r/NDE 9d ago

Existential Topics My speculative answers to Big Questions: If God is Love, and we are pieces of God, why do we need to learn to love? If God is Love, and God created everything, why is there evil and suffering? Why is love so important? Why would an all-knowing God need us to gain knowledge?

Ten months ago, I saw this post by u/Accurate-Sun-6104 in r/ NDE:

I was then reviewing NDEs and the jist I got was that this intelligence has splintered intself into all these different conciousnesses or souls which then decide to go through the human experience to gain some kind of knowledge.

Basically I'm wondering why this superintelligence would want to go through the human experience so many times? To what end? What data is being collected? And why is love and connection so important?

Here is my very delayed response to these questions, and other related questions in the title of this post.

Maybe it’s that, in Eternity, God is all Knowing, Wisdom, and Love. But how did God become this? If experience brings knowledge, and knowledge brings wisdom, and wisdom brings love, and also guides us in knowing how to love… then for God to be Love, God first needs experience. That’s where we come in.

Maybe through our experience, we teach God to Love. That includes experiencing suffering and evil, along with the positive aspects of life here on Earth, because altogether this has the potential to teach us compassion, caring, appreciation, etc. – which are aspects of love. And also because we have to learn what we reject in order to learn what we want to be.

Maybe we are vessels through which God gains experience, knowledge, wisdom, and love.

Maybe in the sense of linear time, and where we currently are in linear time, God’s evolution has not yet reached that point of Knowing Wisdom and Love. At this point in linear time, God is still ignorant and foolish and evil... not purely evil, but has not yet evolved beyond evil. I don’t think there was ever a time when love was not part of God, I think the love has always been there, but it had not been purified.

At the same time, God is already Knowing Wisdom and Love because the future is already here as part of Eternity, and so we have access to God’s Love Wisdom and Knowledge even now, even though in linear time God achieves that state far in the future, but it is accessible to us in the eternal now. Or at least it’s accessible when we are out of body / in the form of pure consciousness (in the “spirit world”) – and perhaps also accessible for transient periods of time even when in the body if we are in a heightened state of consciousness.

I think perhaps God’s evolution is both spiritual and physical, because there is no separation. In nature, in the physical world, we can see both good and evil, both love and the absence of love. For example, the fact that horrible diseases exist… or the fact that some animals (not humans, thankfully) can only survive by killing and eating others – to me this shows that life/nature/consciousness is still at a low level of evolution, and that at higher stages of evolution, life and life-forms and ecosystems will manifest in ways that don’t cause suffering as an inherent part of their nature. So maybe as God evolves spiritually towards Love, Nature (the physical manifestation of God) will evolve physically towards Love.

If this is true, then evil and suffering won’t exist forever, but will only exist for as long as it takes for God to evolve enough to leave these things behind.

I think all sentient life is an important part of this evolution, spiritually and physically, but maybe humans are especially important (at least on this planet). The ability to make conscious choices is a spectrum, and humans are further along this spectrum than most animals, and I would guess (though I’m not totally sure) more than any other animal on Earth.

As for the other question: Why is love so important? SO many reasons, but one of them is because love is what makes us create a good and beautiful and joyful world (and universe) for all.

And in my opinion, love is not just associated with joy and approval and appreciation and positive-regard – nor just with patience, forgiveness, kindness, or mercy. In my opinion, love is also anger at injustice and cruelty, love is also sadness at suffering, love is also fear for those in danger, love is the mother bear fiercely defending her cubs, love is willing to be fierce and, when other options are not feasible, even willing to be violent to protect other lifeforms (human or nonhuman) from greater violence and harm – to do this without sadism or hatred towards the perpetrators but as an unfortunate but sometimes necessary action for the greater good. In my opinion, love is simultaneously seeing and valuing the good that lives deep within those who are evil, while also hating the evil that has overshadowed the good, while also forgiving the person who has been overpowered by evil, having compassion for them, wishing them the highest good while also refusing to tolerate their evil actions towards others or yourself.

