There’s a rather large pothole in New Age philosophy that I keep tripping over. Let’s call it The Earth School Fallacy — the strange contradiction between “We are perfect divine beings” and “We’re here to learn lessons because… well, we’re NOT perfect divine beings.”
Somehow, we manage to carry both of those ideas around in our heads and not notice that they don’t quite fit together.
THE EARTH SCHOOL MODEL
You’ve heard this one. If you’ve been on a spiritual path longer than a week, you’ve probably used this one.
Earth, we’re told, is a sort of cosmic classroom we incarnate into repeatedly. Each lifetime is a syllabus of Very Important Lessons, and with each incarnation we supposedly level up until we become Spiritually Perfect.
In this model, we actually choose our life challenges before we’re born.
Have a temper? Great! Let’s incarnate into a family whose daily activities include pushing all of your buttons like they’re competing for a prize. Assuming we don’t murder each other we eventually learn enough humility and patience and – SHAZAM – we transform into Mahatma Gandhi.
Have an obsession with sex? Wonderful! Let’s incarnate into a world filled with gorgeous, eager, naked partners who—
Okay, that one never happens. But you get the drift.
Pass your lessons and you move up a grade.
Fail your lessons and you come back as a cockroach or a MAGA supporter and start over in Spiritual First Grade, eating glue and making macaroni art.
In Tarot Talk, Gaia’s classroom often looks like the Five of Wands — a bunch of souls flailing around wildly until one of us finally figures out what the sticks are for.
THE ANGEL WITHIN
Now we arrive at the second New Age idea — the one that directly contradicts the first.
This is the belief that we’re already spiritually perfect, but we’ve forgotten that fact. Our task isn’t to improve ourselves… it’s to remember that we don’t need improving.
Buddhists describe it as our original nature: a perfect jewel hidden under a crust of plain gray rock. Chip away the rock and — surprise! — you’ve been luminous the whole time.
Joni Mitchell phrased it better than all the gurus combined:
“We are stardust, we are golden,
and we’ve got to get back to the garden.”
In this view, we are pure, radiant beings from Source Energy who come to Earth, promptly forget who we are, and then spend the rest of our lives meditating, journaling, and buying inspirational calendars in an attempt to remember.
Put another way:
We’ve got a sleeping angel inside us, and the angel really needs to get its butt out of bed.
THE CONTRADICTION
Here’s the uncomfortable question no one asks:
If we’re already perfect, why would we CHOOSE to forget that and struggle?
It’s like becoming a master at algebra, then signing up for a lobotomy just so you can relearn quadratic equations from scratch.
Imagine your higher self sitting in another dimension saying,
“I’m a being of luminous perfection. You know what sounds fun? Forgetting everything and getting pissed off at the traffic while I drive to a boring, meaningless job that I hate.”
Something about that doesn’t quite compute.
EARTH SCHOOL AND THE WORK ETHIC PROBLEM
The Earth School model borrows heavily from Christian theology, a worldview in which:
• Humans are inherently sinful.
• Life is full of temptations that make us more sinful.
• If we behave ourselves and avoid having sex with the neighbor’s spouse, we get to go somewhere nice after we die.
In this model, Earth is basically the rough school on the dangerous side of town, with a curriculum of suffering, discipline, and fear.
Just keep your head down, work hard, and eventually—good news!—you’ll die.
THE VEDANTA SOLUTION (AKA: THE EMPRESS APPROACH)
Vedanta, from the Hindu tradition, on the other hand, leans toward Joni Mitchell’s interpretation. It suggests that:
• We are already perfect.
• Life is not meant to be hard.
• We’re not here to learn painful lessons.
• We’re here to experience, enjoy, and expand.
If the Vedanta version of Earth School has a model, it’s not the stern monk or stressed-out student — it’s The Empress.
She’s not here to ace the test. She’s here to savor the banquet.
Play, creativity, pleasure, beauty — these are not distractions from the spiritual path.
They are the spiritual path.
That’s a really hard concept for Westerners to wrap our heads around. We’re taught from the moment that we’re born that life is a series of assignments that we’re supposed to complete and that the next assignment will be better than the last. That’s really the way that our whole society is set up. We go to kindergarten so that we can go to grade school so that we can go to high school so that we can go to college or trade school so that we can get jobs so that we can get promotions so that we can retire comfortably and have enough money to pay for our funerals.
If we do all of that, we’ve been, “successful.” If we don’t, our lives have been meaningless.
When someone tells us that the whole purpose of Earth School might actually be recess, it feels slightly insane.
LIVING SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE
We can argue both sides.
If you lean toward Earth School, you can point to all the suffering and struggle that seem baked into our reality. As the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously put it, human life often appears “nasty, brutish, and short.”
But if you look again, you’ll also see breathtaking amounts of love, generosity, joy, and compassion.
So what’s the truth?
Probably something in the middle.
No, we’re not perfect angelic beings slumming on Earth…
but we can be.
Maybe life isn’t about learning painful lessons, and maybe it’s not about effortless perfection either.
Maybe it’s simply about becoming more yourself, more awake, more playful, more alive.
And oddly enough, the way we get there isn’t through suffering…
it’s through joy. It’s through learning how to play.
We don’t have to wait until we die to graduate.
We can do that right now — as soon as we remember that recess was always the point.
Just the Tarot 