Theos-Talk Archives (April 1995 Message tl00171)

Jerry -

Thanks for the Jung quotes.  I have read them before many times,
and spent around 18 months on this study alone, so am very
familiar with his work, as that of his main pupils and later
teachers in their own right - Jacobi, Fordham, Harding, Neumann.
:)

> Alan: < If that is so, we are dumped here unjustly, for we
> have (it says again) to learn the lessons bestowed by
> karma from past lives without being allowed to remember
> what we did wrong.>

> Jerry: In a more esoteric sense (which means
> it can't be put into words correctly, but only in an
> approximation) we come here like artists to express
> ourselves and our unfulfilled desires.

Who says, and upon what _evidence_?

  But since the ego,
> like the body, is new each time around, it has nothing
> whatever to "remember" any more than the body does.  Only
> the psyche or atma-buddhi "remembers" and its memory is
> but the "essence," as HPB puts it, of each past life.
> So I would agree with you that those folks who remember
> tiny details of past lives, are probably focusing in on
> something else.

See above :-).  How is psyche defined as atma-buddhi? and why?
Psyche [Greek] can mean "mind" or "soul" or "self" or all of
these.  You seem to be using ego in the above comment in a _non_
Jungian sense: this could confuse some of our readers when it
appears alongside the Jungian interpretation, could it not?

> Alan: <To accept anything "on faith" is a dubious
> proposition.  Insofar as faith=trust then we will only
> trust what or who we already know to be a reliable source
> or witness.>
>
> Children must trust in their parents, or face the trust vs
> mistrust issue of Erikson's first developmental stage (in
> other words, without trust we human beings cannot have a
> healthy growth).

I trusted my parents until I was 42.  Then they let me down
badly.  42 years of trust was, in the event, misplaced.  Result:
the "healthiness" of my "growth" becomes suspect.

  We all must trust that this world was
> created and is maintained by someone (or some others)
> superior to us.

Must we?  Why?

  Most of us trust that justice will win
> out somehow and somewhere, either soon in Heaven or
> karmically on Earth in some future life, or here after the
> ressurection, or something.  The desire (or intuitive
> conviction) for justice burns in the hearts of most of us.
> Yet we certainly see little of it when we look at the
> world around us or watch the evening news.

No we don't.  We see the classical descriptions of Hell on a
daily basis - viz. Olklahoma this very week.  80 plus people
murdered?  Some kind of "mass karma" which they richly deserved
owing to past sins?

> Many people have faith or trust in a higher power of some
> kind.  The problem is, just what do we "know to be a
> reliable source or witness?"  Our senses?  Our intuition?
> Because most of us have nagging doubts about all of the
> sources of information about this world, we have faith in
> something that we cannot yet witness or observe directly.

Please beware of sweeping generalisations.  I for one do not know
and am not even acquainted with "most of us."

> Alan: < I have past life memories, but I do not believe
> that they are necessarily memories of my own personal
> experience - only that they are memories of past lives.
> Spelling it out: they could just as easily be the real
> memories of people who have gone before, and are long
> since "dead" by our usual definition of death.  Who or
> where they are now is another story.>
>
> This is exactly the Tibetan teaching that we are each a
> collection-of-others.  If the subjective self doesn't
> exist (i.e., the ego, soul, and spirit are all aggragates
> and thus have no suchness) then how can they reincarnate?
> The Tibetans answer this question by postulating a
> collection-of-others, which is like saying that we are
> each a monadic host, rather than a single eternal monad.
>
>
> Jerry S.

I'll but that - but only as a working hypothesis!

[Retires gibbering to quiet room . . . .]

Alan