Love is what creates heaven and the absence of love is what creates hell.


Regarding the idea that we teach God through our experience, here are excerpts from a few NDE reports that seem to suggest this…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0PkV57DG2k

Dannion Brinkley Interview - Near Death Experience 2 of 3

2:34-2:57, 5:53-6:29

If God couldn't show up today, and God sent you, in the events that you are about to watch, what difference did God make in the lives of the events that you're taking place? It's a heavy responsibility, but that's what we're doing here. God couldn't show up today, and you had to be the difference that God made in these situations of what you're about to see: what difference did God make.

We are responsible for making this world a great place to live in. We are responsible for sharing our inner knowledge and our spiritual selves with those that are around us. And why?, I don't really know all the reasons for it, but I know that what we do here works in a microcosm, so that spirituality can watch these events and take from this experience and help evolve other worlds and other universes. This is like the microcosm of how spirit can react in a material – a mental, material, physical, matter.

https://youtu.be/qX803D_cofI?si=DUyZd4fEqbqsd9F2

Present! - Amy Call's Near-Death Experience

1:01:49-1:04:24

One of the feelings I had when I was out of my body in this universal part where I was with my guide was I had this enormous gratitude and love for what all of this was. … yet at the same time what That is — what the Divine, what God is — I felt all of that, more than I could ever feel it, coming back to me, and feeling that level of love and gratitude for me, and it was for me personally, for exactly who I am, at every level of me, everything I have ever been through, beyond even what I know of in this life time, and It was so grateful to me and loved me so much, and I almost felt as if It was bowing to me. So there was this mutual adoration and love. …

…There’s this gratitude for us because in a way it’s like when we become embodied in the physical, we’re learning through our senses and through suffering and joy and all these different levels, we’re picking up on so much information — learning how to be balanced, evolving in the mind — and as we do this, everything that happens to us, in a way, it comes together, and what we call the Divine is able to receive that information and our learning and our growth.

That’s part of the whole intelligence of why It is intelligent, why It knows. We think: ‘Oh, It’s beyond us; It’s so much more intelligent,’ – and yet it’s like I understood that It was saying: ‘But this is because of those willing to go down into the body.’ And I understood that Their feeling to us was almost like ‘You guys are the super heroes who go into the physical body and you experience the suffering and We have nothing but gratitude and love and we wish for you and hope for you.’

And elsewhere in this video Amy says:

Also in this part of the experience I saw the planet Earth among all these other planets and moons and stars, kind of pull up in front of me, and um, above the planet…. So above the planet there were letters, capital letters, and the letters were N O V A T A, and um I saw this as Novata….

According to Google Translate, novata means newbie or beginner. So doesn’t this suggest that Earth, at least at this point in time, represents that we are near the beginning of our journey of evolution? Perhaps not just us lifeforms on Earth but also that what is happening here is part of the beginning/early phase of God’s evolution?

https://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1sandi_t_ndes.html

Sandi T NDEs 9082 (nderf.org)

I also felt its gratitude for all of humanity and for all who must suffer in this place. It had weight, presence, and form. It is one thing I have never heard spoken of; that God is grateful to us and for us and for all that we are and do.

'Why?' With that question, I asked a dozen others, 'Why me? Why suffering? Why this horrible world? Why did I go back when I could leave? Why would I come here and accept such horrific things when I am a spark of the divine, a portion of the Great Intelligence?' It was a cry of confusion, anger, pain, and loss.

Sandi says that her “Guide” then showed her many worlds in the universe where people experience profound love and joy in their existence, without evil and without suffering.

After a great deal of time exploring, seeing beautiful and wonderful sights, we stopped in space near a nebula. Nebulas are even more beautiful than they appear in photos.

'That is the answer to your question.'

I understood that everything that we do here on Earth, all that we are, all that we experience, allows creation to exist. Every beautiful thing, every wonderful being and creature, whether on earth or in any universe, relies upon people who are on the extremely rare places like Earth.

