What happens when a witness of famine and a New Age optimist clash over why we suffer? Join a journey beyond spiritual platitudes to expand our mythologies, embrace the complexity of a breaking world, and find a quiet grace at the very center of being torn apart.
Enjoy this 9 1/2 minute read or listen to me read it to you here.
“I utterly reject that!” Rhian shot across the room with the ferocity of a badger guarding her den. It was my second gathering of friends to share stories and songs for nourishment in difficult times and my attempts to dive under the usual talk of jobs, men, and politics had taken an unexpected detour.
Nori was wrapping up an impassioned description of how she’s been noticing she can change her circumstances by shifting her perspective. When she goes grocery shopping feeling isolated and suspicious, people are unfriendly and ignore her, but when she shifts into openness and gratitude, they are suddenly engaging and making jokes. She’s been able to navigate a much more fulfilling career transition and somehow still make ends meet. She had begun tying her experiences into her belief – one I’ve often heard in new age circles – that we not only create, but choose, our reality including the circumstances into which we’re born.
Rhian, who grew up in Ethiopia during the famine, trained as a social worker, and has a close group of friends with disabilities, had a visceral revulsion to the very same idea that brought Nori peace.
“How could anyone choose to starve, to be abused, to suffer in this way?” Rhian’s fire was fierce. “It’s like justifying it happening!”
Rhian and Nori continued at an impasse, attempting to be both respectful and defend the views that guide how they’ve learned to move in the world. Rhian voiced her belief in evil and our eternal struggle to override this impulse. Nori was vehement about our inherent goodness, even in light of the Epstein files, saying that all harm is motivated by ignorance and trauma. I sat riveted not just by two intelligent, compassionate women in debate, but by two predominant ideologies of our time colliding in my living room.
“I understand you to be a very spiritual person,” I addressed Rhian. “And I’ve heard that what you’re describing – the suffering of innocents – makes some people question the existence of God. How do you reconcile the two? What philosophy helps you make sense of it all?”
“I don’t know if I’m spiritual” she replied with subtle hesitance, calling out my mistaken assumption that attending church means being a person of faith. “I have a religion I follow and a social group I belong to, but I’m not sure what I believe anymore. I just know there’s evil in the world because I’ve seen it, and people don’t ask to suffer.”
“See, I don’t believe that,” Nori jumped in. “Stories of past life regression reveal that what you perpetrate on others, you then experience yourself. It’s divine justice. If we recognize that, we can relate to our lives without self-pity.”
“I’m glad you’ve never experienced evil,” I countered. “I used to astral travel, and I’ve been attacked by demonic forces, beings that aren’t human. And I have no doubt they influence our lives.”
“And I’ve visited the Akhashic records,” Nori replied without skipping a beat, “and seen it all written.”
How can all of our experiences be right? How can the omnipotent turn aside from suffering? How can evil coexist with accountability? How can we both determine our reality and be victims of circumstance? Where can we find a sense of agency, of hope, in a world that’s violating our sacred interconnections and undermining the value of life itself?
Seemingly opposing beliefs can coexist if we understand reality as multilayered, microcosms nesting inside macrocosms. At a cosmic level, there is cause and effect. Everything is just one substance: consciousness energy experiencing itself through infinite iterations. At this level, when I push someone, I also fall down. When I annihilate a stand of redwoods, I cease to exist.
But in the physical reality of planet earth, there is separateness. I do not burn when I set a house on fire. My bank account doesn’t increase when I give to the poor. So telling the family of someone killed in a school shooting that they were paying a karmic debt is not only heartless, it ignores the fact that on this plane, in this lifetime, cause and effect often aren’t directly linked. Many people who focused on goodness and gratitude ended up in the gas chamber. And plenty of people who exploit and abuse others are rewarded with wealth and power.
This doesn’t mean that what we do doesn’t matter. It means that our choices are best made not based on desired practical outcomes, but in alignment with our own moral compass. This orientation is less about influencing what happens to us, which is a confounding mix of influences no one I’ve encountered has adequately explained, and more about what we experience within us. We may not choose what happens to us, but we can, with time and patience, shift our perception of and response to it. We can become less unsettled by the spheres we move within, which can at times influence our surroundings when others are receptive. But this is less about us manifesting and more about us becoming more aware of and ready to participate in moments of grace that arise of their own volition.
Good and evil, nurturing and annihilation, boundless compassion and maniacal delight in the suffering of others are all real phenomena. As humans, we vary in our natural ability to perceive and tendency to tune into these forces, and can develop our capacity as a vessel for either with time and attention. And at times, they can overpower our will. A wound can become a channel for hurtful language. A suffering we endured can become a vehicle for compassion for others. We may be overwhelmed by an unfathomable force of altruism, sacrificing ourselves for another. And we may become possessed by demonic forces beyond our human experience.
Everything happens for a reason and there are innocent bystanders in other people’s dramas. What we believe creates our reality and sometimes bad things happen anyway. The inner struggle between good and evil is a daily discipline and sometimes we are inhabited by forces beyond our control. There is inherent goodness and power corrupts. We have choice and we are powerless. We are victims and we are accountable. We create our reality, and reality carries on with or without our consent.
To choose one seemingly coherent philosophy in times like these, despite how raw and real it feels, is to be smashed against the true complexity of Reality and to stand divided from and in judgment of our neighbors. If we’re really paying attention, our beliefs, our guiding mythologies, need to get bigger to incorporate everything we experience, sense, and resonate with. We must also accept that others’ philosophies – what they need to believe to cope, to stay intact – will not bend simply based on another person’s story, especially when it threatens a paradigm they – or often we – are too angry or scared to examine.
And on another level, these are all just words – abstract concepts and fantasies we extrapolate from what we perceive in our daily lives. The truth is, there’s no future outcome to achieve. There’s no past trauma to heal. There’s only this moment – where sensations well up or tear through us – colliding with our longings and the stories we tell about them.
I watch these two women in my living room, the stories our society tells spilling through their words and grappling in some epic mating rut to determine who proliferates and who recedes into obscurity. I see the fire rising and falling in their eyes, the evening light on their cheeks, the folds of their clothes, and I feel the constriction in me longing for silent presence in raw vulnerability with another human being simply admitting, “It’s all so urgent, but how can we really, truly know?”
I can no more resolve this struggle in them than I can in the world. I cannot make anyone shed their defenses, not even my own. But I can validate myself. I can accept the tension in this and in so many moments: a long string of moments that form the life in which I’m increasingly at a loss of what to do. For what can one do when ancient, primal forces rip through us while we sit together simply longing to feel safe? We are not safe. But there is something at the center of being torn apart that each of us must find.
Nancy
“Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to. Don’t try to see through the distances. That’s not for human beings.” – Rumi
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