u/WintyreFraust

If everything has a cause, and you trace all those causes back through time ... how far back do they go? The Big Bang? But.... what caused the Big Bang? Did "nothing" cause the Big Bang?

Do causes go back in time infinitely? Then, if there is an infinite string of causes going back in infinite historical time .. how did events ever get to this point in time?

Hmm. Sounds like, one way or another, causation depends on magic, either to get something from nothing, an effect with no cause; or some magical force that brought events through infinite history to get to now.

Where did the whole cause and effect system come from? What caused it? What keeps it sustained from one point in time to the next, from one location to another? Universal laws? Where did they come from? What keeps a universal natural law consistent and in operation from on location to the next, from one point in time to the next? What caused natural laws to exist in the first place?

Hmm. I guess it all just popped into existence and is maintained by magic.

A few things determinists have said in response to my posts the past several days.

Before getting into that, though, the definition of Causal Determinism from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

>Determinism: Determinism is true of the world if and only if, given a specified way things are at a time t, the way things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of natural law.

Now, the wild things some determinists say:

"Science requires determinism." - No, it doesn't. See this explanation by u/zoipoi Science only requires highly predictable models of the behavior of phenomena, which is not remotely the same thing as determinism.

"Determinism isn’t held on faith, it’s held because in every domain of physics we can model, the model is a deterministic evolution of initial conditions according to a law. That's testable and observable. It’s an empirical track record that would be surprising in a non deterministic universe." - This is the gross conflation of predictable models of behavior with determinism. Virtually all scientific models contain probabilistic elements.

Under my post The "Rewind the Tape" Argument is, Ironically, Circular Reasoning, several determinists said that the "Rewind the Tape" defense of determinism is not used as an argument, but as a description of what determinism means. Even if you could "rewind the tape," the widespread probabilistic elements in that prior state, at both the macro and subatomic levels, indicate that what follows after the tape is rewound to that point has very little chance of being the same set of things that followed the first time through. These probability variances collectively produce exponentially variant outcomes for relatively short durations after each run from the same starting point begins (assuming that could even be done.)

"When the models that are deterministic can be falsified, then they are interesting, before that, I see no reason why we should refuse that reality behaves as we observe it behaves." - There's virtually no current scientific model that is "deterministic" because virtually all of them contain probabilistic elements. BTW, there is no "scientific consensus" (in terms of what physicists believe) for determinism; the top answers among physicists were non-deterministic interpretations: A Century Into Quantum Mechanics, Physicists Still Can’t Agree What It Means, Nature Survey Shows.

"Determinism is the most efficient explanation for what we observe - Occam's Razor. (paraphrased) - Sure, if you completely ignore or wave away all of the probabilistic elements that exist in virtually every scientific model.

"Libertarian Free Will is the insertion of a "magical" (or religious/spiritual) force or component." (paraphrased) - while LFW can be associated with or derived from such perspectives, there is a robust and long-standing field of LFW thought that is not derived from any religious or spiritual perspective and does not rely on anything approaching "magic," such as Agent-Causal Indeterminism that holds that it LFW is an emergent property of some biological entities that provides that organism with the capacity to begin entirely new causal chains.

(Edited to add:)

"Libertarian Free Will and the initiating of new causal chains would violate known physical laws." (paraphrased) - What physical laws does it violate, then? What we call "physical laws" only represent models of the predictable patterns of observed phenomena. As long as the "chain of events" that follows from the new cause can be well-described by those physical laws, how does it violate those physical laws? What is going on here is the conflation of physical laws with a metaphysical determinist assumption: while an acausal cause doesn't violate any known physical law, it violates the metaphysical perspective of determinism, which claims that every event has a cause. That's a claim that is well outside of the scope of science to verify.

Determinism is not a scientific theory; it never has been. Cause and effect is not a scientific theory; it never has been.

The origin of determinism is very closely tied to the origin of materialism/physicalism, which began formally as "atomism." Atomism, essentially, was the theory that everything is comprised of tiny solid objects (called atoms) that were indivisible and had innate, objective characteristics that dictated how they interacted with other atoms at any scale. In fact, determinism directly came from this "atomist" perspective.

Although we found out that atoms were not indivisible objects, the conceptual essence of "atomism" remained: that the universe was comprised of objectively real objects with innate, objective characteristics that dictated all activity and processes and outcomes as they interacted according to those characteristics.