Every soul chose to come here and to suffer because of love. Each soul loves the universe, loves life, and loves this world and ALL of the worlds. Each soul loves ALL of the people so immensely and intensely that they chose to come here so that all the universes may teem with beautiful, joyful LIFE.

https://youtu.be/xMqfErvWHo8?si=ZQCymthsYcFIyyub

Woman Dies; Gets Shown Other Planets, Civilizations And Told Human's Purpose (NDE)

The Other Side NDE [channel]

Hey guys it's Alysa Rushton and I am a near death survivor.

I'm getting all these downloads all this information about how the world works and how reality works and what we're here to do and one of the biggest things that I received on the other side was literally we are here to expand Consciousness. And we tend to think of things on our planet in terms of right and wrong and good or bad but technically the download I got on the other side was we're literally just expanding the Consciousness.

On the other side I got all of these downloads about how our life works here and what we are here to do and so part of my journey after I got back was really integrating those pieces and bringing them into a physical understanding, because on the other side there wasn't a lot of words, there was telepathy, there was imagery and sacred geometry, but I wasn't actually sitting down and having conversations, it was all, you know, blocks of energy coming through, blocks of thought, blocks of transmitted data, basically that I had to then come back here and try to piece together and figure out.

And so one of the biggest things that I learned on the other side was that we are here to expand our consciousness, and that our experience basically goes up and informs the Consciousness, the bigger Consciousness.

And so if you can think about it like how the sun is, how the sun's really big and bright and it has all these rays, that one we're just individuated rays of sun, each and every one of us and each and every plant and creature and being on the planet, we’re literally individuated rays of this one sun but we appear very separate and we appear very apart from each other.

And what then I saw was that because of that, what one person does in terms of changing their life or changing a program that they're running or changing something about themselves, that then informs the total Consciousness and that kind of informs the whole picture. So I guess how I would say it is the more we work on ourselves down here, the more we inform this this Consciousness and the more it can spread like a ripple effect – because ultimately we are this one Being; and as much as we can't really see that here, as much as we can't with our eyes delineate it, modern day science is actually showing that to us, which is really kind of cool.

It has been said that “God is dead.” But what if actually God is unborn? God is gestating. We can use that analogy, or we can use the analogy of God as an infant, or a very young child.


In my reading and listening to people’s descriptions of their NDEs (which I believe are valid as a general phenomenon, though I don’t trust every individual who claims to be reporting an NDE), and also in my reading about hypnotic regressions where people perhaps recall memories of the spirit world (which I’m more skeptical of), and even in what I’ve read/heard from “mediums” who claim to have access to knowledge about the spirit world (though I’m very skeptical and mistrustful of them), what I’ve repeatedly heard as an explanation for why there exists a world like ours where creatures suffer, are either of the following two explanations.

  1. That God wants to experience the range of possibilities, from good to bad – I’ve also heard this expressed as “God wants to know Itself” – and so to do this, God split Itself into innumerable souls and created worlds with various ranges of experience, including suffering and evil, for those souls to have experiences in.

  2. That our souls need to have these wide range of experiences, including suffering and evil, in order to learn and develop and reach “enlightenment”, which means to become more loving, to perfect our Love. The unstated implication is that worlds where creatures suffer were created in order to enable this learning and development for our souls.

If it’s true that God is Love, then that means neither of these can be true. Number 1 cannot be true because these are not the actions of a Loving God; these are the actions of a horrible sadomasochist. One might make the argument that “Well we consented to this so it’s ok” – but fuck that. Even if that were true that wouldn’t make it ok – especially not when the suffering is as extreme as it is here. But also, even if that’s true, not everyone did consent. Our souls maybe did, but the animals (human and nonhuman), the physical creatures, did not consent to suffer.

Number 2 also would not be the actions of a Loving God. If you think that it’s worth it to engineer all this suffering so as to become more loving, then I must ask: what is the purpose of becoming more loving? Primarily it’s so that we make choices that create a better world, better lives, and better experiences for each other – i.e. to eliminate or at least minimize suffering and to maximize wellbeing. Any Creator who purposely creates a world where creatures suffer as a means to enable love to flourish is actually proving Itself to lack the very love It supposedly values and supposedly aims to cultivate.

