it possible to believe that we are not, ourselves, parts of God who share in all the power and creativity that that implies???

"...it would enhance my compassion." I love that.