This is what "determinism" has been founded on for 2500 years. The concept of physical cause and effect came directly from, and is rooted in this conceptual lineage. The origin and lynchpin of both determinism and physical cause and effect is the basic concept of "atomism."

Over time and as science advanced and more became known about the nature of the structure of the atom, "atomism" was replaced with a different terminology, but with the same conceptual structure: it was called "local realism." IOW, even if the actual "atom" did not provide the objective physical characteristics necessary to support cause-and-effect determinism, something surely did - quarks, leptons, muons, gluons, electrons, neutrons, photons, etc.

Then something shocking happened; quantum experiments at least seemed to directly violate the conceptual framework of "local realism." For the next 100 years scientists attempted to dream up interpretations, such as "hidden variables," and eventually test the theories that could salvage local realism. Unfortunately for determinists, the results of all of those experiments contra-indicated local realism, and culminated in experiments that won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics disproving local realism entirely.

Perhaps cause-and-effect determinists now pin their belief in unproven theories of non-local realism?

In contrast, there have been some attempts to formalize the concept of free will into theories that lend themselves to experimental predictions, such as with the Conway–Kochen theorem in physics and the Libet-style paradigms in neuroscience; while both were taken at the time as being contra-indicative of free will, that is no longer the scientific consensus as further examination revealed both conceptual and methodological issues with those studies. IOW, such experiments are not taken to provide good evidence either pro or con, and it is actually a growing field of scientific inquiry.

So, there has been no basic, fundamental scientific evidence levied against free will, while determinism has experienced a very fundamental scientific defeat of its 2500-year core premise, leaving its adherents scrambling for alternative theories to salvage it.

At least people that believe in free will can say that it feels like we have free will; it doesn't feel like my actions are all determined; and we can say that, ultimately, doesn't everyone act as if everyone has free will? Don't we all talk and judge and infer and think based on that idea?

I don't really know what determinists think supports their belief in determinism. The original philosophical lynchpin and origin - atomism/local realism - has been scientifically disproved. Because of this, I'd think determinists would be a little more skeptical that determinism is true; but that doesn't appear to be the case.

At this point, isn't it valid to say that what keeps people vigorously asserting and defending determinism just faith?

"If you rewind the universe back to the exact same point, the exact same thing would happen, however you define free will."

Classic argument; entirely based on circular reasoning.

The entire argument presumes some form of materialist determinism: that the "state" of the universe contains discrete arrangements of strict cause-and-effect characteristics, treating all aspects of the situation conceptually as well-defined objects in well-defined material relationship.

Replace that model with a universe of probabilistic sequences of behaviors, and you can run the tape of the universe back to the same point countless times and get a different sequence going forward from that point every single time. Thus, just by this, the "rewind the tape" argument fails even without inserting "libertarian free will" into the mix.

In short, they are so bad because they virtually never contend with what libertarian free will actually is, and actually refers to.

First and foremost, it's Free WILL. Not free action. Not free circumstances. It's not even free physical choice.

Will = intention. That's it. Free will means you can intend any damn thing you can imagine. You can intend to disappear, float off the ground, walk through a wall, stop smoking, work out 4 days a week, find a great new job ... whatever. Free will only means you can unilaterally intend whatever you wish, whether or not you seemingly have any physical capacity whatsoever to accomplish your intention.

This is an undeniable, self-evident, innate quality (unless you are a mindless NPC) of humans. There is no argument that can be brought against it. Can you freely imagine yourself turning into an elephant and intend for that to happen? There you go. You just demonstrated the unlimited, free and unfettered capacity of free will.

On the question of "could I have done otherwise, given the same circumstances?" Free will has nothing to do with what you DO - actions - because free will is not free action. It only has to do with what you intend. Actions may follow an intent; they may correspond with the intent; but they are not the intent itself.

We all experience our intentions and the ability to freely intend. We can intend countless mundane things, like making a grilled cheese sandwich and washing the bed sheets. We can also intend to be someone else; somewhere else; in different conditions and circumstances. We can intend to have a different history, different parents, be a different age and have different physical attributes. People can freely intend the seemingly impossible all they want.

That's what Roger Bannister did: he intended what was thought physically impossible. And yet he still achieved it by running a mile in under four minutes.

