The purpose of suffering
A classic ‘gotcha’ question for religious people is to ask ‘if God is so loving, why do small children get cancer? Why is there war?’
If we think of ‘God’ in the way that Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) often portray ‘it’, then there is no satisfying answer to that question. If you are a parent who has buried a child, hearing ‘God works in mysterious ways’ will bring no comfort.
Abrahamic religions are monotheistic, which means they believe there is one all-powerful deity (God). In these traditions God is also omniscient (all knowing), and the creator of the universe. Ancient and Indo-Iranian (or ‘Eastern’) religions are polytheistic. In these traditions there are many gods or goddesses each with their own powers, knowledge and creation stories. All these religions give their God/s human-like characteristics. They judge ‘good’ and ‘bad’ like we do in a court. They ‘make decisions’ about our actions in the form of blessings and punishments. They pull metaphorical ‘levers’ to ‘make the world work’. Only in the mystical forms of these religions do we see the original teachings untouched by human bias.
One way to approach the ‘unsolvable problem of suffering’ is to see this bias. To see the flaws in giving human-like characteristics to our understanding of ‘God’. Or in seeing God/s as a separate thing, controlling us, ‘out there somewhere’.
Monism is the theory that all things are One thing. A singularity. We actually most often see this in science. Scientists devote their lives to explaining this One thing. Like the idea that there is a ‘God equation’ or ‘Theory of Everything’ that can explain the entire universe. Perhaps it is energy, or dark matter, or quantum fields, or more recently Unity Consciousness. We may never know. But if our spirituality rests on the idea that all things are One interconnected whole, then that One thing loses its human-like qualities.
Humans are only a tiny fraction of the One thing. It is also everything else. It is the child with cancer, and it is also the cancer trying to survive. It is the lion, and the gazelle dying a violent death so the lion cubs can eat. It is the rock under your foot and the exploding star. It is infinite forms and experiences. It is mostly empty space. It is timeless. It is something beyond comprehension. Human concepts of ‘right and wrong’ or ‘good and bad’ or ‘reward and punishment’ quickly dissolve in the face of this idea. Even animals and plants do not have these concepts. They are concepts of human thought only.
Suffering and violence are also inherent properties of the physical universe. Our known universe started with an explosion so violent we can still measure its effects today. Challenge is how life developed and evolved. The earth faces catastrophic damage and new species emerge. A man spends four years in Nazi concentration camps and devotes himself to exploring the meaning of life. He changes the world. Another man close to suicide thinks ‘I cannot live with myself anymore’ and has a spiritual awakening. He also changes the world. A caterpillar dissolves into mush and then struggles out of a cocoon to become a butterfly. We tear our muscles to make them stronger. We say ‘I don’t regret anything, even the terrible things, because they lead me here.’ In big ways and small, suffering helps everything grow and evolve. The Chinese farmer parable captures this idea beautifully.
But we must be careful not to minimise suffering or use spirituality to cover it up. That is spiritual bypassing. Spirituality is not only ‘love and light’. If all things are One thing, if suffering is fundamental, then spirituality is also ‘pain and darkness’. The compassionate space we hold for people in their darkest moments is spirituality in action. It is only once we accept pain as fundamental, only when we stop fighting it and are brave enough to dive into it, that we can begin to move through it. The writer and spiritual guide Elizabeth Gilbert says “Ruin is a gift. Ruin is a road to transformation.” That suffering may be something we carry along with us throughout our lives, even as it transforms us. It may be a long time before we find any meaning in it. We may never find meaning in it. It might remain a violent explosion we can still measure in the present.
Suffering can also be seen as the result of how far we are from our own spiritual foundation. How identified we are with thought, with the stories we tell ourselves. Examples of this kind of suffering are wars and other violent crime. They are committed by people who are divorced from their spiritualty (no matter how religious they are) and completely identified with their grievances (their thoughts). It can also be found in the ‘poisons’ of humanity, like greed – where we think getting more is superior to our own internal peace. Native Americans call this ‘wetiko’. Paul Levy, author of Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World writes “Wetiko is a cannibalizing force driven by insatiable greed, appetite without satisfaction, consumption as an end in itself, and war for its own sake, against other tribes, species, and nature, and even against the individual’s own humanity. It is a disease of the soul, and being a disease of the soul, we all potentially have wetiko, as it pervades and “in-forms” the underlying field of consciousness. Any one of us at any moment can fall into our unconscious and unwittingly become an instrument for the evil of wetiko to act itself out through us and incarnate in our world. Wetiko feeds off of polarization and fear—and terror—of “the other.” Seeing the world through a wetiko-inspired lens of separation/otherness enlivens what Jung calls “the God of Terror who dwells in the human soul,” and simultaneously plays itself out both within our soul and in the world at large.”