Why is life is not fair. How can God let babies die? Will heaven look like an Academy Awards After-Party?

I think the answers to these questions revolve around a basic question:

Does your physical body and personality closely reflect the nature of your soul (n>4 space consciousness)?

• If you are grossly obese with an eating disorder are you the higher dimensional equivalent of a glutton?
• If you are paranoid schizophrenic and floridly psychotic is your soul insane?
• If you are a stone cold killer and a member of a prison gang is your soul bad-to-the-spiritual-bone?
• Conversely, if you sailed through life, were valedictorian of your class at Harvard Medical School, are beautiful/handsome and superbly athletic, married the prom queen or the captain of the football team, started a medical technology firm, made $2b when it went public, was recognized as philanthropist of the decade, and play scratch golf, are you some kind of paragon of evolution in the afterlife?
• Finally, if your mother was a serious alcoholic and you suffer from extreme fetal alcohol syndrome, leaving you with a functional IQ of 45, does that mean you are a drooling idiot in N-space?

If the basic answer is yes, two conclusions seem inescapable:

1) It seems heaven must be on average populated by the N-dimensional equivalent of the fans at a soccer match in Liverpool, a WWF spectacle or the 20 million people currently watching or The Jerry Springer Show

2) We must believe that either 1) most apparently random processes in our universe effecting our development are pre-determined to ensure our physical selves are congruent with our soul’s nature or 2) our soul’s nature depends heavily on the luck of the draw.

Our personality development, our physical health, our IQ, our level of academic, athletic, professional and economic success are complex functions of many apparently random variables including:

A paradigm that seems to resolve these difficulties is this: our universe is a 4-dimensional school constructed and embedded within an N>4-dimensional “higher-verse” where we (our souls) exist. In this universe: we where our body suits. And I call it the Flatland. We are able to project some of our consciousness into the 4-N subspace of this universe, Flatland, into some (maybe one or more) 4-N consciousness that has evolved through the construction methodology used to create the school in the first place. Namely, the laws of physics, chemistry, evolution and biology that govern Flatland.

To enter the school (either for one of many courses or for the only class you get to try, depending on your theological bent) some portion of your consciousness gets projected into a Flatland consciousness (whether what we consider consciousness can exist as we know it without a higher-verse inhabitant is an interesting related question). The nature of consciousness in N = 4 dimensions disallows perception beyond N = 4 space. For example, one cannot “look up” out of Flatland, although some apparently can roll an eye up and catch a peek.

Why Our Souls Condition is Dependant on Wholly Random Events

How this resolves the paradox of our souls condition being dependent on wholly random events follows.

Imagine that you are a boxer wishing to train for an important match. It is winter so all training will be at an indoor facility. You want to maximize your strength, endurance and focused concentration while losing 5 lbs to make the weight. You select the following gear and workout plan.

Now imagine that you are a marathon runner getting ready for an upcoming race. You will train at the same gym facility and at the same time as the boxer. Your gear and workout plan are simpler.

Next imagine that as both the boxer and the runner enter the gym they pass through an electromagnetic pulse generator, built into the gym doorway, designed to erase all high level memory. Each athlete has instructions that give them the minimal information needed to proceed on their workouts, but no information about what they are training for or why their training experiences look so differently.

Many different unfolding paths can be imagined:

• The boxer strikes up a conversation with the runner and walks with him rather than jogs, feels left behind and inadequate when the runner begins his moderate jog and leaves him behind, strips off his heavy gear and attempts to catch up, despairs when he can not because he has a boxer’s body not a marathoner’s, gives up and spends the rest of the workout period sitting in the corner watching cartoons on one of the TVs over the treadmills. Or…

• The runner feels weak and inadequate as the boxer jogs passed him in heavy gear while he walks, immediately starts running at full pace, laps the boxer 3 times, sneering. The boxer feels slow and clunky and decides to punch the runner out on his next lap, which he does, the runner goes and hides in a toilet stall for the rest of the training period, lamenting that he is so thin and weak and doing continuous sets of pushups until the end of the training session vainly trying to bulk up. Or…

• The boxer and runner strike up a conversation, appreciate each others and their own strengths, encourage each other in their individual workouts and each attain better results than either had previously done by themselves.