Heavier-than-air, mechanically-powered flight was long considered impossible by the scientific community, but people - including Wilbur and Orville Wright - acted on their intentions and achieved the supposedly impossible. The Wright brothers were not scientists. They had no formal education whatsoever; neither of them had even finished high school. They imagined it; they intended it; their actions corresponded with their intent, and they accomplished what they intended.

Free will is 100% disconnected from and unlimited by physics, logic and probability. None of those things limit your free capacity to intend in any way whatsoever. Those things may limit or constrain acting on your intentions, but they do not constrain or limit your actual intentions. Because of this, yes, free will is, without doubt, self-evidently libertarian in nature.

IMO, there's only one very particular assumption that causes all the confusion, panic, doubts, fears and insecurities about the afterlife and the nature of existence wrt how/why we're in this world, what our relationship is to the afterlife, and what the afterlife is like.

That basic assumption is: universalism.

In a nutshell, universalism is the idea that there is one set of metaphysical truths, or fundamental laws, that govern everything and apply to everyone everywhere. This manifests particularly in afterlife-related communities as disagreements about these "whether or not" points, to list a few:

1. Whether or not we choose to come here;
2. Whether or not the afterlife is physical or non-physical;
3. Whether or not we have "soul contracts;"
4. Whether or not we retain our individuality/ego after we die;
5. Whether or not we reincarnate and/or have had many incarnations;
6. Whether or not some or many or all of our experiences here and/or in the afterlife are illusions/simulations;
7. Whether or not the signs we get are really from those we love that have died;
8. Whether or not some form of "justice" is delivered in relation to evils committed;
9. And countless other "whether or not" conflicts and confusions.

I refer to these kinds of universal claims as low-order universalisms that only survive by offering various dismissive explanations for contradictory experiences, information and evidence - that these other other experiences and the contradictory evidence are mistaken, or are "illusions," or represent outright fraud.

If we drop these low-order universalisms, the actual information and evidence can be interpreted in much less competitive and less conflict-based way: some people choose to come here; some do not. Some people have soul contracts; some do not. Some people retain their individuality/ego after they die; some do not. Etc.

I suggest there's a higher-order meta-universalism one can adopt that makes sense out of all this seemingly contradictory and confusing information that low-order universalisms generate: existence/reality is infinitely diverse and all possible things exist - or to put it another way: all possible realities exist.

Under this higher-order universalism, it's not a question about whether or not any of those specific things are true; it's a question of what kind of reality a person either naturally aligns with, or chooses for themselves going forward.

From a metaphysical perspective, you might ask yourself: out of all possible realities, why would only one exist? Why is the only way to support the notion that only one exists is by relying on dismissal of countless contradictory experiences, large amounts of inconvenient evidence, and all the contradictory information? Why do all the low-order universalisms require cherry-picking evidence, information and experiences that supports that particular concept and structure of reality?

IMO, the afterlife and existence is relatively easy to understand under this meta-universalist perspective. IMO, the only thing that is "wrong" wrt any particular description of anyone's preferred or observed or experienced reality is their assumption that the reality they are experiencing, believing in, observing, learning about, finding evidence to support and describing is the only reality that exists.

Much like the irrational idea that "there is no afterlife" is impossible to support either logically or evidentially, the idea that "there is only one reality" (as described above) is impossible to support either logically or evidentially. "There are no other realities" is as irrational a claim as "there is no afterlife."

And, indeed, there is a lot of evidence that supports the idea that virtually infinite experiential realities do, in fact, exist, and that it is by our individual observation, measurements, thoughts, inner states, assumptions and beliefs that move us into corresponding realities.

All of this is, of course, from my perspective, experiences, and from what evidence and information i have examined.

There is a reason ones heart is deeply stirred by certain written or spoken words; by certain stories, songs, music and art, or by certain people we meet. Often, we don't even know why our heart yearns for these messages, or imagery, music, people and stories. We may not even know what our heart is yearning for; we may only know the pain and bitter unhappiness that exists as the aching disappointment in the way of this world, or in what our lives have become here.

There is often a part of us, deep down, that is insisting that this is not the way it should be, even when we may not be able to fully articulate the way it should be. If the only thing we have any knowledge of or access to is this world and the way it is, why is our heart so insistent that no, this is not the way it should be?

