Quote Originally Posted by CFTraveler View Post
I think it's a premise that comes from religious tradition, and shouldn't be taken as automatically true. Sometimes diseases are not so much something you have to pay, but something you chose to go through, for a reason that your 'eternal me' knows.
Yes, this is a common belief, coming along with others such as:
- we agreed to be put into a physical body
- we decided to get through negative experiences
- we allowed our memory to disappear "somehow"

But what if we started to analyze it from the other direction, and ask questions instead of automatically taking them for granted? So, going with this example, starting with the last statement and changing it into the question:

- did we allow our memory to disappear? how?

Answering this key question should be the basis for answering other questions.