Why Is There Suffering?

I’d like to explain, as clearly as possible, why there is suffering. This is something that religions are asked to explain but have failed to explain adequately or have given unhelpful or even harmful explanations.

Often punishment is the reason religions give for why there is suffering. Supposedly, you—humanity—are sinners, and therefore you are doomed to suffer and have little chance for true happiness in this life. So, if something unpleasant happens to you, you may assume you’re being punished by God for something you did. And being imperfect, like everyone else, you can easily imagine ways you’ve fallen short and possibly incurred “the wrath of God.”

This explanation is obviously inadequate and untrue, as innocent babies and children sometimes experience challenges or difficulties they couldn’t have brought upon themselves. And just as frequently, many people go unpunished for their crimes. Animals also experience difficulties such as accidents, illness, aging, and death, so are they being punished as well?

The fact that suffering exists in life leads people to conclude that life is unfair, that God is vengeful, punishing, unjust, or cruel, or that there is no God, no higher intelligence behind life. It seems that there should not be any suffering, and it’s difficult to understand why there is. Why would God create a world so full of suffering?

No, difficulties encountered in life are not the result of being punished by God. Difficulties are part of life. They are part of having a body and living in a world of form, a perishable world. All of life comes and goes. That is just a reality. That’s just how life is. Accidents, aging, illness, death are not punishment. Even difficulties you bring upon yourself through bad judgment are not punishment from God, but merely the natural consequences of bad judgment. Life brings you lessons; it doesn’t punish you for your failings.

But before I continue, I must make a distinction. There are difficulties, and there is suffering. Difficulties often cause suffering, but suffering, itself, is not inevitable. It’s possible to have difficulties and to suffer little over them. Suffering is caused by what people tell themselves internally about some difficulty they’re experiencing, including simply defining something as a difficulty. Suffering is the experience of unhappiness, despair, depression, and any of the negative emotions that human beings experience, such as anger, hatred, jealousy, envy, guilt, resentment, and fear. This is suffering, and you create these negative states by believing certain thoughts.

Although you may or may not be responsible for the difficulties you experience in life, you, not God, are responsible for any suffering you experience around those difficulties. And this is one of the most important lessons you are learning as a human being: You and only you are responsible for your suffering, your internal state. Therefore, you and only you can make yourself happy. This is actually good news. It means that you have the power to be happy in this life rather than suffer.

There is an easy explanation for this type of suffering, which I’ve spoken about in every book I’ve written through this channel: You are designed in such a way that you suffer. You have been given an ego, which includes the voice in your head, that causes you to suffer because it misperceives life and approaches life from fear rather than from love. So, in that sense, you aren’t even responsible for your suffering; your ego is. The voice in your head is full of lies and partial truths, and when you believe those, you suffer. However, you are responsible for discovering this and waking up out of this programming.

But today, I want to say more about why this is—why you were designed this way. It seems like a cruel trick, but it is anything but that. Many of you have heard it said about life that God is playing hide-and-seek with Himself/Herself. So, I would like to explore this idea with you a bit, since it can be a helpful way of understanding what’s going on.

There is nothing but God in existence, both before the creation of physical worlds and after the creation of physical worlds. Everything in existence is God manifesting as that. Take that in, a moment: Everything in existence is God manifesting as that. Yes, God is manifesting as that table, as that bird, as that tree, as that rock. God is immanent in form. There is nothing in form that is not infused with God.

Another way you could look at this is that the world of form is like God’s dream: Just as your mind produces everything in your dreams, everything in God’s dream—the world of form—was produced by God’s mind. In God’s dream, there are characters acting in various ways, but in reality, those characters don’t exist, just as your dream characters don’t actually exist. There is only God.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are God and there is nothing outside yourself. And then, happily, you discover that you can imagine something and experience that as outside yourself. This is the same enjoyment you have in imagining something, only God’s imaginations, unlike your own, can be given a life of their own.

