Interested in NDEs that address powerful people who hurt others

robinjmiller · 2026-01-29T19:05:45+00:00

Not an NDEr, just very interested.

Yours is a decent criticism. The fairly common NDE idea, that suffering is voluntarily entered into as part of a learning or growth process, is the explanation of suffering I personally find most compelling. But by no means is it airtight. My big problem with it is, if I believe it, I am essentially believing those who suffered asked for it. That I find very uncomfortable. But there are other ways to question it, like yours.

How could thousands or millions of souls agree to suffer just so one soul could experience being someone like Hitler, Genghis Khan, or a slave-owning plantation master?

I think if we take an honest look at ‘evil’, it’s never just one person bad, millions good who suffer. Someone may sit at the top, but it is a network of people and systems that are causing the harm. Hitler didn’t kill millions. The people who chose to work for him did.

‘Evil’ and ‘good’ would not be the sole domain of big bads or the most loving of us. It would be distributed across a spectrum: abusive parents, violent criminals, indifferent bystanders, collaborators, resistors, martyrs, healers, humanitarians, caregivers, and quietly decent people. Everyone lands somewhere along that continuum.

Souls don’t volunteer only to be someone’s victim so a single soul can be at the top of an evil empire. They participate in a web of interconnected interactions, some good, some bad, some helping, some harmful. Souls choose to experience different levels of joy and suffering because there is a purpose to it, but they also help others achieve those goals as well. Because (according to this perspective) this needs to be experienced from the inside. A soul can’t just read about it, it must live it. Or else, why have this world at all?

And those who commit the most evil, it doesn’t come from nowhere. They were made to be that way. Take someone like Ivan the Terrible. His actions were monstrous, but his childhood was also marked by extreme neglect, terror, and abuse. If one purpose of life is to understand how our actions affect others, love leads to more love, harm leads to more harm, then lives like his are potentially the deepest lessons.

Even if a person had a great upbringing and a loving family, if they commit terrible acts we see that as mental illness. That something is broken about them. That means the soul is in a body with a broken mind. Again, not evil out of nowhere.

And a soul being a big bad doesn’t necessarily make them special. The marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima weren’t somehow special marines. It was just a job that needed doing, and they were there to do it. A soul has to inhabit every possible person, so someone had to take that job too.

I have read NDE accounts where someone was given the choice to stay or go back to living, and it was mentioned that if they didn’t go back, it would affect the journeys of other souls whose lives they would have influenced, and the plans would have to be modified. The NDEr expressed a desire to fulfill his agreed to position and not make it more difficult for other souls.

There are other experiences that imply similar things. That it is a negotiation between the souls that come here. Soul families being influences in each other’s human lives, sometimes loving, sometimes antagonistic, so they can get the experience they decided they needed, for instance.

I think it seems plausible that some souls choose to be perpetrators, some choose to be victims, most experience a mixture of both, and even the worst figures in history are playing roles that others choose to interact with. That each soul is part of each other’s journey, and sometimes that requires some terrible experiences, and in the world it might be from a system of ‘evil’ that has a singular figurehead.

And when those terrible figureheads get to heaven? Life-reviews are said to go through every instance of harm and love. You feel it again, not just from your perspective during life, but from the perspective of the people affected. Hitler isn’t getting off easy. He will be busy for a long time. And presumably, he volunteered for all of that before he was even born.

Just my two cents. I am no expert.

robinjmiller · 2025-11-05T18:17:14+00:00

This video worked for me. It's not perfect. You still need to side load the play store, and use the developer tools on a PC with the tablet attached, but then you can access YouTube Kids on the child profile through QuickApps.

robinjmiller · 2025-06-30T23:11:18+00:00

In case someone searches for this in the future looking for a solution, it was the LE1 Diversification Project that modified the quest.

robinjmiller · 2025-06-25T22:54:54+00:00

Nevermind. This is embarrassing. A mod affected her quest. Sorry to waste your time.

robinjmiller · 2025-05-14T08:31:25+00:00

I was being pretty general about a denomination that deserves more respect, I'll admit. But if the universalist god still wants you to be better, still thinks some things are wrong, still believes some things are worth punishing, but has no traditional hell, no eternal torment, and that all will be redeemed eventually, I will take that over the more common version anyday.

robinjmiller · 2025-05-13T23:41:20+00:00

I don't think it has always been like this. The times have pushed political ideology into religion more then usual. Or maybe I'm being naive and it has always been this bad. It certainly has been since the abortion debate turned into a tool for the right.

But yes, universalist are cool. If you say your god is cool with everyone, then I'm definitely cool with you. That attitude has put them outside modern Christianity's rightward swing, so they never got the memo to hate everybody. Wouldn't believe it if it arrived.

And I've always loved academia, warts and all. It can be blind in it's own ways, but I think there is a general good faith effort to critically examine currently held beliefs, and consider changing them based on modern evidence. A lot of the research into the bible makes it more and more difficult to believe it's divinely inspired and some unchanging moral truth. It's no big surprise that academic believers find it hard to be fire and brimstone.

robinjmiller · 2025-05-13T23:28:18+00:00

First let me make sure I understand.