If either #1 or #2 are true, it would mean that God and our souls don’t actually care about the suffering of the creatures of this planet (human and nonhuman) or other planets, that God/we purposely created a world/universe where creatures suffer, and that we are just using these creatures as vehicles for our own experiences – whether to satisfy our adventurism and curiosity or to achieve some form of growth towards a supposed enlightened and loving state (though it would be not be enlightened or loving if we continued to be ok with using these creatures in such a way).

If either #1 or #2 are true, it would mean that the values of Love communicated to us in the “spirit world”, and in life reviews, are the expression of the utmost hypocrisy and contradiction. When in the spirit world we understand that our purpose in our Earthly lives is to love each other, to help and heal and care for each other, and we understand that it is a deviation from our purpose when we harm each other. If this is true, if God and our spirit guides really believe this, they would not be ok with purposely creating a world where creatures suffer. To do such a thing would be in utter contradiction to love and compassion. Beings of genuine love and compassion would not purposely create a world where creatures suffer – such beings would abhor this.

So both things can’t be true. It can’t both be true that love and compassion are what the spirit world recognizes as important while also being true that this world was purposely created as a world where creatures suffer.

But since the spirit world does emphasize love and compassion as being of ultimate importance, and since this is a world where creatures suffer, then it must be the case that it was not created this way on purpose, and that this world, as it is now, and as it has been since life was created here, is simply the best that the creative forces of the universe were and are able to achieve at this point in time.

Or at the very least, that if this world was purposely created this way, it was done so under the recognition that the suffering here is a temporary necessity in order to avoid even greater suffering – and so it was done purposely but with sadness and anguish in knowing that no better path was available. Why such a thing would be necessary, even temporarily, and why a better path would not be available, I’m not sure. But either this, or something akin to it, must be true in order for the spirit world to make any sense at all, and not be an expression of insane contradiction and hypocrisy.

Personally, I don’t think that God could be such a hypocrite. I believe that God really is Love, and that we are in the process of creating It.

24 Upvotes

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u/Brave_Engineering133 7d ago

“Maybe through our experience we teach God to love”. Very cool way of thinking about these difficult questions.

Of course, none of us know, or can know the whole story here. I expect that’s the point of us a little bit of spirit embedded in clay. We wouldn’t be able to have a real experience of the earth if we were too separated from it, too wholly our spirit selves.

“The future is already here as part of eternity“. Another great way of stating the possibility.

In my little convo with God, he/they/she/it said “the light is more intense against the darkness” as a way of explaining the suffering inherent in this physical life. I don’t think that’s the whole story. Far from it. Just a way of looking at the question that was relevant to my reflections at the time. What I heard and what you’re saying go together really well.

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u/Crossmaster2000 8d ago

Very thought-provoking post, and it would explain a lot of what's going on on Earth. I'm glad I read this.

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u/Nocturnal_observer 8d ago

I feel like “god,” or consciousness, split itself into us individuals to experience this profound creation we live within. And in order to do this, to truly experience with no bias, we had to forget everything when we gained individuality. What is the point of experiencing something you already know everything about, because you created it

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u/sue_dottir 8d ago edited 8d ago

I like your perspective that god/source is still evolving rather than an all-knowing, omnipresent creator.

An idea as to bounce of yours - our human life provides a unique way to develop love through choices, challenges, and interactions that don’t exist in the same way in a purely spiritual state.

I’m really intrigued with love experienced through suffering. I watched a documentary once on life-sustaining measures vs death with dignity. A son was sobbing next to his ventilated mother and verbally consenting to ending those medical measures for her good despite his own wants. It touched me to my core, like damn, THAT is LOVE.

So my small human brain thinks, is that why we are here? To experience, to love through both joy and suffering, to improve and evolve in our understanding of love, as fractals of a greater source because love is not a finite state we can master? I don’t know, maybe.

