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The other day, as my friend Levi and I shot the breeze, the subject of good and bad, evil and what-not came up. Now it was Levi's contention that if there is a God, He must be a pretty twisted freak to allow all of this rotten stuff to happen to people. "How", he said, "would a loving God let all of this horrible stuff happen to people?"
(Well, for those of you that don't know me, I believe in God. Now I don't mean I believe in shoving my beliefs down other people's throats. I mean I believe that there is a purpose to this all and an intelligence behind it that is NOT separate from us, but with us always..in fact I know that God, being the ultimate engineer made US and everything around us both seen and unseen of ITSELF. In fact, it's about the ONLY thing I really know for sure. It's a long story.)
Well what struck me as strange yet familiar about Levi's comment was that hidden in it was that ever-present tendency of us human animals to want to pass the blame for everything. So I couldn't help but respond with my own understanding of how the whole thing works.
"You see, Levi", I began, "I don't exactly see it that way.."
The way I see it, life is like a stream that will not be tamed. Those things that fight the flow of that stream will be washed away, or worn down to nothing.
The trick, to the whole thing is to find the flow...then go with it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not exactly swimming downstream either, but to understand how it works is a start.
Understand that most things in the stream are already going with the flow. The trees and the grass, the sun and the moon, the birds and the bees. They're all going with the flow just fine.
Then there are the humans, who have the somewhat unique (as far as we know) ability to choose. What we call freewill.
Now these humans, with their freewill, they can choose to go with the flow, or go against the flow...or maybe even sort of go sideways to the flow. And depending upon what they do, they will encounter certain things.
Those that go against the flow have some very big problems in store.
The first is that everything that's going downstream is headed on a collision course with them. These are the bumps and the pits that folks keep running into. These are the moments that create miscommunications and misunderstandings. This is the stuff tragedies are made of.
Secondly, and this is sort of why people go against the stream in the first place:
When you're going against the flow...you can feel a sort of turbulence against your skin. It feels kind of neat. In fact, it's somewhat invigorating. And that's why the people are going against the flow...its the thrill, its the excitement..its that physical or mental stimulation that is so much more exciting than the blaaaahze world of floating lazily downstream. You get to create your own white water when yer walking upstream!
You also can't tell what's going on in the water anymore.
That's right...there are things going on in the stream that cannot be seen, only sensed. If you're going with the flow...you can feel those vibrations, no matter how subtle, and the stiller you are...the stronger they come in because the still waters around you make detection easier.
But our friends headed upstream have no way of knowing what's going on around them. They're making too many vibrations of their own, and strong ones..strong enough to attract predators and trouble.
So it might not be a matter of God being cruel, but of people being foolish, then looking for a scapegoat to blame it on. God didn't do this to anyone Levi, society and its conditioning did. Now kids grow up and are immediately inducted into the unnatural world of human freewill gone awry.
Now I won't say that none of this is by design. I'm a firm believer that the universe is as naturally full of pain as it is full of joy. It's when you throw in a few billion people going against the flow of the stream that you tip the scales toward the side of pain, and that's when the bellyaching starts.
Anyhow, it not a huge leap of faith to believe that we have nothing to fear but ourselves.
With as much as we've cut ourselves off from Creation, is it any wonder that we treat it like politicians do the illegal immigrant? Passing the buck for all of our problems off on the world and its Architect because we don't want the constituency (ourselves and those around us) to realize that WE created the whole mess in the first place. Pretty typical if you ask me.
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