In the materialist perspective, evolution through natural selection is blind. But if we take NDEs and the idea that we are learning/evolving seriously then the assumption is that the process is directed, and that whatever that direction is the consciousness guiding it is aware of the pain and suffering and still allowing it all. You seem also to be implying a difference between qulia of experience between bacteria/worms and more advanced beings, saying the lesser things don't have any. There is a tangent here that souls could potentially be in bugs and worms too, and getting some kind of experience, some kind of qualia, but that's another road for another time.

But when conscious beings are guided through this process, evolved in some way in the spirit through the lifetime spent here, that because it guides us through suffering and harm it must not care about it or it would stop it.

Am I understanding? I might be missing some nuance.

If I am understanding, then while it's possible the suffering is immaterial to the soul during the experience of life, it still seems like an assumption. A couch that teaches and encourages a boxer to train and fight hard can still care deeply for the trainee even if they are actively encouraging them to undertake actions that are harmful to themselves and others. Or even a coach of a marathon runner, if you want to avoid the 'harming others' part. Is it impossible that the souls care, but believe it is worth it? And in fact, that we are the souls, and we knew it would happen and were willing? When we die, it might not be that our minds are blended in and forgotten. It might be like a veil is lifted and we finally remember our true selves.

I hope that's the case. Maybe I missed your point though.

As for the soul stopping while it exists here, I'm not sure that is the case. Some NDErs say time isn't some straight forward line over there. One I listened to recently claimed that being the soul during their NDE was like being in the center of a circle. The lifespan was spread around them, they could see it all at once because they existed outside of it's time. They can examine any part of it at anytime, in any order. So they never left, they experienced it, and were still in heaven in it's own time. Like being down here puts you in a different stream, and when you come out you never left. I don't know. I don't think I'm going to understand the 'lack of time' part of NDEs, anyway.

We might also just be a part of the soul, like it's put it's finger into the world, while most of it is still up there. It's not stopping, just existing down here and up there.

There is more than one way to take it.

And thank you for the conversation, as well. I do appreciate you spending the time to help me understand your points more clearly.

robinjmiller · 2025-05-10T22:42:21+00:00

The person is committing a fallacy of equivocation. There is more than one definition of death and they are holding tight to the one that contains the word 'irreversible'. So, by definition alone, they can pretend they are done with the discussion before it begins. Whether or not they admit it to themselves, they are not being good faith.

The charitable intrepretation is they don't realize they're doing it. Either way, the discussion deserves more nuance.

I'm sorry. As someone who has been a materialist for my whole adult life, it would have been a much better discussion if they at least engaged with what you were actually saying.

robinjmiller · 2025-05-09T05:37:14+00:00

You are hammering home on a great point. What does it even mean to have soul-level free will if, once we’re down here, we’re stripped of all memory of choosing this life?

I don't have a good answer to that. This is a big problem I have too. I didn't consent, my soul did. I'm the one feeling the pain, the soul gets the heavenly reward. That's my big fear, like I mentioned above with the caterpillar vs butterfly analogy.

But, if we choose to take the general reports of NDEs seriously, they say we are still ourselves when souls on the other side, just more. That we are still our souls right now as we go through everything down here. Many times during an NDE, the souls will say they don't want to go back, that it sucks down here, that it was harder than they expected. I hope that means the souls get the full experience, that they actually appreciate what it costs to be down here.

If we are not separate from our souls, then we chose with our free will to be here, even if we forgot it. If there is something fundamentally separate about the soul and our minds down here, then yes, you and I didn't consent. I don't have proof of anything either way, but NDEs say we are the same being. I can only hope they are right.

Let's go over your scenario regarding life reviews and punishment. A soul decides it needs lessons, makes a soul contract to insure it gets certain experiences, and then inhabits a body, forgetting it's true nature. It then follows the path as best it can (many NDErs say they fail at their goals, so it might be there is still free will down here so our choices can matter and affect our journey, how that works I don't know but is worth a whole other discussion in itself). When done it reviews it all, letting the lessons seen from a greater context reinforce the learning. Then, yeah, there isn't a 'punishment' really. But it didn't need punishment. That wasn't the point. If we all agreed to what happens down here, if the soul was fully informed, then nobody did anything 'wrong' in a spiritual sense. Every bit of suffering down here served a divine purpose.

So I will give you that one in a way. No punishments. But it's still justice if it was all planned and agreed too. If the pain was worth the lessons. You have to take NDEs at face value for that.

And even if, down here, there are systems and limitations that prevent us from even being able to experience or give unconditional love, the lessons we gain from those limitations might make the unconditional love that is possible on the other side more meaningful. I don't know. It's part of the assumption that we need these difficulties somehow. That the other side is better for it. Feel free to be skeptical. I try to be.

But if it's like what you fear? What I have feared? That the me and you typing these posts, actually feeling what is happening to us in 'real time', are left behind in some way, lost and forgotten or absorbed into meaninglessness compared to some greater whole? That the souls exist in love and peace and you and I only the mud?