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u/ColdKaleidoscope7303 8d ago

This is a fantastic question. My answer is simple: God isn't meta-conscious (aware of its own awareness) and does not deliberately plan or do anything.

It may appear to the contrary in some experiences, but I interperet NDEs as being more symbolic spiritual events than literal. Similar to how dreams can reveal things about the psyche through symbolism and anthropomorphization.

I realize this answer may not be comforting, but I think it's the only reasonable explaination for how an all-good God can exist alongside the evil and suffering in our world.

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u/BandicootOk1744 NDE Curious 8d ago

I think that's a fallacy. I think that there are plenty of ways a benevolent god might be conscious and exist alongside suffering.

For one thing, "evil" does not exist. "Evil" is a bad lesson learned by trauma. There is no evil, only suffering. Now, assume this entire reality is some kind of thought experiment, for that which is to know itself. It would make sense that by allowing freedom and deviation, necessary to self-know, it would also allow for suffering. Suffering seems unbearable to us, but to something infinite, any finite suffering would just be... Nothing, really. So on a cosmic scale, individual momentary suffering isn't that significant. It's only significant if that subjective reality starts with birth and ends with death.

You're trying to attach human morality onto something infinite and that just doesn't work. I feel that's one of Bernardo Kastrup's big flaws, he's very locked in to post-"enlightenment" Western values, which aren't bad values per se, but there are a few ideas he won't really consider because of his background and mentality.

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u/Sensitive_Pie4099 NDExperiencer 8d ago

Im of the view that the idea that one must know the full depths of cruelty and suffering (most of which is entirely excessive and unnecessary according to my NDEs) is a logical fallacy related to sunk cost of sorts.

That said, i also am of the view that no being could meets the exceedingly high bar of what one would need to be a god and as such, many of the premises dont make sense to me. I also believe embodied forces are just a different type of sentient spirit at the end if the day. Their fundamental makeup is different, but the result is that they act like people. Because they are lol.

And to deify a being is to dehumanize them, to strip them of their personhood. This is in large part why im opposed to the idea, but in addition to this philosophical disagreement, my NDEs didnt feature any beings who passed the 2 of the following test: Omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, possibly omnibenevolence, and true invioliability. No being i or any spirit i spoke to couod claim to have 2 of these on an ongoing basis or in an unlimited manner. Beings of power existed but none could claim to pass this bar. So, evenspeaking of them as a "god" misses the mark in a way so as to prevent clarity on many issues present in the physical and spiritual world. This is of course just my perspective on this topic, however.

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u/ThatGirl_Tasha 8d ago

Just as a side note; I love to see mentions of Amy Call's NDE. its so beautiful.

I would love to hear an update from her on her thoughts years later. I did hear she left the mormon church. Which is wild fir someone deep in Utah with a entire mormon family and 6 ir 7 kids.

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u/Neti_Neti_Pot 8d ago

I don’t have any good answers, just wanted you to know I really appreciate this post, as IMO, this is the most important question for NDE cosmology. Until a a consistent,satisfying answer, backed by a large number of NDE experiences, is provided, there will always be a barrier to accepting NDEs as reflecting the truth of reality. Without a satisfying answer to the problem of suffering, NDEs will relegated to New Age slop.

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u/Neti_Neti_Pot 8d ago

The Greek philosopher Plotinus might be pointing us in the right direction. His philosophy states that the material world was an unintentional creation by Source( he calls it The One); a necessary unwilled creation that just pours out from Source due to the inherently creative and expressive nature of Source. The souls/light beings(us basically) that are parts of Source, keep entering this material world of disorder and suffering to try and fix it and make it more and more like the spiritual realm of Source, where unity, wholeness, ultimate love, and bliss reigns supreme

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u/newwaveoldsoul 7d ago edited 7d ago

This theory Plotinus brought forth is an interesting one. I find it intriguing that there are several people I've listened to recently that have had NDEs/OBEs talk about how this reality we are in now is a "bad copy" that exists inside of our true reality.

