Many people have a hard time believing that God is good when they don’t feel that life is good. How can God be good when life isn’t experienced as good, but painful? Even though life is essentially good, it is possible to experience it as painful because we are programmed with beliefs that make it painful. The fact that we suffer doesn’t make life, itself, bad or painful, even though life can feel that way. We are meant to discover that we create our own suffering by how we think about life and that pain isn’t inherent in life.

A lot of things are inherent in life—change, birth, death, aging, illness, accidents, calamities, and losses of all kinds—but these events don’t have to be a cause of ongoing suffering. Yes, these events can cause grief and sadness, but grief and sadness pass, like everything else, and are replaced with other experiences. The ego, however, clings to negative thoughts and feelings and, as a result, magnifies, intensifies, and sustains those emotions. Meanwhile, the ego overlooks the subtle feelings of joy, gratitude, excitement, adventure, love, and peace that come from Essence. If we dwelt on such positive feeling states as much as we generally dwell on our negative thoughts and painful emotions, our lives would be transformed. And that is what we can learn to do.

The difficulties and challenges in life aren’t proof that life is not good. They are just part of life. For example, the fact that animals eat other animals to survive isn’t proof that life is cruel, but just the way life is. The challenges and difficulties we face are not personal. They aren’t proof that we aren’t good enough, that we are being punished, or that God doesn’t care about us. Challenges are just part of life in this dimension, and part of everyone’s life. No one escapes them.

When we don’t accept that challenges are part of everyone’s life, we suffer. We take life’s challenges personally, as if they mean something about us, and they don’t. Life’s challenges are designed to make us stronger and show us the way out of entrapment in the egoic mind. They are designed to show us the way Home. Life is good because its purpose is good. It supports our evolution, and that evolution is toward greater wisdom and love. Life is wise and loving in providing us with exactly what we need to become free of the egoic mind and return to love.

The way life frees us is by giving us a homing device, which is the love of goodness (God-ness). We all know what goodness is, we all love goodness, and we all have the capacity to express it. When we express goodness, we are rewarded by feeling good and, often, by goodness being returned to us. We know that goodness is at the core of life because it brings us what we have always wanted.

The catch is that our goodness is clouded over by the false self, the ego, the voice in our head that constantly focuses on me, my life, and how it’s going for me. It is primarily a negative voice, which produces negative feelings. It’s the only thing that can take us away from expressing our goodness, Essence. It is the only thing in the way! Imagine that—the only thing interfering with expressing goodness (God-ness) in the world is believing and following the egoic mind!

The ego is the Devil, you could say, in the drama taking place on earth. The ego creates suffering, hatred, and every form of negativity. In our search for relief from the ego, we all inevitably discover our essential goodness. What a heroic journey it is! Life isn’t easy, but that doesn’t mean it is bad. Life is good at its core, and the proof is that we are good at our core. We all eventually discover that, which is more proof that life is good!