Monday, July 28, 2008

What is the divine logic for so much suffering in the world?

Question: If there's a god above why should there be so much suffering? Karma surely can't be the cause of suffering?
Sri Sri: You cannot stuff god somewhere above so he won't make you suffer; He is full of compassion and love, why should He make you suffer? That is not the case. There is the principle of karma, action and reaction.
Do an in-depth study of our scriptures to clear this mystery what the world is really bothered about, what is happening to god, why is He behaving this way etc.
There are opposite values that coexist in this planet. Creation, destruction. Joy, suffering. Pleasure, pain. But you are something beyond that. This understanding is a gift to the world from Indian philosophy, the Vedas.
The whole world is grouping in an ideological struggle to play Satan. If god is omnipresent, present everywhere, where do you keep Satan? Satan should be in a place where god is not. Then god is not omnipresent. If He is not omnipresent, He is not omnipotent also. Then Satan becomes even more powerful. So there is a fight between good and evil.
Our Vedanta, our philosophy in India, has given a big solution to this. The age-old struggle we are talking about, the good and bad, right and wrong are relative. In the absolute sense there is only one truth. The divine. It is one. It is beyond duality. One step below comes the good and bad. They are the opposites, and they all complement each other.
Like the hero and villain. They appear to be in conflict with each other but they merely complement each other. There is no hero, there is no villain. Similarly poison and nectar. Even nectar, if consumed too much, can be poisonous. And poison very often saves the lives of people. All the life-saving drugs have poison written on them.
Take the concept of opposite values that are complementary to each other, which exists in the world, in our philosophy, and it solves most of the riddles the Western world is facing about good and evil, right and wrong, why some people are happy, why some people are not happy.
The theory of karma and the principle of dharma go hand in hand.

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