Can’t we just be pragmatic, please? I mean, look around, there is such a screaming need to focus efforts upon practical matters. to confront crises which threaten our stability in almost every direction! Why must we speak of, think upon, devote time and energy to those challenges and conditions which might exist in the afterlife? For sure, it will be soon enough that we all arrive there in one way or another, and then we can apply our energies to grappling with whatever situations hold there… if in fact any do at all!

/// If you learn that you must travel to Antarctica next week, the reason you immediately propel yourself into a planning and studying frenzy is because you know there will not be convenience stores, pizzerias, or virtual reality gaming centers dotting the landscape, and that the special environmental conditions which hold sway there demand some preparations else your stay will prove miserable, severely limited, or even fatal.

What are you saying? I believe my present Faith will shield me in the appropriate ways.

/// It is easy, easy but lazy and deluded, to project so much of your current reality onto the spiritual conditions you imagine after death. You must entertain the idea that it is, from a higher more objective point of view, quite peculiar and artificial that our current conditions of consciousness result in such a drastic cleavage between life and afterlife awareness. Mustn’t it be something to heal, something that is inherently deformed or corrupted? Things are not as they should be — could be. And this ‘staged’ state of affairs is to the benefit of certain cosmic actors and to the detriment of others — namely us.

Project my current reality how, exactly? I do not really imagine too much in detail about after death conditions, or so I suppose.

/// If you search your conscience, your moral intuition, with sufficient inner quietness, persistence, and honesty you will have the feeling uncovered that you, we, all humans, are called upon to do more. To, at this point in cosmic evolution, become more serious free agent actors in the great drama. We’ve been given freedom and independent judgement. It took centuries of cultural struggle to unfold. Now, what are we supposed to do with it, this gigantic spiritual gift? Apply it to personal libertarian urges, which by the way naturally conflict with the same urges of others, to accumulate earthly power and satisfy whims and ambitions? No! That is extremely short-sighted and morally repugnant. We are called upon at this cosmic dramatic moment to do all we can, with devoted utmost creativity, to re-bridge the gap between earthly and post-earthly consciousness. To answer your immediately previous question… there is a direct relationship between the degree to which we fill our thoughts, our psyches, with exclusively material and earth-bound sense-bound concepts and wishes and the amount of independent perception, and therefore leeway for spiritual activity, which we will be endowed with when in the afterlife. Indeed, it possible to spend the afterlife almost in an entire condition of darkened sleep because we’ve done nothing but inhibit the necessary spiritual organs during our earthly life. We will not have the same inner conditions after death. We will initially inhabit a kind of limited prison of concepts reflected from our own previous lifetime. And the means to obtain consciously active “freedom” from this initial purgatory will directly depend upon the quantity and quality of spiritual — meaning non-sensory, for sense organs are purely an earthly phenomenon — concepts and ideas we have spent time cultivating. It is exactly this activity, which we can ONLY undertake in freedom while among the living, which morphs into any abilities to independently navigate and operate within spiritual existence afterwards.

Surely our unique idiosyncracies would hold. And these things, these personality elements must be indicators of our true natures which would be of relevance in those other conditions. For they must distinguish us as distinct entities.

/// Our personalities will need to be shed there. They cannot exist there, the way plants could not exist without carbon dioxide here. So very much will depend upon the extra-personal attributes and concerns which we’ve cultivated while here. They are what will matter! For they alone are of the same substance which holds sway in non-physical existence, and all else which we might hold as intimately connected to our core being will be gently washed away. For they are preserved, and they contain seeds for that kind of supra-earthly soil. It is a harsh thing, which typical religious faith conceals, as well as of course any form of materialism promulgated into a worldview, that belief we are already “saved” because of our confession to some dogma or other will protect us and nurture our post-earthly circumstances. Faith was appropriate in past eras. Now that individual inner freedom holds sway, something else must be added and is required. We have to alter things here, to give incoming incarnating souls, infants and children, suitable and welcoming conditions for them to fulfil their myriad karmic missions. The best way to do this is to replace the mostly physicalist worldview which clouds reality and open it up to more spiritual reality. We are not offering our children oxygen in the spiritual sense. We are not offering them reality. We are mucking up their chances to preserve a kind of inward integrity, or continuity of purpose, between their pre-earthly impressions about what is important to accomplish and what is actually made manifest and plausible under the deformed cultural realities we subject them to here. Of course, they will rebel, eventually in various manners. Chaos will deepen. It is the thinking that must change — what we occupy our minds with — what we allow to live in our quotidien consciousness, collectively.

_______RS

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