Some people ask: Why does God allow suffering? How can there be a God, and how can this God be good, just, etc. when there is injustice/suffering in the world?
Answer: Suffering is a teacher. Suffering exists so that we may learn. We were put on this planet to experience ourselves (God) more fully. God wanted a mirror.
Each of us is a small fraction of God, like a ray of light coming from the sun. We are each a unique frequency of Love.
You may say, well, how does having cancer teach me anything? How is that fair?
We are born into a world full of foreign structures. We learn we have bodies, we learn how to stand up and walk in them, how to use them, what hurts and what does not. We have social structures, relationship structures, laws/structures of physics, politics, government, genetics, etc. We suffer when we bump up against a structure, because we are infinite souls inhabiting a finite body and spatial structure. We hit a limitation and we recoil. But with each recoil, we have a choice/chance to learn about that which is finite and that which is infinite. One can not be experienced without the other.
In a way, we are privileged to inhabit these weird bodies for a span of time so that we can have a structure within which to experience, know more deeply, and communicate who God is to each other.
Therefore, it is not the cancer which makes the world unjust. Cancer is just another structural limitation we are sometimes forced to inhabit. Suffering and cancer are not synonymous. The suffering is how the brain interprets the body’s reaction to the cancer. You may “have” cancer and you can “suffer from” cancer. You can’t learn anything about your true nature inherently just from having cancer. You will just come to simple facts like I am a human and I have a cell population within my tissues that is reproducing errantly. However, you can learn from the suffering you may experience about what your true nature is and is not.
Sacred Steve brought us back to the wisdom of the heart in relating to each other and living to the fullest health/efficiency/etc. on this planet. The mind, being finite, needs 2 reference points to compute anything. It is a tool but a limited one. The mind may operate in the past or present, but never in the exact “now”. This is the value of heart and awareness meditations, another tool to balance the activity of the computing mind, which can only help us to the point of calculating rough probabilities. The heart’s wisdom, a FEELING, is the infinite wisdom of the Love source within us, which seeks to interact with its world in a productive, love- and life-generating way, before its temporal body is subject to entropy (as every physical structure ultimately is).
This fits my theory that life rewards life. As an example, people who provide the most social benefit to other people are held in the highest esteem and are taken care of by others (the universe). Therefore, we have an imperative to listen to our hearts when making decisions, as the brain will only go as far as to compute for us a probability outcome that will keep the ego/one person safe.
More to come in a later post…thoughts?
i just went to a cancer survivors' mass tonight with my mom, who is an 11 year survivor of breast cancer. from what i've gathered, what makes cancer so awful (aside from the treatment side effects) is the feeling of having been betrayed by your own body, which is impossible to escape- like being strapped to the tracks with a train oncoming. sure, there are other ways of looking at the experience of cancer, but it's hard to pitch that to people in the thick of it.
sometimes i think it's perfectly okay for people to be good and pissed off about their circumstances…not forever, but at least for a bit before moving on to understanding something about it and themselves in it.
of course, the common theme among survivors is optimism and faith, so it does seems necessary to reframe your perspective in order to not just survive, but thrive. i had never thought of cancer as a "structural limitation"- so interesting!
((funny synchronicity that we post cancer blogs minutes apart :)
I m terribly bored and lonely today while I lye on bed because of a back strain. Anyways, I m an agnostic being increasingly drawn to being an atheist. I know that not believing in God springs up so many questions whose answers are more comforting with belief in God. I am all by myself is such a demanding paradigm. I have my reasons to not believe in God and I always find that there are all kind of work around answers to the question of suffering when you believe in God. I can give you incidences of suffering where God is all loving would be severly undefendable e.g. A 1 year old child being starved or even worse being raped. Any defense for that? I don't think so. There is a construct for defending it nevertheless and it's called Karma and one could say that the child is being punished for bad karmas she committed in previous life. A life that she does not even remember. I am yet to see a successful defense of this through true rationality. However I identify the fallacy in which God believers fall in which is that they must defend God rationally under all circumstances. I think if God exists he is beyond the rationality and I m choosing to be rational. I do admire belief in God for one thing that it infuses believers with a sense of purpose in life which is an incredible thing to have. My hands are Paining as I type it on my iphone
lying down. but I believe that all these pseudo rational constructs can do incredible things for us because they work with assumptions that our mind is limited and hence opening new doors.
Wow. I just read what I wrote above and realize how horribly the flow of logic goes when typing on a much smaller screen :(
thanks Ajit, your comment was at least as clear as my post's logic! See my latest post for a followup to your comment.