Indeed, we often find ourselves asking why bad things keep happening to us, especially when it does not stand to reason that we deserve all kinds of negative outcomes from our seemingly positive or even just neutral behavior.
What is the connection between our behavior and the outcomes we experience in life?
To add salt to the wounds, we can find people such as criminals living seemingly good lives, while people who worked hard to enter professions that serve society could be suffering their entire lives. And we are then left to ponder why life could be so unfair.
Our inability to make sense of this dilemma stems from our inability to understand the complexity of our interconnectedness and interdependence. We cannot grasp the rippling domino effect of our behavior in the world, and have no clear or direct perception of the responses to our actions.
Yet, every single one of our thoughts and actions influences the system we exist in, and enables a response. We simply cannot piece together why things take place the way that they do.
We commonly try to find solutions to this dilemma by looking at our past behavior, i.e. that it led to bad things happening later in our lives. However, trying to piece together this dilemma in such a way is over-simplistic, and it fails to take several variables into account.
We thus need to understand the function of negative experiences in our lives. Negative experiences serve to surface questions about their reason and cause, so that we would wish to break out of our small individualistic cells of perception, and expand our perception to encompass a much greater and fuller perception of reality. The more negative experiences we encounter, the more prepared we become to balance ourselves with the interdependent and interconnected system of nature we live in. When we start exiting our individualistic worldviews and entering more complete and integral perceptions of the system we live in, then we start understanding the extent of influence we have on our lives and our world, and what behavior can be considered positive or negative.
We currently evaluate our lives according to extremely limited parameters, and we will keep accumulating suffering until it will prod us to seek beyond our current limitations. We can be compared to unsupervised children who eat only sweets, without understanding the harm that we cause our body, which will catch up to us later on in life.
We should thus refrain from pointing our finger at someone, some group or something else that we think causes bad things in our lives. We should also refrain from digging into our past for actions that might have brought about our current negative experiences.
What, then, should we do with bad things that happen to us?
We should accept their inevitability, and use them to spark questions about their cause and purpose: that they come in order for us to exit our individualistic worldviews and enter a much greater and complete integral one. We do so by better and more actively connecting with our surrounding society. We should thus seek a society that encourages and supports us to rise above the current level of our lives, where we have no access to perceiving the complexity of the system we exist in, and enter a much greater perception and sensation of reality. We do so by positively connecting to others, where we each develop attitudes of mutual giving and concern toward one another, and by doing so, we gradually acquire a new sense through which we feel life.
Through enhancing and enriching our connections to each other, we will find our lives become more and more balanced and harmonious. Such is the way to become truly happy, confident, safe and comfortable. In other words, the cause of our life’s troubles is our incomplete perception that fails to account for our interdependence, and the solution is in realizing our interdependence with positive and altruistic connections.
By attaining newfound balance and harmony with the interdependent system we are all parts of, we then reach the perception of every single event happening in life as perfect, since we acquire a new spin on everything that happens in life: that it is a means to rise above our current narrow perception and enter into a much fuller and greater one. And a much greater and fuller perception is one where qualities of love and giving dwell in our attitudes to each other.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
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