Summary:
• Learning is necessary because God respects free will. If knowledge were Divinely programmed into people at birth, there would be no freedom of thought and no authentic discovery. Learning exists so that souls can choose, explore, and grow.
• Humans learn in two ways: by studying information and by experiencing life directly. Studying is like downloading facts. Experience engages multiple human senses, creating deeper, longer lasting memories and understanding.
• No matter how much you study something—a war, a foreign country, a disease—studying it is never the same as actually experiencing it. Experience shapes memory, emotion, intuition, and wisdom in ways that study cannot.
• According to many NDE testimonies, living a human lifetime on Earth is one of the most intense, most challenging experiences a soul can have anywhere in the Universe. That is why many souls choose to incarnate as humans on Earth rather than only study human life from afar.
• Your soul chose to live a human lifetime because experience teaches far more than study does. This may not be your first lifetime. Souls often return to Earth to learn new lessons or to help other souls learn theirs.
• Some of the most important learning comes from painful experiences, including suffering and tragedy. Terrible events can shock people out of complacency, forcing them to confront problems that desperately need solutions.
• When tragedy happens, the first lesson we should practice is comforting one another. This remains a lesson that humankind still struggles to remember consistently.
• The spiritual purpose of learning is to understand existence, in all its possibilities. For humans specifically, the spiritual purpose of learning is to discover love in all its varieties—even in situations where love seems to be absent, rare, or conditional.
• Love in its fullness is difficult to understand. This is why love must be learned through living it, not by merely studying it in theory.
Imagine if the lessons of a human lifetime could be programmed into a person at birth, like a computer. Why does God not do that? Why is learning necessary if God can insert programming into people?
Humans do contain some built-in programming, called survival instincts, but most of what humans need to know in life must be learned. Learning is necessary because of God’s respect for free will. Programming somebody without the need to learn anything would not respect free will. Learning is necessary because learning encourages freedom of thought. And that is why life is a learning experience.
The purpose of learning has two explanations: one from the theory of evolution, the other from the desires of the soul.
According to the theory of evolution, learning is essential for physical survival. Every species has evolved survival instincts, but we also need behaviors that must be learned, such as methods of hunting and knowing which fruits and vegetables are actually poisonous and which ones we can eat safely. Learning also occurs when one generation teaches its knowledge to the next generation, which teaches the next generation, and the next and so on. Two instincts in humans are especially active in children: curiosity, and a natural receptiveness to learning the language the child is hearing. Curiosity is a desire to know more, which encourages discovery. Language encourages memory and, if the person is later taught to read, the person can learn more about a subject by reading about it.
As children and later as adults, humans learn in two ways: by studying and by experiencing. Experiencing can be a form of studying—but for now, imagine that studying and experiencing are very different from each other.
To study something means to read about it, or watch a presentation about it, or hear somebody talk about it. Studying requires you to focus one or two of your personal senses (seeing, hearing) upon a source of information. Perhaps you chose to study that information—but somebody else chose the words that you are reading or hearing. Since you did not choose those words, you may not entirely understand the content, or perhaps the information is not very interesting to you. Nevertheless, studying compels you to read or hear plenty of words. Studying is almost like downloading a new software program into a computer. Computers are designed to do that: input, activation, instant memory. But people are not computers. The human mind can process information but not with equal attention on everything, always, and always perfectly. Human minds vary. Before you memorize all of the information, the focus of your attention may drift elsewhere.
You can study a subject almost anywhere that you can read a book, or something like a book. Studying can also involve writing an essay about the subject. Doing that requires you to think about the subject, to collect information about it, and to learn it well enough that you can write about it. Many teachers prefer this method because the student’s progress can be easily graded by evaluating the quality of the student’s essay. This method is not always accurate or fair, but teachers have used it for hundreds of years.
Studying is not the same as experiencing, however.
A soldier fighting a battle; what is that like? To study that, you could visit a place where a battle was fought. You can study the history of the battle, study the people involved, read whatever they wrote about it. You can watch recreations of the battle, performed by actors. You can watch old movies and videos of the battle recorded by people who were there. By studying the battle for a very long time, you can become very knowledgeable about it. But studying the battle is not the same as experiencing the battle as a soldier who fought in it, including the emotional impact of his memories if he survived it.
When you experience something, you can use several of your personal senses, not merely one or two. You may notice details not noticed by other people. You may notice how bright something is: perhaps a light so intense that staring at it could hurt your eyes, or so dim that it barely illuminates a small area, implying a risk of stumbling if you walk there. You may hear noises, perhaps so faint that you might ignore them. Maybe you hear a machine operating, or squeaks from an old wooden floor, or your own footsteps. Maybe you hear a voice, perhaps an anxious whisper, or the strained voice of somebody very sick or elderly. Do you smell anything? Perhaps the smell of grass, or perfume, or smoke, or a musty room, or maybe your own sweat. Perhaps you can still taste some food that you ate earlier, or a liquid you drank. Was it cold water? Do you feel a breeze upon your face? Or does the air feel humid? Do you feel sweat on your forehead, a dry mouth, soot on your hands? Do you feel cramps in your stomach? Do you feel your heart pounding in your chest? Do you notice anything odd about the situation? Perhaps an intuitive feeling that something significant happened earlier?
