Astral common sense?

 

Cyrus Kirkpatrick makes a lot of sense here. I´m also positively allergic to the idea that evil and suffering is a "learning opportunity", "the school of hard knocks", "what doesn´t kill you makes you stronger", and all that crap. Was the Holocaust a learning opportunity for the gassed Jews? To take just a very obvious example. (OK, here´s another one: remember that depression you had 15 years ago? Great karmic lesson, thank you Geezus!) The most obvious problem with this position is that it makes God into a devil...

Kirkpatrick believes very strongly that our planet, for reasons he doesn´t discuss, is currently a very shitty and unbalanced place which attracts all kinds of negative spiritual entities that suck the energy of everything living. This suffering and pain is unnatural, and we don´t "learn" anything from it. Instead of keeping Earth in ignorance (so it can continue to be a "learning opportunity" for souls who need hard knocks), we should improve the world for the better. His proposals are not political, but rather spiritual: inform people that we have immortal souls, that materialism is wrong, that we can (and should) expand our consciousness. This will somehow block the demonic entities from infesting our world. Kirkpatrick has a soft spot for psychedelic drugs, which he believes "turns atheists into believers in a matter of minutes". 

It´s interesting to note that the narrator isn´t a Gnostic, but has a very "concrete" and almost "materialist" view of the afterlife (which he refers to as the astral world). He isn´t a Christian by a long shot, but it struck me that his views have a family likeness to Christianity: matter (at least astral matter or imperishable matter) isn´t evil in itself, evil is spiritual and very real, and so are demons, who are presumably a kind of fallen angels. The solution isn´t to become a luminous orb in an ineffable Gnostic pleroma, but rather to spiritually reform our current embodied existence. I admit that I find this guy a breath of fresh air after reading too much New Age literature which claims that evil is an illusion, that the universe isn´t fallen but in perfect karmic balance...and all that bunk about the "learning experience". 

I wouldn´t mind becoming a luminous orb in the pleroma, though. (Not sure what Cyrus has against that?) I offer this clip as a way to, ahem, "balance" the discussions on the metaphysical end of things...