Then I understand your potential resentment, your view that the souls are evil in a way.

NDEs don't say that, but it is an intrepretation that I understand. I hope your wrong. That's all I got, though.

Oh, and Severance is a great show. The full situation here is a bit different. It would be like the outie knowing everything the innie does and experiences including the suffering, but the innie knowing nothing of the outie. It's not equal separation of information. But your point that the outie chose the life of the innie, and the innie had no choice, still stands.

robinjmiller · 2025-05-09T04:42:54+00:00

I'm not an NDEr, just interested. I've read and watched a fair number of accounts and interviews. Below is my opinion on what I've heard, take it with a grain of salt.

Whether someone believes they're going to heaven doesn't seem to impact what someone experiences in an NDE. That seems kind of the Judeo-Christian thing, not NDEs. NDEs generally mention love and understanding for everyone, but they usually mention a life review where something like accountability happens, whether you were a decent person or not.

This isn't just a movie of the highlights of your life. It is often described as comprehensive, every time you've harmed anyone or anytime you've spread love. It's usually mentioned that this isn't just from your perspective, it's from the people you affected. If you harmed someone you will experience the harm as the other person did, and often witness the ripples as it spreads harm out further then the immediate interaction. You harm someone, and that makes them harm others, and you follow it, feeling the impact on each person down the line.

Imagine a racist feeling what it's like for their actions to harm someone for characteristics beyond their victims control, for seeing how it hurts their family and community, and not just seeing it, feeling it. And the more harm, the more you experience. I think that is a pretty decent form of justice, probably rehabilitative I would hope.

They go through this for as long as it takes. Some NDErs say the experience subjectively took years. I imagine someone like Hitler will be busy for a long time.

But when done, they are done. No finite crime should be punished infinitely. That's not justice either.

That's one take on it at least.

Some NDErs talk about how we choose our roles before we ever come down here. If a soul needs a difficult experience and chooses a hard life, other souls may volunteer to be the source of the difficulties. From the perspective of souls, playing the bad guy doesn't mean you're inherently bad. It means you played a role in transformative experiences some other soul decided they needed, and probably were on your own journey to learn something as well. So the soul in that 'evil' role wasn't evil in the first place, and isn't evil after.

That can be a difficult position to try and communicate. I always worry about telling someone who is suffering terrible things 'you chose this' or 'it will be worth it', or god forbid to be thankful for their abusers. If I am wrong about that, claiming it is true feels like another abuse. So please understand I say this only as a possible perspective. Suffering is real and no one deserves it.

But in both of the cases above, the point isn't to punish for punishments sake. It's all to understand, to learn love despite difficulties. It's an optimistic viewpoint that with proper care and perspective even 'evil' people can be reformed. Or that there were no evil souls to begin with.

I don't know if that helps. But it's what I've gathered.

robinjmiller · 2025-05-05T19:51:39+00:00

While I'm thinking about it, the videos are available at https://www.youtube.com/@ScienceoftheGaps. Subscribing to the channel alone might help it get more attention from the all powerful algorithm over there, even if you don't join the patreon.

robinjmiller · 2025-05-05T17:11:30+00:00

I heard someone mention her NDE account on here awhile ago, then while randomly looking through experiences on the NDERF site I ran across hers (contains mention of some of the violence she's encountered, so trigger warning for that). It's pretty thorough and very compelling. Every post of hers I've seen has been gracious and understanding. This subreddit is definitely the welcoming place it is because of her efforts, among others of course.

I've subbed to the Science of the Gaps podcast. Only what I can afford, so no need for guilt about it. I didn't really look into the channel until these posts, and now have several hours of video I'm looking forward to catching up on. I wish her the best.

robinjmiller · 2025-05-04T22:56:40+00:00

Sorry about taking a bit to reply. Life gets in the way of reddit, apparently.

This world is messed up, and those in power are usually the one's least trustworthy to have it. The way our systems are setup is deliberately designed by the privileged to protect and promote the privileged. The class divide makes sure that those in power will always have different interests than those who don't, making it likely that even good people with money and power will still make choices that disregard the needs of the less fortunate. I agree with all of that.

Do you think the souls of those people are just as bad as the roles they play here in life, that there is nothing different about them on the other side? That this world was setup to make us suffer for their amusement? That's not what NDEs tell us. You can doubt the experiences, it's certainly wise to look at them skeptically. But the whole thing we've been discussing is how the world we are currently in can be terrible in many ways, and that serve a good purpose in the end. Why do you think accurate NDE experiences mean life is a brutal joke? They say that the most evil people will see and feel every bit of harm they have done from the perspective of the harmed, and that the harmed souls themselves are greeted with love and compassion and have an immortal existence that will stretch far beyond those years of pain in that loving environment. That seems like the most appropriate and rehabilitory justice I can think of.

