How does "Earth School" work?

What 49 different sources say on why we're all here.

The most practical and powerful worldview shift I’ve had over the last few years is my suspicion that we may inhabit “Earth School.” I’ve written about it in a few different places, but the importance of the idea has driven me to produce a more comprehensive exploration.

Across a full spectrum, from scientific Near-Death Experience (NDE) reports to more esoteric channeled material, accounts of the structure and purpose of Earth School are surprisingly consistent. So, using the awesome power of Claude’s Fable 5, I built a single-page website, Earth School, that aggregates 49 different sources and NDE case studies to show where they agree and disagree. I asked it to condense all these perspectives into a short list of five (A.I. generated) bullet points:

1. Earth is a deliberately constructed learning environment; dense, slow, and veiled, where consciousness develops capacities unavailable in less resistant conditions.

2. The veil of forgetting is the central design feature: only by not remembering our origin can love be freely chosen and will genuinely exercised.

3. The curriculum is twofold: learning to love and learning to know, with suffering functioning as a catalyst rather than punishment.

4. After death, life reviews measure not external judgment but the felt experience of our own effects on others: graduation is the degree to which one has become love rather than merely learned about it.

5. The arc is evolutionary; consciousness descends into matter, develops selfhood through resistance, and re-ascends as a co-creative participant in the larger life of the cosmos.

[On the site, each claim links back to the reference source and there’s a second interactive grid that shows exactly where all the sources agree and disagree. There’s even an explanation of precisely how they confirm or deny a central viewpoint].

On the site, there is an interactive grid across all of the 49 different sources, showing where the common features of agreement and disagreement are.

If we entertain the possibility that these diverse accounts of Earth School were describing something real, what do they then say about how to thrive within it? Fable generated another eight bullet points synthesising the common features across all sources:

1. Act as if you will feel your effects on others from their side, because after death, apparently, you will.

2. Treat every experience, welcome or not, as material to be consciously worked rather than wasted.

3. Keep a daily inner discipline; control of thought, equanimity, small deliberate acts of will, and alongside it a practice of remembrance: the heart turns toward its source while the hands stay in the world.

4. Face what you least want to face in yourself, since whatever goes unfaced runs the curriculum for you.

5. Build deliberately, because beliefs and intentions shape experience more than experience admits.

6. Attend to the little things: a forgotten kindness, a casual cruelty, since the grading runs at a finer resolution than anyone expects.

7. And treat the hardest people in your life as the syllabus rather than the interruption; some of them may have agreed to the role.

8. Stay in, keep choosing love, and let the difficulty do its work.

Now you know what A.I. thinks.

So what do I think? And why has this idea been so important to me?

There are four specific ways that this idea has improved my life:

1. It has shown that there’s a direction to my life’s path.

2. It taught me how to read the symbolic street signs along the path.

3. It has helped me know I’m walking my own unique path.

4. It has helped me stay on the path when things got tough.

---

1. Showing the Path Ahead

One of the central things implied by the existence of an Earth School is that there is a directionality to our lives. One of my core beliefs is that the purpose of our time here is to walk the path of doing what we love in service of love. Put more scientifically, we participate in the increasing complexification of the universe by becoming ever more individually differentiated and more collectively integrated into the whole. This view is supported by diverse models of human development, that show that the increasing integration of our consciousness leads to us being more loving, creative, and subtly attentive to energetic signals.¹ Our curiosity is one of the key ways we orient ourselves on that path and one of the ways we come to co-create with reality.

The framing of Earth School also makes it clear why simply manifesting what you think you want may sometimes be a bad idea. Video games are no fun with all the cheat codes turned on. And, in real life, lack of friction can often be even worse than meaningful hardships. So instead of asking for what you think you want, you can ask for more lessons, rather than comforts and distractions that might insulate you from learning them.

In fact, this practice of “just asking” for more guidance has become central to the way that I now live my life.

When I get curious about a question, especially one around my own personal growth, I just ask for an answer. Then keep my eyes peeled for symbolic clues. For example, at the start of this year, I got very curious about certain unresolved aspects of my healing journey over the last ten years. I had wondered why aspects of my dark night of the soul nearly ten years ago had felt so demonic and evil. So I simply asked for greater clarity. What followed were a series of synchronicities and cues to direct me down an unexpected path. The result has been the meaningful healing of unpleasant physical symptoms.

One of the traps on the path of personal evolution is constantly looking backwards to excavate traumas or biographical stories. I’ve personally found that most of the lessons present themselves when you’re moving forwards. If you follow the path of aliveness and curiosity with your eyes open, you are going to constantly bump into opportunities for personal growth. You can then dig into them with individual practices and practitioners as they arise.

