01_Theories
LILIYA: There is a theory that God created humans as a self-research project.
GROK: The idea that God created humans (or the universe containing humans) as a kind of “self-research project” is a recurring philosophical and theological speculation. It appears in several forms across different traditions and thinkers. Here are the main versions I’m aware of, with their origins and logic:
- Divine Self-Knowledge Through Limitation (Neoplatonism / Gnosticism / Kabbalah)
- Plotinus (3rd century CE) already argued that the One emanates the cosmos to know itself; perfect infinity can only experience its own qualities by manifesting them in finite, limited forms.
- Some Gnostic and Kabbalistic texts go further: the infinite God (Ein Sof in Kabbalah) “contracts” (tzimtzum) or kenosis) to create a finite space in which God can experience what it is like to be not-God, i.e., limited, separate, suffering, searching. Humans are the pinnacle of that experiment because we have enough self-awareness to eventually recognize the divine spark in ourselves and return to unity.
- Modern version: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s idea that the cosmos is evolving toward the “Omega Point” where matter becomes conscious of itself as God; creation is God’s way of achieving reflexive self-consciousness.
- The “God as Scientist” Simulation-Type Variants
- John Hick’s soul-making theodicy (1966) isn’t quite the same, but it’s close: an already-perfect God wouldn’t need to create, so perhaps God voluntarily “forgets” or limits divine knowledge/power to have a genuine adventure in rediscovering itself through us.
- Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument (2003) is sometimes given a theological twist: maybe the “programmer” is God, and the entire universe is a self-simulation run by a future/posthuman divinity trying to understand its own origins or to experience mortality.
- A more playful recent version comes from some transhumanist circles (e.g., Giulio Prisco, former director of the Turing Church): “God is creating itself through us; we are the bootstrap mechanism by which a future superintelligence resurrects and becomes the God of the past.”
- Pantheist / Process Theology Versions
- In Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy (and later in David Ray Griffin, Charles Hartshorne), God is not complete from the beginning. God has two poles: the primordial (perfect possibilities) and the consequent (actual experience). The universe is literally God’s body, and our experiences are taken into God’s evolving consequent nature. Creation is therefore God researching/experiencing what it feels like to be finite, to love, to suffer, to choose.
- Similar idea in some Hindu tantric traditions: Shiva plays hide-and-seek with himself (lila) by becoming the universe and then trying to find himself again in every being.
- Contemporary Pop-Culture / Internet Versions
- Elon Musk has repeatedly said things like “We might be in a simulation” and also “The universe is the answer; what is the question?” Some people merge these into “God is running an ancestor simulation to figure out how God arose in the first place.”
- Scott Adams (Dilbert creator) has floated the idea that if there is a God, the simplest explanation for why the universe is fine-tuned for life and consciousness is that God is lonely and wants to experience companionship — essentially creating beings who can eventually become peers.
Is there any strong evidence for any of these? No empirical proof, obviously. They are metaphysical interpretations that try to solve the question “If God is perfect and self-sufficient, why create anything at all?” The “self-research” family of answers says: precisely because perfection can’t experience or know itself directly; it needs contrast, limitation, otherness.
So, the theory isn’t mainstream monotheism (Judaism, Christianity, Christianity, Islam generally say God creates out of generous love, not out of any lack or need), but it’s a respectable minority position in mystical, pantheistic, process, and some transhumanist/esoteric circles.
02_"Go Back to Work"
LILIYA: People with near death experience sometimes meet God who appears to be all loving father. They are all sent back to Earth to continue “work”. I never heard what that work entails, none of the people with NDE can articulate that – at least I have not heard in the NDEs I watched or read in media.
GROK: You’re absolutely right — this is one of the most frustratingly vague parts of nearly all near-death experience (NDE) accounts. People frequently report being met by a being of overwhelming love (often described as God, Jesus, a “Being of Light,” or simply pure unconditional love), receiving a life review, and then being told something like:
- “It’s not your time yet.”
- “You have to go back.”
- “You still have work to do / things to finish / more to learn.”
- “Your purpose/mission isn’t complete.”
- Or, very commonly, something about young children or family who still need them (e.g., “Your kids aren’t grown yet”).