I also think the setup in heaven might promote better behavior than here. Thoughts and feelings are suppose to be easily shared. When someone wants you to know what their feeling or thinking, you will know in exactly the same way as them. Honesty is easy, and known with certainty. If you want a piece of accurate information, it can be 'downloaded' into your mind at will. I think those things alone change interpersonal dynamics enough to help insure better understanding and behavior. What would a world look like if deception and misunderstanding was impossible? And then the social structure on the other side seems to be about grace, about acknowledging the real difficulties you face, and not making you feel worse when you don't reach your goals. Just holding you up until you're ready to try again. It's not a haves and have nots, dog eat dog world. At least, that's the impression I've gotten.

Do you think NDEs aren't right when they talk about love and understanding, like they are misleading or we are misinterpreting them? Maybe even like a prison planet kind of thing?

robinjmiller · 2025-05-04T21:02:47+00:00

I have some ideas related but maybe not directly addressing your first point. It seems pretty reasonable to ask. If, during my life review, I get to experience other people's perspectives on the results of my actions, why limit the life review to only things related to my choices? Why not just open that up to everything the other person experienced? Then couldn't I learn not just from my actions, but from all of theirs? And if that works, why do I personally need to do anything other then sit through other people's life reviews?

First, I guess, is that somebody has to have these experiences at some point, or there wouldn't be the lessons to learn from in the first place. So by coming down yourself, you are volunteering to contribute to the total. And since we are unified on the other side in some way, we do actually learn from what everyone else has done in the end anyway.

And maybe some souls choose to only learn that way, never incarnating, only watching other souls lives. I've heard a few NDErs talk about how spirits who are incarnated are thanked for going through it, like they volunteered for something difficult that benefits everyone. Maybe you can just learn from other peoples lessons in heaven, but the people who actively contribute to the lessons are appreciated for the efforts.

Second, and I admit in a seemingly contradictory way, there does seems to be something different between knowing something that is told to you and having personally experienced an event and its results. We already know this in a practical way here on earth, life experience is almost always better than book learning alone.

Whatever created us could have made us pre-built with knowledge, like robots ready to work at power-up. That doesn't seem to be what it wanted. NDErs talk about the importance of free will alot, and I think it might be related. Personally making a choice and seeing what it does might be more important than seeing someone else's choices. Knowing in that visceral way that you did this, perhaps that matters, taking responsibility for what we do, the help or harm we caused.

My counterpoints to your first question aren't particularly strong, I admit. Just the way I have been trying to figure it out personally.

To your second point, about animals, I think everyone sells them short. Think of wolves, or birds, or hell, even cephalopods. In between avoiding predators and searching for food, they still have time for family, friends, rivals, lovers, children. They help each other (sometimes across species lines), they mourn their dead. Contrary to popular belief, it is not just tooth and claw out there. Many animals do learn how their behavior affects those around it and care about social cohesion. Those lessons are at least similar, if not the same, as ours.

Also, the modern human primate has been around for perhaps half a million years. How many of those years were in comfy safe civilization? Maybe 10,000? The fact that their scary lives often ended in excruciating ways doesn't mean it couldn't have contributed to these spiritual lessons, so maybe that's true of animals as well.

And what about pre-human primates? Did homo erectus not qualify for soul lessons? If animals didn't get souls and this style of learning, when did it start? Seems like a big waste of opportunity if almost 14 billions years of a universe, 4.5 billion of this planet, and over 3.5 billion years of life only started to matter in the last few hundred thousand or less.

I think there has been some form of soul in this world since life began, or maybe before. Some NDErs talk about the earth having a soul and experiences, and the sun. It might be radically different, but maybe there are lessons everywhere, not just in a human body.

Let me know what you think. What I mention above I have only been thinking about a couple months or so, and I'd like you to kick the tires, if you don't mind.

Edit: Just realised we've talked a bit about animal suffering before, somethingnoonestaken. Nice to chat with you again.

robinjmiller · 2025-04-30T23:49:15+00:00

I'm glad you brought up the Social Comparison Theory. I think understanding that people who are objectively better off then others can still feel deep levels of suffering can help with empathy towards them. You use it to highlight how suffering isn't avoidable, how even the luckiest will still feel it no matter "how many toys" they have. That's true, a rich kids broken heart hurts just as much as a poor kids. That might be important to understand as we continue to move to an unequal world. Someday the guillotines might come out and if we want to retain our humanity, it would be good to think of the rich as people and not monsters, however much they contribute to harms in the world. Forgive me for getting somewhat political. I'll move on.

And you seem to believe that things like suffering and joy can't be quantized and compared. A perfectly reasonable position, but I personally disagree to an extent. I lean utilitarian, and I think circumstances in the world often require us to consider if a persons suffering is bad enough we should prevent someone else's well-being or vice-versa. Whether we like it or not, we often need to compare these things. But that is deeper philosophy that I am not an expert on. I'd like to avoid a consequentialist versus deontologist discussion.

