I've often written that the "function" of this mortal life on earth is to learn from the experiences that The Creator ensures we have during our lives. God can provide the experiences, but only we can learn from them.
This learning is a positive thing. In the sense that ultimately, we don't Have To learn in order to follow Jesus Christ to Heaven (salvation does not depend on theosis).
But the more truth we learn, the more of our-selves we can carry-through resurrection into eternal life; because we must leave-behind all of-us that is not-of-love.
That's what learning is for - in a nutshell: the more we learn about Love*; the fuller and more complete will be our resurrection.
*(Love is perhaps better understood as loving-creation -- Love is Not just some emotion, neither is Love something like physics - a force-field or frequency/ vibration state).
But a great deal of learning in this world and civilization is a matter of un-learning.
A great deal of what we know in the Modern West is false and evil.
A great deal of our "common sense" is actually propaganda and mind-games. A great deal of our motivation has been socially and by the mass media inculcated artificially and with malign intent.
Another way of thinking of un-learning is that modern people like us believe that many sins are virtues and virtues are sins; that is, our values are inverted; and we need to unlearn this inversion.
What this points-at is that our un-learning is mostly about basic assumptions rather than "empirical" facts: we need to unlearn our deep, false and evil metaphysics rather than surface ideologies and religions.
So if you are puzzled today about what you are supposed to be learning from your actual and present life; it might be worth considering that it is probably more likely your basic assumptions need to be un-learned, than that there are necessary and positive life-lessons to be learned from the surface level of your life: from stuff like evidences, facts, and explicit theories.
Because evidence/ fact/ hypotheses are all downstream from metaphysical assumptions - and when the deep metaphysics is wrong, then you cannot learn from surface experiences.
@Bruce, well put! There is much to learn but in our day perhaps a majority of it is "negative" in the sense of un-learning false assumptions as you described.
ReplyDeleteI suggest that in the same way that positive learning increases love, a great deal of negative un-learning likewise increases love. This is because the faulty assumptions typical of our day tend to diminish, weaken, strain, and terminate human relationships. Isolation and resentment abound.
On the other hand, relationships built upon sound metaphysics grow, strengthen, and endure, potentially forever!