When you hear or read the words, or hear the songs or music, or see the art or imagery or find the people that stir your heart in loving and joyful recognition and hope, laughter and beauty, awe and wonder, it is because your heart recognizes what those things represent.

The heart deeply recognizes the artifacts, the representations, the items and people and imagery and music of your eternal home - the place you belong, the place where your life is as it should be.

But, this world can beat your heart down with the unrelenting pressure to turn away from it and conform and submit to the authority figures and society, to the cold and uncaring edicts of materialist scientism, to the gleeful attacks from skeptics, to live in fear and doubt and insecurity, to see ourselves as miniscule and meaningless collections of mere matter in an uncaring universe. We are whipped with the idea that our heart is naive and childish and that we need to face the harsh, bitter pill of the "reality" they have pounded and programmed into our minds.

And so we even help them to bury our heart, to turn away from what it is telling and showing us. We build defenses around it not to protect it, but to protect ourselves from the disappointment and heartbreaking chasm between what it says, and what the world around us appears to be and is insisting we submit to.

We allow ourselves to be convinced that what the heart is saying, that what the heart recognizes as its true home in the words and art and music and things and people it loves, in the secret moments we allow ourselves to imagine these things, is too good to be true. We become afraid of embracing it, of letting it out, for fear of ridicule, disappointment, and unrelenting disapproval.

Yet, for many of us, our heart still resists. It still insists: this is not our home. What they say is not true.

I've been through this myself. I know what it is like to be beaten down so hard, and become so miserable at the disconnect between what my heart yearned for and what the world was crushing me with, that I was nearly hopeless and wanted to leave this world by any means necessary. I thought, "I don't have to stay here. I can leave any time I want."

Oddly that thought liberated me. "I don't have to believe a goddamn thing they say," I thought, and my heart took a breath. "I can believe whatever the fuck I want," and my heart expanded, like breaking out of a prison. "I will no longer try to subdue what is written in my heart, and I will no longer allow this world or anyone to beat it down or turn me away from it."

Now, I don't claim to know what's in your heart, or what your true home is. That's for you to find and understand, if you wish. All I can say is that for me, this is when everything changed. When I say that the heart is a beacon and a portal, what I mean is that I opened that door and could see my home. I could feel it. I've been through that portal and have visited my home beyond this world. I keep that door open and look through it constantly, feel its warmth and peace and excitement wash away the pain and suffering and angst and fear and doubt. It immunizes me against the bullshit of this world and gives me indomitable strength and resistance against it because I no longer even care what this world has to say.

My eyes and mind and thoughts are firmly fixed on the portal to my home and, my friends, let me tell you: it's beautiful beyond compare. I try to capture this in the music and art of the videos I post online and have posted here, but it's really only a small taste.

Thank you for indulging my desire to speak more from my heart this morning. I want to thank my beautiful, amazing wife, Irene, for showing me the way home.

u/LimpingDophin - in this post, "Why Do We Keep Coming Back to Earth?" - asks a good question: why incarnate here at all?

My way of dealing with questions like this is to understand these things in a very common-sense, logical and ordinary perspective, one that doesn't require any additional spiritual or religious structures, doctrine, or esoteric explanation.

I have already written a post that covers what I consider to be the most obvious reason: Why Suffering In Life Here Transforms Our Afterlife Home Into Paradise. However, u/LimpingDolphin points out that we have a "library" full of people's experiences here, usually referred to in Western countries as "the Akashic Record." Why not just open one of those records from the safety and comfort of the afterlife and have these experiences there?

Let's say you do exactly that. Open a record, and start experiencing what someone else experienced here. What would that be like?

In order to have that full experience, you'd have to forget that you're in the safety and security of the afterlife, because that person didn't have that "meta" perspective. You'd have to go through the entire experience, moment by moment, birth to death, from that person's point of view. If you keep your "meta" perspective, you can't actually feel like that person did with no such meta perspective available to him or her.

And, if you fully experience that life without the "meta" view; how would you know that this is not actually what is happening to you now? There would be no way to tell the difference.

The thing is, if you are doing this, or if you retain your "meta" perspective while "reading" a life from the Akashic Record, you're not finding out anything about yourself, and what you would do, in that situation: you're experiencing only what someone else did, their choices, their feelings, their reactions, how it affected and altered them. That kind of experience doesn't shed any light on what you would do in that situation; how you would handle it; how it would affect you; what your choices and thoughts and feelings would be.