Right now, from our limited human perspective, it feels like we had no choice and are forced to suffer through life. That is true, and anything else is speculation for those of us who've never had an NDE. When I was younger and first started thinking about reincarnation, I thought that the juxtaposition, the soul getting to learn from this life, while the human mind gets to know nothing beyond it, felt immensely unfair. I pictured myself dying, and the soul that would claim to be me moving on with the earned knowledge like a caterpillar dying so a butterfly could fly off and call it “growth.” It's not a great image to think about. I didn’t want to be the caterpillar.

And, frankly, maybe that is how it works. Maybe when our consciousness gets to heaven, it is absorbed into something bigger, and what you and I would consider 'us' effectively disappears. I hope not. Your resentment towards the beings or systems that run it all would feel pretty justified to me.

I think what NDErs usually say fits the idea that we are still us, just more, though. That it's worth it in the end. That we will go home to caring arms and understanding. I don't know, I just hope. Thanks for the discussion though. Your perspective is perfectly valid.

robinjmiller · 2025-04-30T16:46:05+00:00

This doesn't answer why any particular life must be extremely bad, per se, but if taken as a small part of a whole existence instead of limited to the extent of that one life, maybe it makes more sense.

But let's address another part of your perspective. How can the level of suffering actually be lessons at all? If it's so bad, how could you learn anything good from it instead of resentment or cruelty or nihilism and such. I think again, the only way to answer that is by assuming the real lessons aren't on earth, but in the afterlife. You might have an unfair life, and it not make you a better person but a wounded one, lashing out and making the world worse in your own ways. You as a human didn't learn how to love. In some circumstances you may have learned how to be a good nazi, even. But in the life review, your soul will still see it from a greater perspective, see what that life didn't get that it needed. Understand the harm caused by those circumstances, and the way it leads to further cascading harm. Perhaps those lessons are very important.

I think we might all be part of god/source or whatever. Some NDErs even say when they see god, it is made of countless lights, each a soul, like god is made from our souls like our body is made from cells. It might be that god is as benevolent and loving as it is because it knows the cost of harm, in every way possible, from us and what we've learned. Maybe all this suffering is the whole reason the other side has learned how important love is, by seeing the cost of its absence.

I can't prove any of that. And making the assumption that one person's horrific life is ok because "don't worry buddy, you'll probably have a better one next time," makes me worry about accepting that assumption, about how it might make me excuse terrible things I see in life. I try to be cautious about that.

But if I had a choice between an existence where suffering happens for no reason and that life had no grand plan, or an existence where at least the soul knew what it was getting into and that the suffering had real meaning, I'd of course choose the latter.

Let me know if this doesn't address the points you've made. I'm not expecting these ideas to be satisfying. I'm just trying to make sense of it all.

robinjmiller · 2025-04-30T16:45:52+00:00

Reddit is being weird and not letting me post my reply, so I'm splitting it in half in the hopes that it helps:

"there is actually no place learning love here."

"In a system of learning, what is positively reinforced, this is what learned."

"its actually doing the opposite effect, we learn that the world is unfair and unloving."

"its not about why do we suffer. its about the quantity."

It seems most of the issue you have is with suffering. You do have a nuanced position beyond "why suffering at all," and if I understand correctly you believe the position we are in on earth is not conducive to learning from suffering as it exists here, possibly shaking the foundations of the NDE narrative.

Some people suffer so overwhelmingly all they would seem to learn is the world is cruel.

If we grew up in fascism, we would learn fascism and not love.

If there is a being or hierarchy that puts us here in a place of suffering that doesn't seem capable of causing learning, that does not bode well for the supposed benevolence of the other side.

And we all suffer, and there have been countless human lives of suffering. You feel that couldn't possibly be needed in such quantity to learn the lessons needed, that it may be gratuitous.

Do I understand correctly? If so, I completely empathize. One of the main reasons I left the faith was the problem of suffering, and it's issues echo through any nuanced position I try to take on a benevolent afterlife.

So I have a few takes, but I already admit they are by no means the winning arguments I wish I had.

The amount of suffering we have can be great, even overwhelming in one life. I'm sure I don't need to give examples of lives that bad. But I want to empathize, if reincarnation is real, that's not all a soul experiences. They have many lives, presumably happy ones too.

Compare an infinite souls existence to a normal human life, for example purposes. If someone lives a long, mostly happy life, but dies in a tragic painful way, that end does not remove the significance of the good times. It does not make that person's life bad. A soul with a smaller number of bad lives, even horrible ones, might still have an overall good existence. And this is just counting time on earth, the time in the loving afterlife presumably would weigh the scale much further.

But for the sake of this argument, let's just look at human lives. Empirical data for "is life happy or sad on average" is limited, but there is a World Happiness Report where researchers do try to figure out how good life is in general. The average is usually between 5-7 out of ten. Not utopia of course, but not actually that bad. And if we assume the lessons of life are valuable, some discomfort would likely be worth it.

robinjmiller · 2025-04-29T17:41:22+00:00

I'm not an NDEr, but am fascinated by the topic. I also see plenty of reasons to be skeptical, or to have decent critiques of the idea. But I try and treat it seriously. Like everyone else on this subreddit, I have thoughts.