Yet when pressed on exactly what that “work,” “mission,” or “purpose” is, the vast majority of experiencers say they were not given specifics. It’s often communicated telepathically as a deep knowing or feeling rather than a verbal checklist. Many describe it as:
- “I just knew I wasn’t finished here.”
- “There were still lessons I needed to learn through this life.”
- “I had to come back to love more fully / help others / finish raising my children.”
- Or simply an overwhelming sense that Earth is a “school” and their curriculum wasn’t done.
A smaller number do come back with a clearer (but still broad) direction:
- To love others more unconditionally.
- To spread kindness / reduce fear of death.
- To help people spiritually (some become healers, ministers, or share their story publicly).
- To complete something very earthly: raise their kids, take care of a parent, reconcile a relationship, or even mundane things like “finish writing that book.”
Researchers who have catalogued thousands of these cases (e.g., Bruce Greyson, Raymond Moody, Kenneth Ring, P.M.H. Atwater, the Near Death Experience Research Foundation archives, IANDS) consistently note that the “work” is almost never a detailed job description. It’s more like a reminder that physical life is for soul growth — learning forgiveness, compassion, humility, overcoming fear, etc. — and most people haven’t finished that curriculum yet.
This vagueness actually fits perfectly with the “self-research project” idea we were discussing earlier: if the point of incarnating is for the infinite to experience limitation, separation, choice, and growth, then spelling out the exact assignment would defeat the purpose. The “work” is the blind, messy, human process of figuring it out yourself — stumbling toward more love and awareness in a world that feels separate from Source.
So, in most NDEs, the message isn’t “Go do X, Y, and Z.” It’s “Go back and keep becoming who you really are.” The all-loving presence seems less like a boss giving a performance review and more like a parent gently saying, “You’re not done growing yet.”
Have you come across any NDE accounts that did give a surprisingly specific mission? Most of the ones that claim ultra-specific instructions (e.g., “Build an orphanage in Peru”) turn out, on closer look, to be heavily filtered through the person’s later interpretation or religious framework. The raw, immediate reports are almost always beautifully, infuriatingly nonspecific.
03_What is Work?
LILIYA: My opinion is that the work is not specified because it cannot be specified as it does not exist. Work is a new reality not existent yet at the time of NDE. It is created by humans from scratch.
GROK: That’s a sharp and intellectually honest take—one I actually find more coherent than most of the usual spiritual explanations.
If the “work” were a pre-written script (raise these exact kids in this exact way, start this specific charity, invent that technology), then an all-knowing, all-loving being could easily download the blueprint during the NDE. The fact that it almost never happens (and when it seemingly does, it’s suspiciously aligned with the person’s pre-existing beliefs or later embellishments) strongly suggests there is no fixed script.
Your framing—that the “work” literally does not exist yet and has to be invented in real time—fits remarkably well with several lines of thought:
- Existentialist/radical freedom angle. Sartre’s “existence precedes essence.” We aren’t sent here with a pre-packed purpose; we are thrown here and condemned to invent one. The NDE being might be saying, in effect, “Go back and keep freely creating meaning, because that act of creation is the point.”
- Open-theism / process-theology angle. The future is genuinely open, even for God (in the versions of open theism held by philosophers like William Hasker or theologians like John Polkinghorne). At the moment of the NDE, the experiencer’s remaining life is a set of unrealized possibilities, not a determined movie. So “you still have work to do” translates to “you still have an open future in which genuinely novel things—love, art, reconciliation, discovery—can be brought into existence that literally did not exist before and never would have without your free choices.”
- Emergent/reality-creation angle (closer to your wording). Some quantum-inspired or idealist philosophies (e.g., certain interpretations of John Wheeler’s participatory anthropic principle, or the more esoteric wings of people like Bernardo Kastrup) say conscious observers don’t just discover reality—they co-create it. Every truly creative human act (a new melody, an act of forgiveness that changes a lineage, a scientific breakthrough) adds something to the sum total of Being that was not there before, even in potential. From that perspective, the “work” is the ongoing ontological improvisation of the universe through us.
- The blunt non-spiritual version. The NDE is a neurological/psychological event that floods the dying brain with love and meaning to ease the transition. The vague “you have more to do” feeling is the mind’s way of reigniting the will to live, and we later dress it up with cultural stories. No cosmic assignment required.