This is an ordinary perspective. In this world, we may read or hear about what other people did in certain situations; and we may think to ourselves, "this is how I would react and this is what I would do in that situation," but if you're anyone that has had a few experiences in this world, you know that there's no way to actually know how you would react in such situations until you actually, personally go through it, because actually going through it is usually very different than speculating on it from a safe distance.

Additionally: we know that there are many things from this world that also exist in the afterlife, things like delicious food and drink, beautiful clothes and architecture. Restaurants, theaters, roads, modes of transportation like cars, trains, ships, etc. None of these things are necessities in the afterlife; their existence was not driven by need, pain, or suffering in the afterlife.

For example, why would food and drink ever come into existence in the afterlife? There is no hunger there; we don't need to eat or drink to survive. In this world, however, we require food and drink just to survive and avoid horrible discomfort and debilitating weakness and suffering. Our bodies start breaking down, dying without it. So we must find food and drink; and when our survival here is taken care of by devising the skills, infrastructure and cooperative systems that provide plentiful food and drink, we can turn our attention to making the food and drink delicious and delightfully varied. We don't just eat for sustenance; we eat and drink for the pleasure and enjoyment of it, and for how it compliments and adds to social gatherings, family and friendship.

How can any of that come into existence in the afterlife without people coming here and going through that process, collectively and over time, that brings delicious food and drink into corporeal existence from that humble, need-driven origin?

They say necessity is the mother of invention; so is pain, suffering and discomfort. Absent those things, what is the "mother of invention" in the afterlife? Where would the very idea of clothes come from, or buildings, if we did not need to protect and shelter our fragile bodies and lives here from the elements and predators?

So, in addition to gathering the perspective of pain and suffering that reveals to us the paradise-like nature of the afterlife, coming here also reveals to us aspects of our own nature that only difficult situations can reveal, giving us the opportunity and perhaps motivation to change things about ourselves we may not like; and this world is also the mother of invention for all sorts of beautiful, amazing and diverse things now present in the afterlife.

Without coming to this world, who in the afterlife can write a book, or produce a play or a movie that not only requires an intimate knowledge of suffering, heroism, redemption, failure, loss, tragedy, triumph, etc. ... but an original work from ones own unique perspective and unique experience? Without people coming to this world, there would be no great stories - no great love stories; no great tragedies that make you cry; no uplifting stories of perseverance in the face of horrifying circumstances, or overcoming great obstacles; no stories of heroism or achievement against all the odds, etc. No heartwarming stories of just saying a kind word or lending a helping hand and how it can completely change someone's life or at least raise their spirits and give them a moment of joy in an otherwise bleak and lonely life.

You don't get any of that by just lolly-gagging around in the afterlife for eternity and nobody ever coming to this kind of world and living the kinds of lives we live here.

Later next month Dr. Gary Schwartz's research definitively proving the existence of the afterlife via scientific experimentation is scheduled to be published in the Fall edition of The Journal of Scientific Exploration.

Ahead of that, his most recent book detailing those experiments and the evidence recently became available on Amazon: The SoulPhone Experiments: BREAKTHROUGH SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE FOR SPIRIT COMMUNICATION AND COLLABORATION

I've been following this research for many years now, even sitting in on a few Zoom calls with members of his research team as they explained it, and you can get a general overview of what these experiments entailed from this hypothesis paper published in 2021 before the successful multi-center experimental research: A computer-automated, multi-center, multi-blinded, randomized control trial evaluating hypothesized spirit presence and communication

If you have any questions about it, I can do my best to provide answers. This is the culmination of about 30 years of ongoing research by Schwartz and his team and other collaborating research teams.

From the book description:

>This book describes 28 years of his university-based scientific laboratory experiments. The data from this research now definitively demonstrates that life continues after bodily death. Replicated and controlled research using advanced hardware and software reveal that postmaterial persons (the so-called 'deceased’) have verifiably communicated and collaborated with us.

Our lives here are temporary. Our moods shift and change, even in the course of day or a few minutes. Our bodies are always changing, growing and then declining. We may have periods of health and illness, of long- or short-term disability. We have high energy and then low; periods of intense though and activity and then we might get sluggish, slow and sleepy. Dishes pile up and then we clean them; clothes get dirty and then we wash them. People come and go in our lives. The cycles of day and night and the progression of seasons and their effect on us and our environment goes on our entire lives here. Memories change and fade.