One of the key things that has shifted along my own path is that I have come to see my reality increasingly symbolically.

---

2. Learning to Read the Signs

"Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul."

-Carl Jung

One of the non-speaking autistic “seers” from The Telepathy Tapes, Asher, describes our time on Earth as an “escape room.” There are a series of puzzles and riddles around us that are aimed at evolving our consciousness. While I rather enjoy my time on Earth and have no burning desire to escape, I find this metaphor useful.

Our right hemispheres are dramatically more connected to the world than our left. I think it just makes sense that messages from the outside world will be coming to us predominantly energetically, somatically, and symbolically. The clues are very rarely obvious or verbal.

Throughout human history, dreamwork has been one of the most effective paths of engaging with the symbolism of life. Before you go to sleep, try asking “what do I need to learn?” or pose a more specific question. As Thomas Edison said, “never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” I also regularly engage in a practice Leading Edge’s Jungian wizard Dan Lawrence suggested in his lecture on dreams. This is getting into the habit of deliberately falling into the phrase in your mind “I had a dream that..”, but applying it to your waking life. So if you meet with Steve in real life, you can begin to connect waking dreaming with night time dreaming by reframing it as “I had a dream that I met Steve.” If Earth School is truly communicating with us symbolically, rather than solely verbally, then you can start to learn its language.

What I have come to find in my own life is that when you simply ask for guidance, the universe may also learn the ways that you like to be communicated with. For me, this is often movies and song titles. Over the last few months, I’ve been called to new and old stories that have contained key insights and archetypes as to where I am on my current path. I think a similar dynamic applies to “woo” tools like tarot, astrology or intuitive readings. They aren’t objectively or falsifiably “right” in any way, but once the universe realizes it can speak to you through any new medium, it might.

This kind of pattern recognition is obviously not too far away from psychosis when it goes wrong, so you have to be really careful when it comes to deploying analytical rigor and holding any potential coincidences lightly. But one of the central takeaways for me is that reality is much more symbolic than we might think it is. Whether it’s movies, music, dreams or coincidences, we benefit from reflecting on a deeper meaning behind many of the events of our lives.

---

3. Individuality: Everybody’s Truman

“I once heard Earth described as eight billion individual simulations running at the same time and there seems to be some deep truth hidden within that.”

-Jeff Williams

How might Earth School work? I know not everyone needs a potential theory or mechanism for why reality works the way it does. Some people are happy to be content in “The Mystery.” I am not one of those people. Imagining a way that something could literally be true helps me be more open-minded.

The Law of One² introduced me to the idea that the Sun is kind of a local manager of our individual solar system. It controls our reality and what we can see and when. It determines how the veil of forgetting works. The specific thing that I’ve been pondering recently is if this reality is slightly different for each of us. This would obviously require an incomprehensible level of intelligence. Which brings me back to the fascinating topic of plasma. Plasma is a medium that conducts, self-organizes, and carries information through electromagnetic filaments, which is a kind of computation. The Sun is a gargantuan mass of plasma. What if the Sun somehow uses that processing power to run a subtly individualised simulation for everyone on Earth? It’s the like Truman Show, where everything we experience is being arranged specially for us, but we are all Truman.

That said, I don’t really like the idea that reality is “just a simulation.” I think about walking through a pediatric cancer ward and remarking to the distraught parents, “don’t worry, this is all just a simulation!” But I do like the idea that the technology that we invent reflects deeper realities we can only sense. And I think some video games can reflect the dynamics of the school we have inhabit. Reality is profoundly responsive to your actions, it rewards your evolution and the learning of new lessons. There is a “main quest,” which is the evolution of our consciousness. You also seem to “level up” when you face fears.

The individual school theory also helps you relax about the relativity of your own difficulties. Something that seems entirely trivial to other people may actually be hugely significant to your personal journey. The little things may matter. For someone in their mid-40s, learning to drive was actually terrifying to me. I know that for other people it’s trivial and even embarrassing that someone of my age didn’t know how to drive. And yet, when I finally embraced my fear, I received a series of abundant rewards and synchronicities. This framing is also supported by a lot of the literature; loving actions that appear insignificant for you can be enormous for other people, and vice-versa.

