[TraineeHuman]

As Mudra and others have said, if you look at how meditation works, it’s based on sooner or later getting you to experience the gaps between your thoughts. Those gaps – that stillness or peace or letting-it-be-ness – is, obviously, whatever’s left over once you’ve taken away whatever you normally consider to be “you”. Meditation is based on the fact that what’s left over is not nothing, but is actually the essence of who you are. So: one answer is to practise meditation, because what meditation is is a kind of fiendishly clever experiment that keeps leaving you with nothing but who you really are. It’s a kind of ancient technology for exploring precisely your question.

A second answer is to find out more who you really are moment by moment. That means learning to have a kind of mirror in which you keep seeing yourself within the bigger picture of your activities. In the spiritual traditions, particularly the esoteric ones, this is even more important than meditation. It’s called things like self-observation, or self-reflection, or (metaphorically) opening your eyes, or (metaphorically) waking up or staying awake. By contrast, all people “normally” have a false mirror with them, that the spiritual traditions often call “the ego”.

And so on. When you throw away the religious nonsense, what’s left in the spiritual traditions is quite often sophisticated methods for exploring your question.

I appreciate, of course, you may imagine these types of practices, etc are unlikely to answer the question in the ways you want. Obviously, in addition to the questions you've listed, you want to know details like “Is life on this planet ultimately just a school, and if so, is it the toughest school in the galaxy in many ways?” (Correct answer: yes.) And does absolutely everything in my life happen more “from” me rather than “to” me? (Correct answer: big yes.) And are human beings (as distinct from dracos who have incarnated as humans) among the highest beings in the universe? Have these high beings voluntarily decided to play hide-and-seek with themselves and forget who they are and made themselves low and weak and kind of thrown away the key because that’s the most far-out game the Divine beings could ever play with themselves? And also because the ultimate test of strength is to play being incredibly weak and to be tossed around in a whirlpool of total craziness and still, in one’s heart, not be beaten? And is this planet in the very middle of a mind-bogglingly gigantic intergalactic war, and that’s just one example of the Divine being determined to slum it out for a while? (I leave the reader to guess the correct answer by now.) And have human beings been subjected to very considerably greater slavery and oppression in lifetimes in the distant past? And so on, and on. One of the things previous posters seem to be pointing out, though, is that knowing all the answers isn’t the full answer, so to speak. Not-knowing is also one way of exploring the universe, and therefore part of what you need to explore to get the whole picture. Or to put it another way, maybe such a thing as the whole picture doesn’t exist?

But I hope I've said enough to kind of explain why "God with Alzheimers" is actually a fuller and greater version of God, when we consider that that Alzheimers is only temporary. Yes, you are a soul, and yes, you do exist forever, and beyond that too. I know that totally for sure, but I probably couldn't have gotten that knowing except through becoming very experienced at meditation. And yes, it's all very much about freedom. But how can you understand freedom fully if you haven't first tasted all the flavors of tyranny? I know one doesn't have to become an alcoholic to understand the dangers of abusing alcohol. But I think it's necessary to get drunk at least once.