Sunday 10 January 2016

Life on Planet Earth: why is it so awful?

This world seems to some of us a terrible place to have to live in. Life often resembles a long prison sentence with torture thrown in. To thinking and aware people, the majority of the human race may seem pretty horrible; we may not come out too well if we evaluate ourselves and our own lives either.

There is a fine line between being realistic and being negative and defeatist. It is positive to face reality and ask whether the dice are loaded against us so we and our efforts to make our lives and the world a better place are doomed and we are just emptying our resources into a bottomless pit. Why is life on Planet Earth so painful, damaging, dangerous and disillusioning for many of us?

People have speculated about this for millennia, and many philosophies and ideologies, not to mention spin doctors for various religions, offer explanations for why this should be. The proponents of these theories make a good case for them, although some advocates present speculation as established fact and others appear to be trying to defend the indefensible.

Here are a few summaries of some intriguing theories:

·  The earth is one big lunatic asylum. We could certainly be forgiven for thinking so!

·      The earth is a quarantine area, isolated to protect the rest of the Solar System from being infected with our evils – sins such as selfishness, ambition and greed. I first came across this one in C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet.

·    The earth is a prison planet, a holding area for the scum of the galaxy. It is like an unpoliced, no-go area. We are all doing time here, and we deserve what we get. This is almost comforting in a way: better deserved suffering than undeserved.

·   The earth is one big remedial school, where we all have many lessons to learn before we are fit for purpose. The pupils are in classes where they will learn lessons suitable for their developmental levels, and some people are here as teachers, reporters or inspectors. This would explain why the human race as a whole never seems to learn from experience: it is always a new intake as the graduates have incarnated elsewhere. To me, this theory covers some of it but not everything. It is not paranoid enough for my liking, and it is possible to be too positive and gloss over inconvenient truths.

·      This world is, quite literally, Hell. It was created and is ruled over by Satan. I first learned about this one when reading about the beliefs of the Cathars. Some of them thought that bringing children into this world was wrong. The idea that it is cruel and selfish, evil even, to bring children into this world to suffer resonates with me.

·  The human race is fallen: we came from the angels but have turned to evil.

·    The human race is still very animalistic: we evolved from ape-like creatures and have a long way to go.



·    This world is a vale of soul-making, or a journey to redemption as described in The Pilgrim’s Progress. We must resist the temptations of Vanity Fair, face up to our fears, avoid the many traps, risk the dangers, learn discernment, pass all the tests and behave well, all in expectation of our eventual reward in Heaven.

·  The human race is property, enslaved by reptilians, aliens or other creatures in the inner world or on another dimension. We are experimental victims in their laboratories; we are farm animals, raised in captivity and milked or harvested for our negative emotions. Not only do they sabotage individual lives so that they can feed off anger, pain and frustration, but they also engineer wars to create suffering on a huge scale to provide themselves with large amounts of food. They do all this via people who act as their agents. This is another proposition that we could be forgiven for thinking has something to it.

·  Many apparent human beings are not real people. They are actually part of the Matrix hive, soulless beings or organic portals, robotic entities. They are heartless, dead and empty inside. They are not on the level

They have been described as People of the Lie, script-ridden games players, malignant narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths. They are avatars, fronts for something evil that wants to cause as much suffering as possible, ruin people’s lives and corrupt and destroy everything good. Their role is to distract, divert, subvert, block, sabotage and destroy. They tie up and waste resources and seem like bottomless pits, black holes in the fabric of society. They act as homing beacons for others of their kind. They are programmed and scripted and cannot change, although they can switch between programmes. 

This would explain a lot: I have often felt this way about people I have encountered. There is something ‘off’ about them. They get away with so much: they must be protected by something. Quite independently, they say and do the same things; to me this indicates that they are agents, slaves, pawns and puppets, all controlled by the same entity.

Any explanation is better than no explanation; an explanation that makes a lot of sense is better than any old explanation. An explanation that increases understanding of the problems and offers solutions is better still.

Neither believe nor disbelieve, but entertain possibilities.