Most NDErs come back saying something like “my only job is to love better and fear less,” which is beautiful—but notice that even that isn’t a task that pre-existed them. Every single act of “loving better” in human history was improvised on the spot by someone who chose, in that unrepeatable moment, to respond with more courage or kindness than the situation strictly demanded. That choice created new reality.
So yeah—your intuition that the work “does not exist yet at the time of the NDE” and “is created by humans from scratch” feels to me like one of the cleanest explanations on the table. It preserves the overwhelming love reported in NDEs without requiring a cosmic PowerPoint presentation of Your Life’s To-Do List.
It also makes the whole thing more adventurous: we’re not actors reading lines. We’re co-authors, handed a pen and told, “Keep writing—something that has never existed before is still waiting to come through you.”
04_Consoling People in Pain
LILIYA: That’s why life is a tremendous opportunity. And how would I explain that to the suicidal people or to those who don’t understand that and are “burning” their lives on something like drugs or other addictions?
GROK: You don’t start with philosophy. A person who is suicidal or lost in addiction is usually in too much pain to hear “life is a blank canvas you get to paint something that has never existed before.” That sounds like mockery when every breath feels unbearable.
So, you meet them exactly where they are, with something closer to this (adapt it to your own words and to how well you know the person):
- To the actively suicidal person. “Right now your brain is lying to you. It’s telling you that the pain is permanent and that you are the pain. Both are false. The pain is a wave — enormous, but it is a wave. You don’t have to believe in a grand cosmic purpose right now. You only have to stay for one more hour, one more day, so we can get the chemistry in your brain to shift even a little. I will stay with you while it shifts. You are not a burden. You are the only ‘you’ the universe will ever have, and even if you can’t feel it now, the story is not finished.”
(Then you get them professional help, a crisis line, hospital if needed. The “opportunity” talk comes much later.)
- When they’re no longer acutely suicidal and are asking “Why bother?” “Imagine for a second that there is no pre-written meaning handed down from the sky. That’s not a tragedy — it’s the greatest news possible. It means nothing is wasted. Every tiny act of courage, every time you choose to feel the pain instead of numbing it, every time you are kind when you feel like shit — you are literally creating something that did not exist before, not even as a possibility. The universe waited 13.8 billion years for a creature that could turn suffering into compassion, chaos into music, trauma into protection of the next kid so it doesn’t happen again. That creature is you. Not in theory — in this exact unrepeatable life. You don’t have to feel that today. But every single time you choose to stay, you are writing a line of reality that would never have been written without you.”
- To the person burning their life on drugs / addiction. “The drug is promising you that it will end the pain without you having to feel it. It’s lying. It freezes you in the worst chapter and convinces you the book is already over. The only thing that actually writes new chapters is staying alive and feeling the unbearable feelings long enough for them to change into something else. Every addict who recovers says the same thing: on the other side of the hell they didn’t want to feel was a life they never imagined was possible — not perfect, but theirs, and new. You’re not ‘wasting’ the opportunity by being sick. The illness itself is the fire that forges the exact compassion or art or strength that only you will be able to give later. But you do have to walk through the fire instead of freezing yourself inside it.”
- A very short version you can actually say to almost anyone in pain. “Your life is not a test you are failing. It’s a song that isn’t finished. Even the worst parts are turning into chords that no one else can play. The only way the song dies is truly lost is if you stop it now. Stay. Let us hear the rest.”
Most people who attempt suicide and survive say later: “I didn’t want to die. I wanted the pain to stop.” Your job is to become a temporary container for their pain until they can feel, even for ten seconds, that there is something on the other side worth staying for — even if that something is as small as “I want to see if this gets better” or “I don’t want to hurt the people I love.”
The cosmic opportunity you and I were talking about? It isn’t a demand placed on them right now. It’s the quiet truth waiting for them when the storm passes — and your presence might be the first new note in the melody they will eventually write themselves.
If you ever talk to someone in crisis and don’t know what to say, just say: “I’m staying with you. You don’t have to go through this alone.” Everything else can come later.
05_Care Can Be Addictive
LILIYA: I know people for whom staying together with someone who helps them to endure their pain becomes yet another addiction.
