Because suffering is part of human life, everyone asks why it exists, and the answers we give to ourselves make a great deal of difference. Explanations lead to action, for one thing. Billions of people choose religion as a way to accept suffering or to try and escape it. In the first post of this series we began with the opposite of religion, however. The modern tendency, deeply influenced by science, is to explain the bad things in life as random and accidental. This explanation also leads to action. If you accept that random events will bring pain into your existence, with no blame or guilt on your part and no higher being who is punishing you, you won't behave like a devout Christian or Muslim.
The notion that science has raised us above superstition has become a stick that staunch atheists like Richard Dawkins use to beat religion over the head. Yet the issue is subtler than the war between belief and skepticism. In the world's wisdom traditions suffering has a cause and therefore a solution -- such is the message of every great spiritual guide. The answers that they delivered have shaped civilization. In the first glow of discovery, Darwin and Freud, not to mention Marx, were eager to throw out the worst of religious excess. Yet as we saw in the first post, substituting randomness for God was not a psychological step forward. An accidental universe is almost impossible to live with for creatures like us who shape our existence to be meaningful.
If the good parts of your life are to have meaning, the same must be true of the bad parts. That, too, is a continual message delivered by the world's wisdom traditions. How, then, are the dark and the light related to each other? There are cosmic answers to this question, and by a kind of trickle down effect, the cosmic answer turns into the answer we accept in normal, everyday existence.
Here are the basic choices for how the two aspects of life, pain and pleasure, came to exist.
1. Two universal forces contend for control of creation, one being good, the other evil. Human beings are caught in this titanic struggle between light and darkness.
2. Creation cannot exist without destruction. These forces are not opposites but two sides of the same eternal process.
3. The only real existence transcends good and evil. All events that we perceive as good or evil, pleasurable or painful, are illusions compared to the "real" reality, which is whole and therefore not divided into opposites.
4. Creation was originally good, with no blemishes, and life was without suffering. Then sin entered the world through human error and disobedience. After that disastrous event, creation changed.
5. The cosmos is presided over by higher beings who sport with humans. Our experience of pleasure and pain reflects a game that is played out beyond our ability to comprehend it.
6. The cosmos is in the state of constant evolution. Good and evil, pleasure and pain are prompts to guide us forward in our own evolution.
7. The relationship between this world of light and darkness and some other world cannot be known. Going beyond pleasure and pain reveals a kind of emptiness, which is the only escape route, despite our yearning for higher purpose.
Although there are countless variations on these seven themes, they will serve as a template for how people explain good and evil as cosmic forces. For the devout, there is no mixing of stories -- a fundamentalist, whether Christian or Muslim, adheres to the teachings of his faith. Yet increasingly we feel confused; some bits and pieces of each explanation tug at us. On some days we watch the news and an airplane crash is shrugged off as a terrible accident. On other days a well-known villain gets his comeuppance, and we tell ourselves that good has won out over evil; a just punishment has been rendered.
Confusion makes it more difficult to lead a meaningful life. In the back of our minds, we'd prefer to know, with some certainty, that our lives mean something, that we aren't pawns in a game of blind chess. In an effort to tell yourself a consistent story about who you are and why you are here, you can't escape the temptation to choose a cosmic explanation, even if it's the explanation that rests on randomness. Depending on which explanation you finally accept, your whole life will unfold along a path. Call it a spiritual path or not, the implications are spiritual. You are testing through your daily actions how the universe works; you are making a silent wager over the state of your soul (for atheists, the wager is that the soul doesn't exist).
In later posts we'll see how each of the seven cosmic explanations alters your existence and guides your choices in life. As a preview, here are the primary decisions that each of us can choose:
1. You can live to obey God and resist the temptations of the Devil.
2. You can choose the most creative life.
3. You can decide to offer yourself in service to others.
4. You can seek to purify yourself of sin or bad karma.
5. You can pursue enlightenment in order to go beyond the world of illusion.
6. You can work to maximize your inner potential, speeding up the process of evolution.
7. You can become a co-creator of your own reality, aligning yourself with cosmic intelligence.
These are big choices based on big stories about how creation works. They are the most fascinating issues but also the most troubling that we face every day. Your ability to settle these issues becomes the most important power you possess, once you realize how deeply your life reflects the workings of the universe.
