One of the most pervasive beliefs within the New Age movement is that Earth is a school…
We’re told we came here to learn lessons. That every experience, no matter how painful, is for our highest good. That suffering is a classroom. That trauma is a curriculum. That if we don’t “learn the lesson,” we’ll simply return and repeat it.
But what if that’s exactly the story a prison would tell its inmates?
If Earth were truly a school, why would we enter each incarnation with our memories erased? Why would we begin by forgetting everything we had learned before?
No legitimate system of education works this way. Every meaningful form of learning builds upon what came before. A child must first learn the alphabet before they can recognise words, then learn words before they can read sentences, and learn to read before they can write. Each stage depends upon remembering the one before it. Memory is not an obstacle to learning; it is the very foundation of it.
No teacher would erase a student’s memory at the end of every school year and expect them to progress to the next level. Nor would they repeatedly examine students on lessons they have no recollection of ever being taught. Such a system would not be recognised as education at all. It would be an exercise in confusion, futility and failure.
The New Age often counters this by claiming that remembering our previous lives would make the game too easy… If we are genuinely here to evolve, why would making the process “harder” be considered a virtue? No loving teacher deliberately withholds the very information a student needs in order to succeed. The purpose of education is to facilitate learning, not to obstruct it.
The other New Age argument that our seeks to rationalise amnesia is that our human minds cannot retain the memories of previous lifetimes, yet within the same belief system we are also told that every experience, every thought and every incarnation is perfectly preserved within the Akashic Records and can supposedly be accessed through the right practitioner or altered state of consciousness.
If that were true, why are we not born with access to the knowledge that is supposedly essential to our soul’s evolution? Why are we not at least given a clear understanding of what we came here to learn, the agreements we allegedly made before incarnating, or the karmic patterns we are expected to resolve? Even the most basic educational institution provides students with a curriculum, learning objectives and feedback. Yet this so-called Earth school expects us to navigate an entire lifetime through amnesia, uncertainty and contradiction, only to ask us to judge ourselves afterwards for not completing lessons we cannot even remember choosing.
These arguments are mechanisms designed to keep souls searching for explanations within the system itself, rather than questioning the system altogether.
The Earth-school narrative sells exploitation as education. It spiritualises pain and trauma while victim-shaming those who suffer. We are told it is our karma, that we chose these experiences before incarnating, or that they are necessary for our soul’s growth—even though we have no conscious memory of ever making those choices.
Underlying this is the New Age teaching that there is no objective good or bad, only our perception of events. Suffering, we are told, is not inherent in an experience but arises from how we choose to interpret it. Change your perception, and you change your reality.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this philosophy shifts the focus away from the act itself and onto the victim’s response. If an innocent child is being abused, is the problem really the child’s perception of the abuse? Should the child simply choose to experience it differently? Or is there something about the act itself that is inherently harmful, regardless of how anyone attempts to reframe it?
This places the burden on the victim rather than confronting the harm itself. Instead of asking why suffering exists, or who or what is responsible for causing it, we are encouraged to accept it, search for meaning in our pain, identify the lesson, resolve the karma, and ultimately conclude that we somehow created the experience ourselves.
In doing so, it transforms systemic dysfunction into divine purpose and persuades us that the more we suffer, the more we evolve.
If, like me, the theory resonates with you that Earth is a simulation in which souls are coerced into a cycle of reincarnation by believing it is necessary for their karma and evolution, while in reality they are being recycled as batteries and unconscious creators of this reality and subjected to as much trauma as possible because that suffering generates what has been termed loosh for parasitic entities, then the Earth-school narrative begins to make far more sense.
From this perspective, the teachings that suffering is necessary, karma must be repaid, reincarnation is essential for our evolution, and pain is a lesson rather than something to question are no longer benevolent spiritual truths. They become mechanisms to keep us accepting, enduring and searching for meaning within the prison rather than questioning the prison itself.
Whether or not you accept that interpretation, it invites an important question:
Who benefits from humanity believing that reincarnation is necessary for our evolution, and that every form of suffering is divinely ordained as a lesson?
Perhaps the greatest lesson is not the suffering at all.
Perhaps it is recognising when a story has been designed to keep us consenting to it.