It’s the individualized nature of Earth School that might help explain some of the weirder aspects of my own spiritual journey. Apart from anything, it’s why any meaningful synchronicities meant just for you tend to sound ridiculous to anyone else. I’ve also been in situations with friends when I’m about to turn the conversation to something mystical, and suddenly a waiter across the restaurant will drop a huge tray of glasses. The conversation resets, and whilst I’m tempted to force it, I don’t think I’m supposed to. For example, I’ve been discussing The Telepathy Tapes with somebody very close to me in the years since it exploded into popular awareness. I attended a Zoom event with a non-speaking autistic girl and her mother. I saw something that was closer to compelling “proof” than anything I had seen before. So the next time I saw that person, I pulled out the video to show her. Three seconds into the video, she looked right past it, turned around, and walked away without saying anything. It was like it had never happened.

This makes me wonder if certain ideas are just not meant to reach people at certain times in their journey. It’s like somebody else’s “veil of forgetting” won’t let something through at the wrong time. In this school, the teacher only arrives when the student is ready. Respecting the free will of other people’s path seems to be paramount to most spiritual traditions. I think it also explains why we continuously forget key ideas on our own path. I’m sure I’ve been presented with ideas that would have rocked my world years ago that I simply wasn’t ready for at the time. It’s almost certainly happening right now, I’m just not ready to see it yet.

---

4. Resilience on the Path

“Life is good, death is safe and what really matters is love.”

- Tim Freke

Despite a pretty solid array of supporting sources, I have no way of “proving” my belief in Earth School is true. But my life seems to have followed an obvious trajectory of increasing alignment and integrity. I have used my skills in more positive-sum ways and have flourished in unpredictable ways as a result. I have become more responsive to synchronicity and feel like I have established a subtle two-way relationship with reality.

A career on Wall Street taught me that, no matter how high your IQ, if you’re not open to the collective intelligence of the market, you’re probably going to get carried out quite quickly. The sign of the real veterans was that they started from the premise that the market was right and they were wrong. As I’ve said many times before, I believe that this dynamic applies to everything in our reality, from random coincidences to our closest relationships. If we exist in a learning process, almost everything is a potential lesson. That has made me more resilient to adversity, so far, and very open-minded about why certain things are happening to me. Being attuned to symbolic cues around me has made me less emotionally reactive to negative events. The Law of One describes all emotional reactions as catalysts for growth. The significant hardships and blessings I have received make a great deal of sense within this context.

Perhaps most importantly, my fear of mortality has also significantly diminished. Supported by some surprisingly robust scientific research, the vast majority of Earth School sources confirm some kind of continuity of life after death.³ They also almost universally talk about the force driving this process being loving and benign. Dr. Chris Bache recently posted his own research that argues that even frightening NDE experiences are the result of an incomplete rebirth process, rather than some kind of eternal hell. I have come to believe that more awareness of the research around NDEs and Out-Of-Body Experiences is one of the most powerful linchpins to shift our damaging materialist mindset.

At the end of our interview with Dr. Bache, we asked him about what he had learned from his nearly fifty years of extraordinarily intense psychonautic travels and subsequent integration. He replied that there is no final end point of the journey. “It’s not about getting somewhere, but about changing the porosity of the membrane between physical reality and spiritual reality, allowing more of the energy of spiritual reality into your life.”

It’s exciting to learn the lessons, and I believe you can even accelerate the process if you want to, I think a lot of overly-serious spirituality ignores the fact that we’re here to have fun. It’s living with the “increasing energy of spiritual reality” that makes life so special.

1. I’ve explored these models of consciousness, including Spiral Dynamics with Peter Merry, and the Stairway to Heaven with Tara Springett. I also interviewed the legendary Ervin László on the force that he believes is driving us, which he calls the holotropic attractor. In my interview with Tim Freke he calls this becoming a “unividual.” Whether or not he’s right, my jaw literally dropped when he made the following argument. Leaning on his decades of research into different traditions, Freke believes that our spiritual experiences themselves are evolving, especially our post-death experiences. He said that the Tibetan Book of the Dead makes reference to the deceased moving towards a divine light. But there’s no mention of this phenomenon in the Ancient Egyptian accounts thousands of years before. By the time of the Greeks, the underworld was somewhat shadowy and unformed. Then different religious groups experienced it as reunion with a monotheistic Jesus or Buddha. But now contemporary “life reviews” tend to not only show us the events of our own life, but also how they impacted everyone we ever came into contact with. As we become more interconnected as individuals, our spiritual experiences are evolving in tandem. Our afterlife experience is itself becoming more “Unividual.”

2. See our interview with the original scribe and last surviving member of the Law of One trio, Jim McCarty.

3. I enjoyed this latest piece from UNVEIL THE WORLD on reincarnation and NDE Research.