IMO
For example IMO Biblical Hades was a historical holding place that held the historical life of this life until resurrection which raised up the history of the life lived over-against the firstfruits (first century christians that followed Christ in death and resurrection as it was being played out soteriologically) who received the inheritance.
So here there is no real problem or incompatibility IMO.

The problem involved is that it tends to be blind toward the purpose and direction of this life here. Where so much is put on personal transformation that the evolution or development of God’s creation becomes overlooked.

This is what happens too, when all the verses that refer to audience relevant issues become blended into issues of personal growth and perfection. Where the “coming of Christ” becomes a personal experience instead of a historical reference when God historically ended the validity of types and figures in AD 70.

Then there is biblical futurism that places Judgment in front of us historically and sees it as the end of the Universe.

So in many schools of thought “Creation” as we know it, becomes nothing more than a needed testing ground to be discarded as a grown up discards his or her youthful toys.

All in all then most “camps” become oblivious to what God is doing “here”. Interestingly enough “what God is doing here” is the message of the Bible. For in it there is precious little told about postmortem continuity.
It is His creation and He is sharing with His offspring.
That’s what love does, it shares.

What happens to me when I die is of interest. But for me, not that great. Rather contributing to the “whole” as a member of the “whole” while here makes a lot of sense to me as a general focus of life. God can handle the rest, as He’s been doing it for a long time already. I’m His now, I’ll be His when I die.
IMO lets get on with things “here”.

Not that postmortem continuity does not deserve our attention, our discussion, our debate, our interest and such. But that “this life” in the process should not suffer the loss of our interest. So do not take this as a criticism.
However, God is doing things here with the here. I’m happy to be a member and part of it. And to be a part of ongoing history.

The tendency to look downward on this experience is IMHO problematic in many schools of thought. Even if the “here” is a sort of stepping stone does not itself mean that there is not a grander purpose for it.

It may be just my opinion but I say, why lose sight of such a blessed experience.
You just might find that postmortem continuity may request its own demands of experience of hardships and challenges with its own chaos as well.
For without some element of chaos there is no creativity.
And when all challenges have passed away one may just wonder what boarding hell they find themselves in.
Yea, utopia is fine for about 6 weeks then it loses it’s appeal.

Learning to live in the love, well that is applicable to this life and all life. Truth is truth. And the real meaning of life does not change.
While it may be harder to see it here, that does not make the “here” a mere stepping stone. This place was designed to be evolved. That’s what I think.

Just a few thoughts.
JMO Barry

If what you say is true, that the human race is on a steep learning curve through reincanation then looking back through history one would have to ponder if we are making much progress. What do you think? Technology wise yes, but morally, I wonder?

Belief systems can be a real trap because they give us a mind set that blocks us from seeking deeper. Christianity, on the whole, is a belief system yet Christians have never been able to prove to the rest of the world that their God actually exists. How dumb is that?
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What Audrey and I are trying to encourage you to investigate is something that is very real. You can’t get anything much more real than putting some of these old theories aside for a while and exploring what is really in your heart. I think you’ll discover a unifying stream that runs through all of us. Let’s have a look at that for a change. I see it’s being tapped into all over the place now and it bypasses all the inert belief systems because it’s “living”.

Hey Brian.

This is off topic bro, so please forgive me.
There is growing evidence that the ancients never believed that the world was flat, not even in the middle ages.

Quote:
Recent scholarship finds that since about the 3rd century BC, virtually no educated person in Western civilization has believed in a flat Earth.
End quote
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth

I for one, as was many of my generation were taught the “fable” that Columbus contradicted the belief that the world was flat. This however was made up. Educated people of that time knew that the world was indeed round.

Blessings Barry

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Benjamin Franklin

“I look upon death to be as necessary to the constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.” And, “Finding myself to exist in the world, I believe I shall, in some shape or other always exist.”

Jack London, author, best known for book Call of the Wild

“I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable myriads of millenniums. All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me. Oh, incalculable times again shall I be born.”

Napoleon

Napoleon was fond of telling his generals that he believed in the law of reincarnation and even told them who he believed to have been in a previous life.

Mark Twain

“I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna.”

Leo Tolstoy

“As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other more real life and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real the life of God.”

Henry Ford

“I adopted the theory of reincarnation when I was 26. Genius is experience. Some think to seem that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives”.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, (German poet, playwright and scientist)

“As long as you are not aware of the continual law of Die and Be Again, you are merely a vague guest on a dark Earth.”