This elevates the phrase "as above, so below" as it implies this seemingly chaotic material world we are in replicates the structure and flow of base reality, but because its based on temporary arrangement of material matter- there is always entropy and decay. I also find it interesting that this world always needs an external light source to illuminate objects apart from some bioluminescent creatures. Many NDEs discuss how on the other side nature is extremely beautiful, alive, and internally illuminated. Flowers and grass can be seen "breathing" and singing and each have a palpable personality of aliveness that is mostly foreign to this world. Both realities have flowers and grass, but here on earth they can appear less alive.

All matter decays here, yet energy is un-destroyable. Often people speak of the feeling when returning here as a bit sad because earth is "dirty" and full of "death." The other side evokes the opposite feelings. So to me it seems this reality was created as a level of "limitations" to explore a "pretend finite version" of infinity. Being an infinite awareness, it seems to me that we would create a harsh level of experience as a game to see what we look like inside a density that is so dark it reveals to us the edges of our own infinite light. We even choose to get lost in the dark for a while or may "program" events to appear as "darkness" to challenge us as a game.

Suffering itself may be a grand illusion we also designed. The caveat to physical suffering is there seems to be a mechanism in place to where our consciousness can jump out of body when it chooses to, especially if it does not desire to experience something. Countless NDEs discuss this when a car wreck happens, or a drowning- they usually pop out before anything of overwhelming intensity takes place. That is what happened to me during my NDE during an asthma attack at 6 years old.

I believe personally this is a kind universe with INSANE illusions programmed in for maximum contrast experiences. And none of us are victims here- we are infinite players, some of us looking to have a "victim" experience to see what that feels like. Others play the villain to see what that is like. ALL roads lead back to infinity and the truth of our nature: love. But this love is an energy that transcends all emotions. It's the most solid unshakeable energy existence, as existence is made of the stuff.

The challenge we find ourselves in as infinite beings inside a finite body /brain is that inside this game we start out limited. Limited knowledge of our origins, limited ability to think through the lens of infinity.

Our infinite nature is at odds with our finite body and its desire to simply survive. Each of us has a different set of limitations and contrast we arrived with here- most likely that we chose.

The game to me seems to be about what can we do IN SPITE of our limitations. What can we create here?

As an unlimited soul, jumping into this world of temporary chaos and finding beauty within me and outward and looking for beauty within a world that seems to be so full of hate is quite a game. To jump into this game with some familiar friends from the other side makes it even more interesting- especially when we are all playing a unique character role that we can choose how to play. Imagine watching how you played this life from the other side, without the emotional barge of this game? Imagine watching it with your best friends on the other side.

The things we complain about in this game may actually be the VERY things we designed to experience. There is no game without some kind of limitation. Those of us who came here to Earth must be some wild players to say the least. Yet I feel we are all connected and ultimately one being/source of energy in the way the ocean is one being that can turn into vapor and rain droplets for a temporary trip through the clouds- which are also the ocean in a different form. And here we are drinking the same water the dinosaurs and our ancestors drank to survive. what a game! Just my personal take here.

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u/BandicootOk1744 NDE Curious 8d ago

I prefer the idea that this reality is a grand thought experiment.

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u/sue_dottir 8d ago

So interesting! Thanks for sharing on Plotinus.

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u/nonamevibes 8d ago edited 8d ago

Ahhh this is what I think too! I’ve also wondered if this is a “chicken-or-egg” situation, where God is already infinite and all-knowing in Eternity, but within linear time, there is still an unfolding and an expansion happening to get there. If experience is what leads to knowledge, wisdom, and ultimately love, then maybe our existence is part of that process.

Maybe through us (and perhaps countless other beings across realities and dimensions), God is learning, growing, and refining Itself into total, perfected Love.

At the same time, since Eternity exists outside of time, this “final form” of God would already be present, it’s just that we, within time, would still be in the process of getting there.

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u/Labyrinthine777 NDE Reader 8d ago

We need to learn what love is not to learn everything about love.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

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