Perhaps, we are 4-dimensional projections of our N-dimensional selves, projected into 4-dimensional physical bodies in order to grow in certain ways charted by us or for us (or both). Perhaps, conscious existence in a 4-dimensional subspace of some larger reality offers chances to stress ourselves (our souls) in ways that are impossible in N-space. Maybe, the “noise” of physical hungers, pain, and longings, the strain of looking for love through the hindbrain of a reptile, the time-blindness of the restricted view in Flatland, all afford us a deeply meaningful opportunity to exercise free-will in an intense way not available in our gentle N-space home.

Here in 4-space we go to the gym and place wholly contrived pressures upon ourselves with weights, equipment, timers, aerobic instructors, etc. in order to strengthen ourselves in ways that we no longer experience within our roles in industrial society. Maybe Flatland is a combination of a cosmic Tae-bo class and an offer to earn your PhD in Physics from MIT at home in your spare space-time. If so, the hardest part of the course is probably stopping from looking out the window and playing with your pencil long enough to notice you are sitting in a classroom. If so, I suspect there are plenty of our N-dimensional friends wandering around N-space wearing N-dimensional T-shirt equivalents that say “I incarnated in Flatland in a physical body and all I got was this lousy T-shirt”.

For me, this model resolves the fundamental paradox of the relation between an N-dimensional soul and a 4-dimensional body/mind that is both the result of and subject to the random nature of physical laws.

Before we dive into Flatland, we can see the infinite possible paths of the Flatland multi-verse (the entire multi-verse fits into a 5-dimensional subspace of N-space). We can choose to project into a Flatland consciousness whose potential world-paths we wish to experience and influence. We choose carefully one whose multi-world-paths offer the learning & strengthening opportunities we seek. Perhaps we have “workout partners” who go to the Flatland gym with us.

A casual look at a gym cannot tell you who has made the “most” physical and mental progress in their workout regime. Maybe the slightly paunchy, average looking middle-aged man just spent five years battling the results of a stroke and life-threatening asthma and the mental, physical and spiritual toughness that brought him to his current level of fitness is greater than anyone we have ever met. Maybe the incredibly fit, perfectly cut 30-year-old has destroyed his health with steroids and his spirit by becoming wholly consumed by the appearance of his own body.
I suspect the characteristics of our bodies, including our IQ, emotional make up and the fundamental degree of our physical and mental health, are probabilistically determined by the genetic and environmental factors understood by our 4-dimensional scientific models. I suspect that we (N-dimensional beings) choose to “put on” particular 4-dimensional “workout suits” for our own particular training regimen reasons.

So we cannot really deduce who is “doing well in class” by casual inspection. Maybe the gang killer put on a suit with such animalistic brain chemical balances that he is getting an “A” by not having wiped out his entire family and by actually experiencing some feelings of love for his gang member cellmate.

Maybe the philanthropist of the decade is failing because his path gave him opportunities to save half the planet and his actual accomplishments are cosmically equivalent to staying in kindergarten because 1st grade seemed hard.
Maybe, the profoundly retarded Fetal Alcohol Syndrome victim and the massively psychotic schizophrenic have enrolled in graduate courses so advanced and abstruse that we can’t even read the covers of the textbooks.

Good looking, brilliant, athletic, wealthy, successful people living in the richest country in the world, free of war, famine, disease, mental illness, raised by healthy, loving, successful parents, with mentally and physically healthy families. If life is school, what class does it sound like we (we all fit some of these) signed up for? What class is easiest, where virtually everyone gets gold stars daily and we all go home to Mom feeling like royalty as she puts our drawing on the refrigerator?

Many places in the major holy books say in one way or another, “the meek shall inherit the Earth”. This could be a reminder that the advanced 'life ccourses' of are associated with difficult life-paths here in the Flatland. Not the easy ones.