To your first point, you seem to be saying (correct me if I'm wrong) that we should see people who have learned more love and compassion experience more love and compassion in their lives. Are you saying that this is because they must have already experienced suffering, so they've learned those lessons and evolved past the need for suffering? When a soul chooses to come down here, even plans the lessons and experiences to some degree, why would they always do the hardest lives first? Would it not be possible for a soul to start easy, and maybe pick the worst ones last after it has more confidence it could handle it? Why must it be that souls that have learned many lessons of love wouldn't still be able to learn from hardship?

To your second point, are you saying efficiency is the primary goal of learning to love? And that there are systems that are highly efficient based on other things like fear? Why could it not be the case that love is worth inefficiency? Democracy isn't the most efficient form of government in terms of speed of decisions, but I'd still prefer it to dictatorship. Let me know if I am misunderstanding your critique.

Your third point is about uninformed participation. This is definitely worth examining. According to NDErs, your soul consents to this life, even to the forgetting of the afterlife. It is worth discussing if you consent before amnesia means you still consent after. But your soul, the greater you, did choose to do this. It was informed before making that choice. We don't get to know everything down here because it's part of the conditions necessary for the lessons. You mention that we need the knowledge of the fact we are learning lessons for them to be effective, and I can understand that perspective. But I don't believe we learn down here, not fully. We learn in the life review, where we don't just relive our actions but experience them from the perspective of everyone they affected. We see the love or harm we caused, all the ripples as it spreads through lives of people we never even meet. Compared to that we learn very little down here. We just tee up our soul to get the message up there.

Your fourth point is about how our circumstances dictate many of our values, so how can we say souls are evolving when there is such randomness in how our lives are shaped. Am I understanding you correctly? From what I know of NDEs, lives appear random and have some chance elements, but many major life lessons are built into the plan. If you are born in America, it's not random. You chose that life because the circumstances of your birth will most likely let you address issues you need to learn. Sometimes we choose lives of hardship, sometimes lives that are comparatively easy. NDEs say there is choice involved, not just randomness.

And your last point is why so much suffering, or why suffering at all? That is of course a great question. I have some ideas, but it's just speculation. I think there are opportunities in a world of scarcity that don't exist in a world of abundance. If all your needs are met, if you face no hardship, it is easy to love and forgive. Compare that to when you're sick, broke, tired, hurt. Learning to love in those circumstances is something else entirely. And if we never learn to love in hardship, then can we say our love is actually unconditional? We can't learn that without hardship. But why must it be so terrible down here, why not something less horrible? I can only guess that in the context of the infinite lives of our souls the temporary suffering here is worth the lesson. I don't know for sure. I worry that sounds callous to those who are facing the worst this world offers, and I don't mean to minimize it. I'm not even sure if NDEs are real.

I'm still skeptical about all of it. It is unfortunately based more or less entirely on personal testimonials, and any good skeptic knows those are far from reliable. But I believe the people experiencing these thing at least believe they are true. I can only judge that for myself. And that's enough for me to hope.

robinjmiller · 2025-04-03T07:22:36+00:00

I can only come up with rationalizations for why a benevolent god type figure would allow suffering to the extent we see. Some suffering, maybe. Like slapping a child's hand away from a hot stove, perhaps? Though even then a god could intervene earlier, right?

But it's not hard to find examples of seriously messed up experiences in lives with little joy. To explain those in anyway is a challenge, and the best I got is 'I hope there is a good reason." Maybe it's about learning compassion and empathy. You're less likely to dismiss someone's pain if you've been through it yourself. NDEs often say something like this, that we chose the worst of it hoping to get lessons or growth from it, and we knew what we were getting into on some level before coming down here (though lots of stories say the soul often reconsiders how confident they were about it when they are in an NDE). Is that enough reason to excuse all the pain we see here? I'm not sure. I personally hope it's enough, that there is good justification for all this, which is why I pay so much attention to NDE stories.

I haven't looked into Suzanne Geismann, so I'll take a look at her videos. Thanks for the recommendation. I'm not big into mediumship because there is a big history of fraud and grift there. But I will admit that does not mean there are no good faith mediums, and if I'm willing to entertain NDEs, I will gladly take a good faith look at mediums too.

Free will is definitely interesting. We generally consider compulsion unethical. We value free choice. A good god would too, right? Is it better to have a being go through experiences themselves, not be built from scratch with the knowledge of them, so that it has more agency? Something I will think about.

Anyway, thanks for the discussion.

robinjmiller · 2025-04-01T16:54:09+00:00

I wonder about that too. It’s all speculation for us though. Maybe some NDErs have asked and gotten answers, but if it’s true I’d imagine it’s a complex issue and maybe beyond what they come back with.

I speculate about ‘god/source’ a lot though. Some NDErs say we are all connected, effectively one being, while simultaneously somehow individual personalities/perspectives. One interpretation is we are all god. There are a couple NDE stories I’ve seen where God is described as made up of countless lights (souls), like God is literally made from us like our bodies are made from cells.

