A point is a place that has no continuation; a ray has a beginning and then continues on into infinity. But a line has no beginning and no end: it is effectively everlasting, eternal.
If the soul is eternal, then must it not also exist before birth as well as after death?
And if the soul was before birth, then why should it have been born at all? What reason might there be for taking a soul, thrusting it into a body, and subjecting it to all the physical, emotional, and spiritual pain that this world has to offer?
As well might ask why we must be born at all and not simply spring full-grown from our parents' heads as did Athena....
But born we are, and this separates us from some forms of life that slowly bud instead, as coral, and do not separate from the adult until fully-grown. I think that this is due to our complexity: we cannot know until we experience, and so we must take a time to grow after birth. But for a time, when we are growing, we are too fragile to live in the outside world, and so we are kept safe in our mother's womb - and yet even there we may be harmed, by drugs or improper diets or physical maltreatment or any host of other things, so that as we continue our growth we are stunted and unable to reach our full adult potential. And then, once we are born, the choices we make and the guidance we receive may either heal or harm us, free us or kill us, when we reach for our adult life.
Perhaps our time before birth is our time in the womb, and our physical birth our spiritual one as well. Then perhaps our life here is our childhood, and death only the last rite of passage into the adult life where potential may be fully realised: then the pathos of this world would be seen, also, for the wrong choices, the wrong behaviors, might cripple us as adults even as they cripple children in the physical world's realm...
If the soul is eternal, then must it not also exist before birth as well as after death?
And if the soul was before birth, then why should it have been born at all? What reason might there be for taking a soul, thrusting it into a body, and subjecting it to all the physical, emotional, and spiritual pain that this world has to offer?
As well might ask why we must be born at all and not simply spring full-grown from our parents' heads as did Athena....
But born we are, and this separates us from some forms of life that slowly bud instead, as coral, and do not separate from the adult until fully-grown. I think that this is due to our complexity: we cannot know until we experience, and so we must take a time to grow after birth. But for a time, when we are growing, we are too fragile to live in the outside world, and so we are kept safe in our mother's womb - and yet even there we may be harmed, by drugs or improper diets or physical maltreatment or any host of other things, so that as we continue our growth we are stunted and unable to reach our full adult potential. And then, once we are born, the choices we make and the guidance we receive may either heal or harm us, free us or kill us, when we reach for our adult life.
Perhaps our time before birth is our time in the womb, and our physical birth our spiritual one as well. Then perhaps our life here is our childhood, and death only the last rite of passage into the adult life where potential may be fully realised: then the pathos of this world would be seen, also, for the wrong choices, the wrong behaviors, might cripple us as adults even as they cripple children in the physical world's realm...
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But is not the body born, and not the soul?
Both are; flesh is born of flesh, and the spirit of spirit. But if the spirit existed prior to manifestation in the physical body, then it must have been born into that body. My postulate is that the physical birth is the spiritual as well, and that the metaphysical childhood lasts throughout the earthly life and not just the twenty years we term childhood: because is not childhood a place of growth and learning that _can_ happen later, but is best and easiest if learned early? For instance, an adult may break a difficult habit he formed as a child, but how very difficult it is than if he had been eight or fifteen or so on... Likewise there are things we must learn and practice before we become spiritual adults, fit to be freed upon all of creation. These are best learned, and easiest, during our physical life: responsibility, joy, love, touch, sight, and a host of others. If we die without having learned, then certainly we may learn after death (during adulthood), but it is harder than it would have been here. Which is why the soul should be born in the first place: if left alone it should not learn the lessons as well or as quickly, as a bird that is clipped and then taught to fly as an adult.
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