But how is that done? First, you—God—make each of your creations look unique. Then, you must program them to experience themselves as separate from you and distinct from others. This is the ego. It is the programming that causes you to believe that you are separate from God and distinct from each other. Then, this sense of being a distinct individual is further enhanced by endowing each individual with free will.

Every individual is allowed to choose what God, in God’s infinite wisdom and love, might not choose. Every individual is allowed to do something other than what God would do. After all, if an individual did not have free will, he or she would always choose what God would choose. So free will, by definition, is the ability to choose something other than what God would choose. In this way, God is able to explore and discover what happens when the characters make various choices, including unwise, unloving, and harmful choices. What happens if every possible choice is allowed?

The ego is what allows God to play hide-and-seek with Himself/Herself. The ego allows God to have an experience that God would not otherwise have. Just as you are interested in having experiences, God is interested in having experiences. Many of you choose to have challenging, adventuresome, and risky experiences, such as climbing mountains, just to see what happens and how you would handle such a challenge. This is God within you choosing this. God also chooses lots of comfort and enjoyments in life too, not only challenges. God is making every possible choice through human beings and, thereby, gaining experience, wisdom, skills, understanding, new knowledge, and other things that God could not have attained any other way.

“Any other way”—this is important! Maybe some of those experiences God would not choose to have twice, but God is willing to have any and every experience at least once, because there is always something to be gained from every experience.

Human beings are God’s experimental selves. Although God is experimenting, exploring, and experiencing through every creation, because human beings have free will and an imagination similar to God’s, human beings offer God very unique and interesting possibilities.

In hearing this, people naturally bring up the most horrific experiences humanity has had, such as the holocaust and other human-caused tragedies. Yes, God is willing to have these experiences as well. Being victimized is one of the ways people are pointed back to love very quickly. How easy it is to see the importance of love and kindness when you so dramatically see the results of love’s opposite. Those who have had such an experience become great lovers of life, goodness, and justice in their future lifetimes.

Most human beings, although separate from each other, have a natural empathy that allows them to relate and learn from other people’s mistakes. The horror of the holocaust lives on in most people’s hearts, whether they experienced it or just heard about it, as a warning and example of what can happen but what must not happen again.

In the end, God’s wisdom and love will rule, even in human society. No matter what people experience, they will return to love and will have gained wisdom along the way. People gain this wisdom through suffering because suffering is painful, and this pain points them in a different direction. If being hateful results in pain, and it always does, then being hateful will eventually, if not immediately, result in one not repeating that behavior. And, make no mistake, those who cause pain to others are also in deep pain before, during, and after they inflict pain on others. It may take them a while to learn to behave otherwise, but everyone eventually does learn this.

Because you are of God, you can never be divorced entirely from your divine nature, and that is part of God’s design. Although God chooses to have all types of experiences, God does not wish, or choose, to get permanently lost in the limited viewpoint of the ego. However, temporarily losing Himself/Herself is necessary to explore life as fully as desired.

You are made of love. You came from love and will return to love. The story of your many lifetimes is ultimately one of victory over fear and hatred and a return to love. Along the way, you are discovering, at every turn, the power and importance of love and the hell of its opposite, and that is also part of the design of these lifetimes. Your lifetimes as a human are not only about having every possible experience as a human, but also about discovering that there is only wisdom and love behind all of it.

Love is all that has ever existed and will ever exist. It is the great, good news that is cause for celebration: There is nothing but goodness behind life. There are no bad guys, only players who have lost their way and are making bad choices that are harming themselves and others. At some point in your evolution, you were one of them, but you learned to behave differently. Everyone is learning, and everyone is teaching. And it is possible for you to be happy and to know your true nature no matter what your circumstances.

Thank you for being open to this message. This is perhaps the most difficult teaching to convey, and I hope I have provided at least a glimpse into this great mystery called life. I am with you always.