Freidrich Nietzsche

“Live so that thou mayest desire to live again – that is thy duty – for in any case thou wilt live again!”

Mahatma Ghandi

“I cannot think of permanent enmity between man and man, and believing as I do in the theory of reincarnation, I live in the hope that if not in this birth, in some other birth I shall be able to hug all of humanity in friendly embrace.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The soul comes from without into the human body, as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it anew it passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal.” “It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Nothing is dead; men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals… and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some strange new disguise.”

General George S. Patton

“So as through a glass and darkly, the age long strife I see, Where I fought in many guises, many names, but always me.”

Albert Schweitzer

“Reincarnation contains a most comforting explanation of reality by means of which Indian thought surmounts difficulties which baffle the thinkers of Europe.”

Walt Whitman

“I know I am deathless. No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before. I laugh at what you call dissolution, and I know the amplitude of time.”

William Wordsworth

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting. And cometh from afar.”

Jalalu Rumi (Islamic Poet of the 13th century)

“I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as a plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was man. Why should I fear ? When was I less by dying?”

Carl Jung

“My life often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and no end. I had the feeling that I was an historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. I could well imagine that I might have lived in former centuries and there encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had been born again because I had not fulfilled the task given to me.”

Henry David Thoreau

“Why should we be startled by death? Life is a constant putting off of the mortal coil – coat, cuticle, flesh and bones, all old clothes.”

Socrates

“I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, that the living spring from the dead, and that the souls of the dead are in existence.”

Jesus Christ in Gnostic Gospels: Pistis Sophia

“Souls are poured from one into another of different kinds of bodies of the world.”

Voltaire

It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection.”

Koran

“God generates beings, and sends them back over and over again, till they return to Him.”

Josephus (most well known Jewish historian from the time of Jesus)

“All pure and holy spirits live on in heavenly places, and in course of time they are again sent down to inhabit righteous bodies.”

Honore Balzac (French writer)

“All human beings go through a previous life… Who knows how many fleshly forms the heir of heaven occupies before he can be brought to understand the value of that silence and solitude of spiritual worlds?”

Arthur Schopenhauer (Philosopher)

“Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life.”

Paul Gauguin (French post-impressionist painter)

“When the physical organism breaks up, the soul survives. It then takes on another body.”

George Harrison

“Friends are all souls that we’ve known in other lives. We’re drawn to each other. Even if I have only known them a day., it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to wait till I have known them for two years, because anyway, we must have met somewhere before, you know.”

Pythagoras

Among the ancient Greeks, reincarnation was a doctrine closely associated with the followers of the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras. According to Pythagorean teaching, the soul survives physical death.. After a series of reincarnations each one following a period of psychic cleansing in spiritual environments the soul becomes free eternally from the cycle of reincarnations.

May I ask you what you think is next? Do you think we live only once in a clay body and then go on to some type of eternal spiritual bliss? Isn’t it logical to believe we are creatures that are designed to learn and what we learn will be put to use? And if that is true why isn’t it plausible that we should have many experiences in a clay body that will provide us with all the lessons we need?

As a matter of interest what were you up to in your past life here on earth?

You say,
“I think Audrey has spoken to this as well as one can with words but ultimately it is not about the words but rather about the awakening of an incredible heart that we all have. And as I have said before, I don’t think we can get it in just one lifetime”.
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Why do you say, “I don’t think we can get it in just one lifetime”? Are you placing limitations? You people here at Boldgrace are getting an insight into grace that not too many before you, for the last couple of thousand years, have been able to see all that clearly. But do you think that’s all there is for us now?
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Why shouldn’t we get the whole deal if we are willing to proceed as Audrey suggests? The true meaning of “metanoia” (wrongly translated as “repent”) has never been understood until just the last year or two and that opens up a whole new world – the kingdom.
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As He said, “Metanoia because the kingdom is right beside you!” and “Unless you metanoia you’ll all die (physically)”.
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Forget about your re-incarnation stuff. I can never remember living here before and I’ve never struck anyone else who has other than the odd heady psychic who at best I find pretty weird. One lifetime under this regime is bad enough let’s move on to the kingdom. The invitations have gone out and we are now discovering that we are carrying it around inside ourselves anyway. It flows through everyone and is available anytime if we choose to go there. So why not?
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Just some thoughts to consider.