The more you use your personal senses, the more memorable your experience becomes. This is because your senses are activating several parts of your brain, storing that information. If you notice similarities between that experience and other memories, you are more likely to remember it. If the experience is very emotional, you are more likely to remember it—and be influenced by it in the future. That is why a person can suffer a phobia (a deep fear) of something that most people do not worry about, because that person once had a terrifying experience. An experience can involve so much sadness, or so much happiness, that the person will feel the same feelings when remembering it years or decades later.
Whatever the experience is, it is your own experience, created by your senses and your mind. Other people might be present, but they could be experiencing the situation differently. Even if the situation were meticulously planned in advance, the experience is still real. Actors in a stage play may perform the same play again and again, saying the same words, but the actors know that each performance is a new experience. It is a new opportunity for something to go wrong, performed for new audience who may react differently than previous audiences did, perhaps laughing at some jokes but not at others, perhaps applauding with enthusiasm or barely applauding. Perhaps the actors feel differently than they felt the day before. Perhaps one or more actors suffered a personal tragedy which the audience is unaware of. Every experience is somewhat unique because not everything can be planned.
If God can arrange anything, then why cannot souls learn the lessons of life without suffering life’s fears, pain, and sometimes horrors? The answer is that souls actually can, according to some near-death experiencers. Souls can choose to feel (in other words, they can re-live) the experiences of other souls who have lived human lives. That method is limited, however. It is like tasting a few foods instead of experiencing a lifetime of regular meals. And the original experience is not your own, it is someone else’s experience.
Human experiences are experienced by humans, but what does the soul experience? According to many NDE testimonies, when a soul is outside of a human body, what the soul experiences is much more intense than what a human body can experience. Yet, those NDE testimonies come from souls who were also humans; and because you are a human, you know what being a human is like.
A soul can study the lessons of human life without actually experiencing a human lifetime. However, if a soul only studies those lessons, instead of actually experiencing them, then studying those lessons can take a very, very, very long time. And if the soul never experiences them, then the soul may not fully learn those lessons.
Therefore, your soul chose an option much more different than studying: your soul chose to experience a human lifetime. And this is probably not your first lifetime. You may have reincarnated many times, either to have another human experience or to help another soul have a human experience. Having a human experience is much more authentic than merely studying something, and this is why many souls prefer experience. Testimonies from numerous near-death experiencers say that experiencing a human lifetime on Earth is one of the most intense, most arduous, most severe challenges a soul can experience in the entire Universe. If you doubt this, consider the countless tragedies and horrors recorded over thousands of years of human history.
Why would a soul with no experience as a human ever desire to become a human? To learn. That desire to learn can be difficult for a human to believe because, right now, you have a human perspective. A soul without any human experience has a different perspective. What is that like? Fortunately for us, the spiritual purpose of learning can be explained from a human perspective.
Imagine studying a foreign country that you have never visited. You might learn plenty of facts about that country. You could become an expert on its history. But until you physically visit that country, you have no real experience with it. You know what you studied, but what you studied is not the same as experience. You studied what other people have described about that foreign country. Their experience is not your own experience.
There are some similarities between the country of your citizenship and every foreign country, and so you do possess a little experience about them because you have experienced those similarities. But imagine trying to learn about something that is totally unlike anything you have ever known. For example, imagine in outer space an extraterrestrial being that humans might call an “alien.” Imagine that the alien possesses a form of intelligence unlike any form that humans know about. Human ideas about logic are based on mathematics and cause-and-effect. Imagine that the alien has its own logic, a logic not based on mathematics or cause-and-effect. Imagine that the alien uses senses for perception, but they are unlike your human senses and unlike any senses used by any animal or plant that we know of. Compared to what humans know about biological life, there is almost nothing about the alien that we can comprehend. Still, try to imagine that alien.
Trying to imagine something without knowing anything to compare it to, or trying to understand something without any context, is what a total lack of experience is like. Imagine that the alien has a color that no human has ever seen. You can comprehend the idea—the alien is a color that no human has ever seen—but you cannot imagine the actual color because no human can. The alien can be described to you, but that description might be confusing more than informative because, like a color you have never seen, nothing about it is familiar.