Whether we like this or not, this world is the world of the relentlessly temporary.

From the evidence, apparently in the afterlife we have access to a complete, "fully experiential" memory of every moment of our lives here when and if we choose to access it, with added depth and breadth of sensory capacity. This is not like our memories here (at least not for the vast majority of us.) The way these memories are described, they are experienced as entirely real - more real than real, with every sensation and feeling and every bit of emotional and psychological content, and that this is true every time we fully visit what we call a "memory" there.

In the afterlife locations most commonly reported by the dead and people who visit those worlds, entropy - the gradual degradation of all things over time - doesn't appear to be a thing. Our bodies and minds and the world around us don't naturally degrade over time.

In these commonly-reported locations, it's not like there is zero change whatsoever; of course people move around, change their clothes and hairstyles, engage in activities. They might build or generate a new building, redecorate, do some gardening and landscaping. When people die, they often find themselves in the same community, or "being led" to the same time and place they used to live in as a child, untouched by time in the afterlife, perhaps with a few differences that do not really make any substantive emotional or psychological difference. Those locations always exist in what we call "the afterlife." We can always visit and revisit them by "tuning in" to that emotional/psychological location inside ourselves.

In this same sense, we can also visit, or live in as fully real, any place we can imagine.

This is because places we can only mentally grasp as "imagination" and "memories" here, are eternally existent, actual, real locations; only, our ability to fully visit those places as real, as "realer than real," is greatly diminished by what we call "the veil."

Many people ask about getting "bored" in the afterlife; that sense of being "bored" is certainly available if you put yourself into a location where you feel bored. However, you can always revisit any location where you felt exited, or imagine a new such location, and feel that fresh excitement and wonder again. You can revisit the same exciting location any number of times; "boredom" is not an aspect of your state in that location.

The is the difference between the world of the temporary and the world of the eternal; no experience and no location, no person, no relationship, no situation is ever lost to us; it all eternally exists.

It seems like we have a consistent stream of people that come here who acquired most or all of their information about the afterlife by watching and/or reading Near Death Experience accounts. Usually, they find themselves troubled or worried about some of the common aspects of NDEs, such as "not having a body" or becoming so different as a person that they aren't really even themselves; or some form of blending back into some kind of "universal oneness."

Quite often, the people who have these experiences speak in absolute, omniscient terms; meaning, they will often say they know the "truth" about life, death, the afterlife and what it all means, for everyone. Such as, "we plan our lives here" and "we don't have bodies there" and "it's all blissful love over there," and "you will have a life review where you judge your own life, to experience how your actions affected other people and learn from that."

While NDEs represent good evidence that consciousness continues after death, they are only a small slice of the total evidence and good information we have about what death and the afterlife are like, especially in terms of permanent death vs temporary death experiences. In addition to NDEs, we have several other categories of afterlife research that have been providing a much bigger and more diverse picture of death and the afterlife than what is mainly offered via NDE accounts.

When the permanently dead, in their own words, and/or speaking through a medium, and those who visit the afterlife via astral projection, speak of their experiences of either their deaths and lives in the afterlife, or APers report their observations, we find that NDEs are not, by any means, representative of the vast majority of experiences of death and the afterlife from these other avenues of evidence and information.

For example, from these other sources, reporting that having a "life review" event is very rare (and even from NDE accounts, having a life review event does not occur a majority of the time.) Most commonly, in the vast majority of non-NDE experiences and descriptions, people report having physical bodies in physical worlds that feel more solid, and more real, than this world - and in fact, over 50% of NDEs report that same thing. Apparently, those kinds of NDE reports don't get as much traction on YouTube or other sources.

Also, while people who died permanently tend to report feeling much better after they died, they do not usually report feeling "one with everything" or any overwhelming sense of unconditional love. They usually report that they still feel like themselves, and have access to all of the varied emotions we have here.

My point here being: if the NDE accounts your algorithm brings you trouble you, don't worry about them. They do not represent anything universal or absolute about what death or the afterlife is like or what we're doing here or what it all means. You might want to expand your resource base and explore other information and evidence from other areas of afterlife research, evidence and information.