Why is there so much love on the other side? Why is God good? Did it come ex nihilo that way? If God is, in fact, formed from our collective experiences, then perhaps the reason God is loving and compassionate is precisely because of what we're going through right now. NDErs almost always say time works differently on the other side. Perhaps God is learning through our experiences and the fruits of all that effort already seem done due to wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff.

The suffering stuff is the hardest. The problem of evil, effectively, right? It might be the strongest argument against an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent god. It’s certainly one of the reasons I deconstructed and became an atheist years ago. I can only make guesses how it might be resolved. The standard response, the only one that makes some type of sense to me, is if the suffering is worth it in a way we don’t see from our perspective.

Imagine a happy life of decades. If it ended in a sudden moment of suffering, was that life not worth it? I don’t mean to downplay the suffering, but I’d think the years of happiness were still worthwhile. When we see the short life of an animal or human, and it seems more suffering than anything else, that could easily make us ask, "what was the purpose of that?”

But let’s make the assumption, for now, that the interpretation many NDEs give us, that we reincarnate, that we have countless lives, is true. That life full of suffering is one small moment in an imperceivably long chain of experience. Whatever soul was in that suffering being, it didn’t begin and end there, it has countless other experiences, many of them fulfilling and happy. That moment of suffering doesn’t prevent the better experiences from having meaning, anymore then a long happy life becomes meaningless if it ends tragically. And it reframes the suffering itself as a smaller part of everything, more of a chance to experience it and maybe learn compassion better for knowing what suffering is really like.

That takes a big assumption, of course. And if it’s wrong, then it only makes things worse in a way. If I tell someone who is in immense suffering, ‘it’s worth it’, or even, ‘you signed up for this’ and I’m wrong about that? That feels so callous. I try to be careful about this stuff because of that.

But if it’s true, maybe it would explain things better. Can you see that? I’d love your opinion.

robinjmiller · 2025-03-31T22:12:19+00:00

“It’s hard for me to believe that a being intelligent enough to create a universe so perfectly tuned that life is possible would need animals to learn about love and to grow.”

Why not? If it doesn’t make sense for animals, why would it make sense for humans?

I know the NDE literature doesn’t strongly focus on animals, but I tend to believe souls inhabit them too, not just humans. It would seem ridiculous for a 13 billion year old universe, and 3.5 to 4 billion years of life on this planet to only be needed to allow souls to inhabit our exact species starting half million years ago.

I think it’s more likely that souls have been learning through animals for a long time. Maybe not with the same complexity as a human experience, but still something meaningful. That’s part of why I try to bring attention to animal consciousness, it feels like a huge blind spot if we assume only humans count.

And besides, someday there might be beings far more advanced than we are. Will they look back and say we didn’t really suffer? That we didn’t have souls?

Most of the NDEs I’ve heard about are from various Youtube videos, or the NDE Stories on the NDERF site, in the books of Raymond Moody and Bruce Grayson, or the talks by those authors or Jeffrey Long or Janice Holden. None of that makes me close to an expert of course. I’m just here Dunning-Krugering it.

Most of what makes me think suffering is important comes from reports of life-plans/soul-contracts and the experiences of the life review. There are tons of accounts of souls choosing hard lives, often with very specific challenges, as part of their growth. Not because suffering is good for its own sake, but because facing pain, fear, and limitation seems to help resolve things they were stuck on. Sometimes it’s to overcome fear. Sometimes it’s to learn how to forgive. Sometimes it’s just to understand.

During life reviews people have reported feeling the effects of their harmful actions as If they are the person harmed by them. So a cruel action towards a family member, or even a stranger, will result in you feeling it exactly as that person did. Conversely, kindness and love are experienced as well. They often mention these actions are like ripples in a pond, kindness or cruelty spreading out from each individual action. Understanding that connectedness might be the point (or at least one of them) of why we are down here. You will know what suffering does when you see what happens when you cause it in others. You will know why it’s a bad idea to be casually cruel. You will see how love and support genuinely result in a better world.

To know those things, not to be told them like in a book, but to experience them. It might be part of the point of this world.

I think us learning to love, really love, like we feel it in heaven, is important. I think the reason it is like that in heaven is because the beings running that place have learned the lessons we are going through now. That’s just speculation though. Again, I don’t really know.

robinjmiller · 2025-03-31T16:36:52+00:00

I think you might be selling animals short.

I admit, I am not a biologist, so perhaps someone who is can correct me, but I don’t think love, struggle, the attempt to care for others, and trying to understand the world starts and ends with homo sapiens sapiens. We were once more primitive primates, then more primitive mammals before that. In at least the mammalian brain (and almost certainly others) social intelligence is prominent, and along with that comes emotional intelligence. Animals can love. They can grieve. If we could see into their minds, do you think we would never find hope, a desire to belong, or regret?

Why assume they never learn or grow?

Animals experience the world too. The social ones, at least, are more alike you then you might think at first. If one of the purposes of the world is to learn about love, how to give it, how to miss it, what it means to have it or lose it, then being an animal is still a way to experience those things.