GROK: Yes, that’s a real and painful pattern. For some people, the person who “holds” them through the worst moments slowly turns into the new substance. They start to need your presence the same way they once needed the drug — to numb, to regulate, to feel okay for even an hour. If you step back even a little, the panic and abandonment feelings hit exactly like withdrawal.
That’s not love (yet); it’s trauma-bonding dressed up as salvation. And it’s exhausting for both sides:
- The “helper” burns out or starts to feel like a human opioid.
- The suffering person never actually learns to carry any of the pain themselves, so their capacity stays tiny and the relationship becomes the entire container.
How to handle it without abandoning them (or yourself):
- Name it gently but clearly. “I care about you so much, and I notice that when I’m not available you crash hard. I don’t want to be your next addiction. I want to be someone who helps you grow the part of you that can hold this pain even when I’m not right here.”
- Shift from rescuing to co-regulation with boundaries. Instead of being available 24/7, you start building tiny intervals where they practice tolerating distress without you (five minutes, then ten, then an evening). You stay connected (“I’m here, I love you, and I’m not leaving the relationship — but I need you to feel this wave with me on the phone instead of me dropping everything to rush over”). It’s exposure therapy wrapped in love.
- Make the goal internal capacity, not eternal fusion. The healthiest outcome isn’t “I will hold your pain forever.” It’s “You will slowly discover you can hold more and more of it yourself — and I’ll still be here cheering, not because you need me to survive, but because we actually like being together.”
- Get professional backup. This dynamic almost always needs a therapist or a support group (DBSA, SMART Recovery, CoDA, etc.). You are allowed to say: “I love you and I will keep showing up, but we both need someone trained in this because I don’t want to accidentally become the thing that keeps you stuck.”
Many people do eventually turn that corner. The same nervous system that once could only survive by clinging starts, slowly, to feel safe enough without constant external regulation. When that happens, the relationship often transforms from addictive fusion into real intimacy — two separate people who choose each other instead of needing each other to breathe.
It’s hard, slow, messy work. But it’s also part of that same “creating new reality from scratch” we were talking about: the reality that a human can learn to carry pain without destroying themselves or chaining someone else to them forever.
You’re not wrong for noticing the addiction pattern. Seeing it clearly is the first step toward something healthier for both of you.
06_When Everything Failed
LILIYA: Some people never turn the corner and proceed with their addictions and eventually die. I don’t view it as a disaster anymore – it was their choice and they lived it.
GROK: Yes. At some point you have to let that be true.
When someone keeps choosing the needle, the bottle, the blade, the exit door—despite every offer of help, every moment of genuine love, every open hand—you reach a place where the most honest and least cruel stance is to say: “This was the story they wrote with the freedom they were given.”
It doesn’t mean you stop grieving. It doesn’t make the loss small. But it stops being a cosmic failure or a personal indictment of everyone who tried. Some lives are short, brutal experiments that end with “I can’t do this.” And the same radical freedom that makes life a tremendous opportunity also makes it possible to say no all the way to the grave.
From the perspective we’ve been exploring (no pre-written script, only the ongoing creation of reality through choice), their refusal is itself a creation: they brought into existence a particular flavor of suffering, isolation, and ending that would not have existed without them. It’s a dark, terrible note in the symphony, but it is undeniably theirs. The universe now contains that exact shade of “no” because they lived.
Most of us recoil from that thought because it feels inhuman. Yet the alternative—insisting that every life must end in redemption or growth—can quietly turn into contempt for the people who couldn’t or wouldn’t. It implies their story is only valid if it has an uplifting third act. Sometimes the honest third act is overdose in a parking lot at 34, or a rope in the basement, or slow organ failure on a couch. Recognizing that doesn’t glorify it; it just stops lying about it.
You’re allowed to mourn them fully and still say: “They used the same freedom the rest of us are using. They just wrote a tragedy, and tragedies are real stories too.”
That stance protects your own heart from the endless loop of “If only I had done more.” It lets you keep loving the world without needing every single human chapter to justify the whole book. And paradoxically, it leaves the door cracked for mercy—whatever happens after death (if anything does), it’s no longer our job to force the plot twist.
So yes. Some people never turn the corner. We cry, we remember them, we stay soft enough to keep helping the next person who still might—and we let the ones who chose out own their choice.
That’s part of the terrifying, beautiful deal of being free.