Sometimes I wonder if people that believe in mandatory life reviews have ever really even thought about it much outside of it delivering pain and suffering back upon people that cause it, and/or always teaching people to avoid causing people pain and suffering. They seem to think in a very narrow and linear way about it, as if always serves some kind of simple "justice and rehabilitation" narrative.

I wonder if they've ever considered the following scenario, which I will take in general out of my own life, from - in general - people who have harmed me in the past via their deliberate, harmful actions:

Now, people say that you not only fully experience how your victim felt at the time, but also how your bad behavior affected their lives.

What would someone who harmed me, hurt me emotionally, psychologically, physically - experience when they do their life review?

In every single case, this is what would likely occur, what they would actually experience, from their life review interaction with me:

"Well, I didn't actually hurt him as much as I thought I did. I've been beating myself up much more than was appropriate to the actual harm I caused out of my own guilt and shame. And, holy crap, he actually became stronger, more resolute, more tolerant, more forgiving... OMG, he actually became a better person because of it!! He doesn't even bear me any ill will; he actually appreciates what I put him through!!"

What's the "moral lesson" there? That causing harm to others can be beneficial to them? That hurting people, even deliberately and with malice, can actually help them become better people, and/or provide them with the intense motivation to do meaningful things in their life? That it can provide the person you've harmed with the opportunity to become a more forgiving person? That you shouldn't have done the very thing that was ultimately of immense benefit to that person? That you should feel bad about doing it?

Now think about the converse: what if some kind, loving act you did out of the desire to help someone ultimately ends up ruining their life, and causing harm to many other people due to unforeseen and unknown circumstances? Do you have to suffer through all of the unintended consequences of your kind, loving actions? What's the "moral lesson" there?

No, I don't think the advocates of mandatory life reviews ever think about things like this; IMO, their concept about the nature of human interaction is way over-simplified and they have little to no understanding of just how complex human interactions and the ramifications thereof can be.

So-called "spiritual" people, who believe that we all have a life-review event where we are forced to experience the pain and suffering we have caused, seem to think, or at least be implying, that someone like Epstein, if forced into a life review process where they had to endure the pain and suffering they caused others, they would inevitably change for the better because of that process.

Unless you are completely removing free will from the process, there's no guarantee, and IMO it is highly unlikely, that evil people will become better people if they are forced to undergo the pain and suffering they have caused others. I don't know if you've been around people much, but if you force people to go through painful processes, they're at least just as likely to become resentful and angry about it, whether or not they "deserve" it. Some people are so deeply wicked that they might even enjoy experiencing the pain and suffering they have caused others; their minds don't work the same way as non-evil people.

If there is some judgmental force that will simply take away a person's free will and literally force them go through a life-review; and then force them to have no option other than to become "better" people; and have a creation-wide system that ultimately forces people to become "good, kind, loving people," what's the point of all the in-between shenanigans in the first place? Why allow them to become evil in the first place? Why not just set up a system that has no option to be evil, if you're going to remove free will along the way to eventually force them into "goodness" anyway through a very painful, multi-lifetime process? Why set up a system that allows people to become evil, cause untold serious damage and harm to other innocent people, only to force them to become better people by making them experience that very harm and forcing them to "change their minds" in a positive way?

That makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, I'd be angry and resentful at a system like that - one that allows me enough free will to become evil, only to then take away my free will to force me to go through painful processes that forces me to become a good person?

What kind of sick f***ing game is that? I guess all the innocent victims of evil people along the way are just collateral damage fodder for this sick system of half-ass free will, allowing people to become evil, do their evil deeds, and then forcing them to become good after they have caused all their harm and suffering.

IMO, if people of their own free will choose to go through a life-review process because they want to fully understand the effects of their choices and behaviors on other people, and then use that life-review process to learn how to behave and make choices in a way that is more kind, loving and tolerant, great! Nothing wrong with that; it's all free will choices about how you want to direct your life, for the good, the evil, and everyone in-between.

ETA (consolidating a second post into this original one:)

Sometimes I wonder if people that believe in mandatory life reviews have ever really even thought about it much outside of it delivering pain and suffering back upon people that cause it, and/or always teaching people to avoid causing people pain and suffering. They seem to think in a very narrow and linear way about it, as if always serves some kind of simple "justice and rehabilitation" narrative.