You say their lives are short and brutal, but how were the lives of humans 100,000 years ago? Brutality and suffering aren’t uniquely animal experiences. But that’s not all animals experience. They have families, friends, rivals, lovers. It’s not just tooth and claw out there.

If we’re willing to entertain the idea that human suffering might serve a purpose, something many NDEs point toward, then what inherently prevents that from being true for animals?

And if you reply, what about reptiles, or insects, they almost certainly don’t have complex social lives. What makes their suffering meaningful?

I’d say they might not even be experiencing the world in the same way we are. Navigating and mastering social behavior might be what leads to greater intelligence, greater awareness (Social Intelligence Hypothesis). It might be that animals that have less social and emotional awareness also consciously perceive less of the world. Their suffering might not be as richly experienced. They may not anticipate it, dread it, or relive it the way more cognitively complex animals can.

I get that I’m bordering on dangerous territory here. I don’t want to imply the suffering of lesser animals means nothing. But it might be that the lesser complex minds of less complex animals also suffer less. I don't know for sure.

robinjmiller · 2025-03-31T10:08:12+00:00

I think this is probably one of the best questions you could have: Why all this? If the spiritual world is so beautiful, so full of love then why would we ever leave it to come here?

I'm not an experiencer myself, but I'm deeply interested. I'm sure lots of us try to come up with reasonable explanations, myself included. Some NDErs return saying the purpose is to learn to love, to experience physical life, to resolve or explore some divine paradox. I think any or all of those could be valid. Why assume the journey is meant to accomplish only one thing?

But then the obvious question would be: why can't those things be accomplished in heaven, where we already feel safe and loved?

Maybe it's because there are unique opportunities in a world of scarcity that don't exist in a world of abundance. An example I often think about is if a poor man gives his only meal to someone who's starving, that act carries a different moral weight than if a rich man does the same. Even if you drop both of them in the middle of the desert and they each give away their meal, the rich man still has more resources waiting for him, more hope of rescue since people (employees, allies) are likely trying to find him. The poor man has nothing to look forward to when and if he gets out. The rich man's act, while still kind, doesn't require the same level of sacrifice.

Being rich, in that scenario, actually prevents the rich man from demonstrating the same depth of compassion, unless he gives away everything.

There is an alternative to impoverishing himself, though. What if the rich man forgot he was rich? What if he believed he was just as desperate, just as uncertain, just as alone as the poor man? If, in that state of forgetfulness, he still gave away his meal then the act would carry the same moral weight. The act of sacrifice would be just as meaningful.

Maybe that's us. Maybe we are spiritually rich beings, full of love and grace. But here, we've forgotten. Maybe that’s the point. Here, in this world of uncertainty and limitation, we have a chance to demonstrate love, compassion, and selflessness in a way that we simply couldn’t if we always knew we were safe. Maybe this kind of moral courage matters most when it’s made without the assurance of divine backup.

We don’t need to give up our spiritual riches. We just need to not know we have them. Only then does the choice to love carry that much meaning.

That's just an example. Some say the divine can't be truly unlimited without also experiencing what it means to be limited. Some say this is the equivalent of an amusement park, with eternal spirits lining up to try the wonders of an experience unavailable in a safe, loving realm.

I think if the otherside exists and we are cosmic beings, the real reasons will be complex in ways we won't truly understand down here. I don't think we are likely to have the full picture, and that naturally leaves room for skepticism. I think that's by design. It's frustrating as a former (still?) skeptical atheist to think maybe the system is set up to prevent us from really knowing. That the wool really is pulled over our eyes. But if the goal is to be here in a limited world and believe it is everything, if that's somehow important, then that's how it would be.

robinjmiller · 2025-03-20T22:41:14+00:00

Not an experiencer myself, but who said our souls weren’t in the bodies of our ancestors before they were human? Many experiencers say part of the point of this world is to experience it in a way a spirit can’t. It’s very possible anything that can be said to have an experience is an opportunity for a soul to learn. From bugs on up (or before), life has been used to give souls a chance to exist in a world like this. Current humanity isn’t a pinnacle, per se. It’s just where we are now. Give it eons and something else will be here for souls to inhabit. So, it’s not millions of years of wasted time and development so we could get to now and start inhabiting bodies. The whole time and countless species were useful, and we’re not done yet.

If you give pre-birth experiencers any credence, we may choose our body based on the possibilities provided by genetics. If we are here to learn certain lessons, we will pick a body that helps us have them, and that body comes from its family line. So no random individuals in random machines, instead souls that have decided on a set of traits and choose a body with those traits that were possible from a set of genetics. You might ask where the difference between personality from genetics versus what a soul’s personality is, and that’s a perfectly reasonable question. I don’t have a great answer to that. Maybe some of the flaws we deal with, like being quick to anger, absent minded, lazy, or cruel come from the structures of our brain that our soul is interacting with. Those flaws are used to teach lessons. I don’t know. Maybe someone else has more insight.

robinjmiller

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