(To be continued)
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Life is a journey where you influence your outcomes with your thoughts and intentions - there maybe turbulance along the way but ultimately you cultivate your legacy and destiny.
Stick me with a fork, I am DONE. I simply cannot get up again. I fear pain more than death.
I so wish I could turn this into lemonade...one I could, two maybe..but Not all this in a short 6 year span. Yup..I was Mengele..cancer happens,but the car wreck then lyme..within a month...too much.
I hope you feel better soon!
No, not really. You can give your own life meaning without insisting that everything else has to have meaning too.
Attitudes of the Baptist church I used to go to had nuance -it may have been a more "rational" congregation than many, though - we did have a doctor in it. Some of the thoughts upon suffering within that congregation were such: 1. "We live in a fallen world, so bad things/diseases just happen." Also, diet and exercise were obvious keys to good health, it's the way nature works. 2. "If something really bad happens God is testing/refining me." - It wasn't always guilt, judgement or the Devil, sometimes pain is the only way we learn. and 3. Judgement (tended to be an attitude reserved for big world events) - and even there, I made an older fellow who was convinced 9/11 was a "judgement" blink a little when I started asking about certain classes of innocent victims.
Speaking for myself, I haven't been to church in years but still believe in enough Christianity to make people annoyed with me. I'm weird about it, though, even a little agnostic. The #2 is the attitude I take toward most things. I mean, I'm actually grateful I broke my arm once because I learned things from it.
the Gorilla loves us ; we are the Gorilla contemplating immortality
Regardless we probably have a world system wher eveything works in conjuction with everything else and all life has a collective consciousness of sorts.. the good of the parts depend on the good of the whole and the good of the whole depends on the parts and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and who knows what the whole thinks of the aliens interfering because we are too busy doing lots of the same kind of stuff to ourselves?
this would explain the god of gaps between us and the monkeys and the repubs. :-)
BUDDHISM: If bad things happen, it isn't really bad.
HINDUISM: This bad thing happened before.
ISLAM: If bad things happen, it is the will of Allah.
PROTESTANTISM: Let bad things happen to someone else.
CATHOLICISM: If bad things happen, you deserved it.
MATERIALISM: Just call me Chance.
SCIENTISM: Those darn selfish genes are at it again.
EVANGELISM: Thank God for tea bags and the Koch brothers.
ATHEISM: Bad things happen and religion is to blame for it.
AGNOSTICISM: We will never know why bad things happen.
SPIRITUALISM: Evil spirits cause bad things to happen.
MORMANISM: Too busy making children for bad things to happen.
JUDAISM: Why do bad things always happen to us?
The really fantastic thing is that often the worst events lead to the best developments in our lives. So often in fact, that one of our most commonly used phrases, "blessing in disguise," refers to exactly that phenomenon.
Funny how so often we're exactly where we need to be, exactly when we need to be, for the universe to steer us in the right direction, isn't it?
Quantum unto the Unified Collective Consciousness.
there is no punishment in the universe of love and intelligence but there are severe karma lessons that sure feel like punishment.
lower level spiritual teachings and religion will teach that karma is punishment; higher level spiritual teachings never call karma punishment.
"Bad things happen because some believe that life has no meaning".
"bad" things happen to everyone, of course we have to define what we mean by bad. sometimes those so called bad things that happen in our lives turns out to be a wake up call. after that wake up call the ego is traumatized and this person often becomes a sincere seeker of these universal truths.
seldom if ever have I seen anyone become a sincere seeker without some kind of wake up call.
by sincere seeker I dont mean joining a religion and seeking within that religion's beliefs.
Number six also has some levels of knowledge to it.
All sin and evil have their home in an ignorance of our divine reality. And interesting to me is that ignorance is a necessity for unique souls to be “created” and exist thereafter even in their creative processes.
What would the world be without uniqueness????
Good to know that karma is not punishment contrary to what many religions teach. It is a divine principle or law; for without it a soul would never progress and be in a type of Hades forever.
Karma removes ignorance but not without what we term as suffering and struggles and hardships. Every advanced spiritual teacher I have studied knows they would not be advanced in their awareness without karma.