I wonder if they've ever considered the following scenario, which I will take in general out of my own life, from - in general - people who have harmed me in the past via their deliberate, harmful actions:

Now, people say that you not only fully experience how your victim felt at the time, but also how your bad behavior affected their lives.

What would someone who harmed me, hurt me emotionally, psychologically, physically - experience when they do their life review?

In every single case, this is what would likely occur, what they would actually experience, from their life review interaction with me:

"Well, I didn't actually hurt him as much as I thought I did. I've been beating myself up much more than was appropriate to the actual harm I caused out of my own guilt and shame. And, holy crap, he actually became stronger, more resolute, more tolerant, more forgiving... OMG, he actually became a better person because of it!! He doesn't even bear me any ill will; he actually appreciates what I put him through!!"

What's the "moral lesson" there? That causing harm to others can be beneficial to them? That hurting people, even deliberately and with malice, can actually help them become better people, and/or provide them with the intense motivation to do meaningful things in their life? That it can provide the person you've harmed with the opportunity to become a more forgiving person? That you shouldn't have done the very thing that was ultimately of immense benefit to that person? That you should feel bad about doing it?

Now think about the converse: what if some kind, loving act you did out of the desire to help someone ultimately ends up ruining their life, and causing harm to many other people due to unforeseen and unknown circumstances? Do you have to suffer through all of the unintended consequences of your kind, loving actions? What's the "moral lesson" there?

No, I don't think the advocates of mandatory life reviews ever think about things like this; IMO, their concept about the nature of human interaction is way over-simplified and they have little to no understanding of just how complex human interactions and the ramifications thereof can be.

First, I'm not saying life reviews don't exist or do not happen; they do exist, and they do happen, but they are far from universal experiences. To one degree or another, some form of "life review" occurs in 13-30% of NDEs. They are also reported (albeit as more of a long-term self-evaluation of ones life here and not as any single post-death event) from the long dead through credible mediums like Leslie Flint and Chico Xavier. However, outside of Western countries, the entire "life review" process in any form is much more rare.

Second, from the reports, it appears that one can generally just "opt out" or "not do" the life review process even when it "starts happening." The long-dead generally report far, far fewer "formal" life-review events, but instead report "life reviews" more in terms of just generally considering, over time in their afterlives, their lives here in much the same way an older person in this world might "consider" and "review" their lives while still living, albeit with better memory with deeper sensory acquisition of those events they choose to think about.

In virtually no case is it ever experienced as "punitive," and only extremely rarely is it experienced as something a person can't opt out of.

In other words, from the evidence, the famous and formal "life review" event is apparently not something most people experience when they die; it is virtually never something that one "must" go through; it is never experienced as externally-imposed "judgement," and it is mostly common among people that have a culturally-imposed sense of personal responsibility and accountability.

IMO, this supports my personal view that NDEs are more like staged "interventions" than they are comparable to full, permanent death, and that these "life review" events are part of these intervention processes, not something one usually experiences when they die permanently.

We (see below who "we" are) created this video based on reading hundreds of years of available evidence, information and accounts from and about the afterlife, from prolific astral projectors, mediums, channelers, NDEs, ITCs, ADCs, etc.

The Red String Society and Love After Life is creating videos of various sorts to provide secular, non-religious, non-spiritual support and comfort for those who find themselves in fear of death or are suffering from grief. These videos are not intended in any way to undermine anyone's spiritual or religious beliefs, but just to offer at least one resource of afterlife information and media that is free from such messaging.

What the Afterlife Worlds are Like

What we call "imagination" is not what we've been trained to think it is.

Imagination is a set of "veiled" astral senses and capacities that represent our innate capacity to experience, to one degree or another, actual, real locations in the infinite diversity of existence. There's nothing you can imagine that doesn't exist somewhere.

If you want to have an experience of the afterlife, just imagine whatever scenario, location or situation you would like to see. No matter what you see or experience, it exists; you're just usually getting a kind of low-grade, low-resolution, highly-filtered and difficult to maintain version of that through your "veiled" capacities here.

If you would like more information on this, I have a free book you can read, called "The Architecture of Potential," which is very concise at less than 70 pages. The book also provides a method of moving from point A towards point B, or "where you are" towards "what you imagine."

Please remember: I'm just some guy on the internet writing stuff. Take it or leave it, agree or not. It's all good.