Now imagine that you, personally, are that alien being, and that the foreign country is Earth. As that alien, you have some knowledge of a strange but fascinating species called humans, which you have studied at a distance. Perhaps you have studied plenty of human history, but you have never been a human. Perhaps you have studied plenty of human situations, but you have never experienced a human situation. Perhaps you have studied human emotions and desires, but you have never experienced any. You have never felt the entirety of human emotions, including desires that may cause people to behave in ways that may violate your own (alien) logic and morality. Unless you become a human and live a human lifetime, you can never really know what it feels like to be a human.
And you may discover that to truly understand the vast variety of human experiences, one human lifetime is not enough.
There are some experiences that most humans would prefer to avoid. You might be surprised, however, by how many humans (and many souls) do choose to have those experiences. For example, a good soldier despises war, a good police officer despises violent crime, and a good firefighter despises huge fires. Nevertheless, after training rigorously, every professional soldier and police officer and firefighter wants to be tested by the real event. They are curious to discover how well they would perform.
A war correspondent is a journalist who reports on a war. A good journalist has no desire to see innocent people harmed physically and emotionally, to see mangled corpses, to see children killed or lose their parents, to see people hungry or maybe starving, to see them ravaged by disease, their homes and cities destroyed, their homeland turned into battlefields and devastated. A good journalist has no desire to experience the horrors of war and to risk getting captured, beaten up, injured, or killed. Nevertheless, a professional war correspondent does feel a moral and professional obligation to report on what is happening during the war, and so the war correspondent must be physically in the war, experiencing its risks to report on its horrors.
In response to a natural disaster such as a massive earthquake or hurricane, a professional rescue worker has no desire to see how the disaster has harmed thousands of innocent people, many of them buried alive in rubble, others severely injured, traumatized, desperately trying to find friends or relatives among the sudden chaos, or emotionally devastated when told that loved ones have been killed. Nevertheless, a professional rescue worker feels a moral obligation to help, to save whoever can be saved. That means the rescue worker must enter the destruction and chaos, and get working.
Physicians, nurses, and other medical specialists who care for sick or injured children know that the death of a child is an emotional event they can never fully get used to. They see terrible diseases, injuries, and abuse afflicting children. Nobody should feel emotionally comfortable when seeing those things. Nevertheless, good medical professionals feel a moral obligation to help. Sometimes they help while knowing that, soon, the child will die regardless of the care they provide. But they help anyway.
There are professional psychiatrists, psychologists, and religious clergy whose job is to talk to very violent criminals in jail, providing emotional and spiritual counseling. Those professionals have no desire to listen to a criminal describe in detail the violent acts that criminal committed against innocent people: murder, torture, sexual assault. Those professionals have no desire to listen to the criminal describe the terrible abuse that he once suffered in childhood, abuse which probably encouraged him to become a violent criminal. Nevertheless, those professionals feel a moral and professional obligation to help a fellow human being, including a violent criminal who may die in prison. They feel a moral and professional obligation to try to understand the mind of a violent criminal, and to reveal to the rest of us what went wrong, such as abuse in childhood.
These are jobs that most of us do not want to perform. The work is often difficult, the experiences are often gruesome, and the physical risks can be deadly. Nevertheless, some people do perform those jobs, and those people have souls. Stories are told about those jobs, stories presented to the general public as a form of entertainment. Yet, what are those jobs really like? Are you at least a little curious? Souls are curious.
Certainly, some experiences are so terrible that no human should want to experience them. To be tortured, sexually assaulted, murdered. To be severely crippled or disfigured, perhaps for a lifetime. To be judged and punished unfairly. To suffer oppression, discrimination, slavery, perhaps for decades. Why would a soul choose to have such experiences? So that others can learn. The person suffering is not the only person learning. Sometimes it takes a terrible tragedy, a horrific event, or a gruesome crime to shock enough people out of their complacency; then they realize that something is so terribly wrong that a solution is needed. The solution might not be easy, indeed it might not be implemented anytime soon, but what is wrong still demands our attention. What is wrong may not affect everybody, at least not yet, but it does affect somebody and it is immoral, unfair, cruel, perhaps deadly. You may wish to leave the problem to somebody else to solve, perhaps somebody with more knowledge or wisdom. Nevertheless, you have a moral responsibility, a spiritual responsibility, to do something to help.
When something terrible happens, some people lose their religious faith. Others ask God, “Why did this happen?” You can ask God, but we need to ask ourselves what we can learn from the experience. The first lesson we should learn is to comfort each other, because the afflicted and the grieving need to be comforted. Yes, this lesson still needs to be learned even today, because sometimes we forget it.
For souls, the spiritual purpose of learning is to fully understand existence in all of its possibilities. Learning through experience is better than learning through only study. For humans, the spiritual purpose of learning is to discover love in all of its varieties, including in situations when and where love appears to be absent, or rare, or somehow conditional. (Conditional love is not really love, but many people are still learning this lesson.) Love in its entirety is not easy to understand. That is why love must be learned. That is the point.