Why Bad Things Happen

the proverbial question of evil

Why Do Bad Things Happen?

Someone recently asked, as many have before, how human tyranny and cruelty can be the manifestation of the “One Consciousness,” often referred to as God or unconditional love. The person wondered if I believed that bad things happen for a reason, by design, for our benefit, to wake us up.

I replied that I don’t believe there is some Cosmic Plan that intentionally designs bad experiences for our benefit to wake us up. But I do know from my own experience that the “negative” and difficult situations in our life are often the most deeply transformative and can be the sources of immense insight, wisdom and compassion. Losing an arm, having cancer, dealing with trauma and addictions—these are not things I’d choose or wish on anyone, but they’ve all played a part in making me who I am as a person and in waking me up to the bigger picture. I don’t regret any of them. In a very real sense, they were (and are) all highly beneficial. A life of only sunny days would be no life at all.

Life is one whole seamless happening. It can’t be pulled apart. You can’t have up without down. That doesn’t mean we can’t or won’t do what we are moved to do to cure illness, heal wounds, recover from addictions, eliminate social injustices, and so on. Illness and medicine, viruses and antibodies are all movements of the whole. But if we are expecting perfection or a life of only calm, temperate, sunny weather, we will be disappointed. There will always be pain and painful circumstances—those are part of life. This manifestation can only appear in polarities and contrasts. But the apparent opposites are never really separate. You can’t have a one-sided coin or left without right. They go together.

Spiritually-inclined humans have been tying themselves in conceptual knots for centuries trying to explain away the existence of evil in a cosmos supposedly run by a “good’ and omnipotent power. I don’t believe there is any such controlling agent running this whole show. There does seem to be a kind of intelligence in this universe, but it is the intelligence of nature, the intelligence of evolutionary experimentation, of trial and error.

I’ve never liked the word evil either. We don’t think of hurricanes, volcanoes, tidal waves, earthquakes or viruses as evil, nor do we regard the hungry lion ripping apart a zebra as evil, but we do think of certain human behavior as evil. This seems to be partly because we have the idea, erroneous in my experience, that humans have free will and therefore “should” and “could” be doing better in any moment than they are. And it’s probably also because we know, correctly in my experience, that humans have the potential, given the right causes and conditions, to do better, whereas hurricanes, volcanoes and hungry lions do not.

Perhaps because of this, we often see ourselves as something other than or removed from nature, but our human behavior, even the worst of it, is every bit as natural as that of a hurricane or a hungry lion, even though it may seem otherwise. Our complex thinking and conceptualizing, and everything that has come from it—industrial civilization, technology, deforestation, climate change, AI, along with all the ways we have mentally separated ourselves from nature, gotten “lost in thought,” and brought ourselves to the edge of extinction—all of this is as much a movement of nature (i.e., of the universe or the whole) as an erupting volcano or a swarm of locusts. And importantly, so is our evolving capacity for awareness, self-reflection, critical thinking, and waking up from delusion. It’s all included.

From an evolutionary perspective, human beings are part of an evolving universe—and how it unfolds may or may not be pre-determined. We don’t know. Most of our actions arise out of unconscious bodily intelligence along with mostly unconscious psychological programming and conditioning, all of it the result of infinite nature and nurture. At the conscious level, we typically operate out of a very dualistic view of life, and we tend to easily and unknowingly mistake conceptual maps and abstract ideas and beliefs for the living actuality.

We lack the sensitivity, awareness, insight or ability to do any better than we are doing in any given moment. As we become more sensitive and aware, and as we learn more about ourselves and the world at large, more possibilities open up. The person who is running a factory farm and who cannot yet see that the animals being tortured there are sentient beings, or the person who is compulsively driven to commit serial rape or murder, or to get drunk every night and fly into violent rages and beat their wife or their dog, such a person is not yet able to do otherwise. But at some point, perhaps this will change. That possibility is there in humans. Whether the conditions will arise in which such a change might happen, we don’t know. But the potential is there.

In recognizing that everything is a movement of an indivisible and seamless whole that cannot in this moment be otherwise than it is, perhaps we can get beyond blame and guilt and see the whole picture with greater understanding and compassion. Otherwise we just perpetuate the cycle of violence, conflict, blame and retribution.

The awakened perspective doesn’t mean doing nothing about the serial killer, the child abuser or the genocidal dictator, but the response will be very different if the choiceless nature of their actions is understood. We will still do everything we can to stop them from harming people, but it won’t come from the mistaken idea that they acted out of free will or that they are evil.

To understand that bigger, less dualistic, more holistic picture, it may help to remember the famous old Chinese farmer story. The old farmer’s only horse runs away, and all the neighbors say, “What terrible bad fortune.” To which the old farmer replies, “Well, maybe.” The next day, the horse returns, bringing with it a bunch of wild horses, and the neighbors all say, “What great good fortune!” To which the old farmer replies, “Well, maybe.” The next day, the old farmer’s only son, who runs the farm by himself now that his father is very old, is thrown by one of the horses while trying to break it in, and the fall breaks the son’s arm and both his legs, so he can no longer work and run the farm. The neighbors all say, “What terrible bad fortune!” And the old farmer replies, “Well, maybe.” The next day, the army comes through, conscripting all the young men to fight in a hopeless war where they will all be killed, but they don’t take the farmer’s son because of his broken arm and legs. The neighbors again say, “What great good fortune!” And the old farmer again replies, “Well, maybe.” And on it goes.

As the story illustrates, we can’t really pull the apparently “good” apart from the apparently “bad.” As Thich Nhat Hanh put it, “No mud, no lotus.” Or as someone else once said, everything is grace when you see it as grace. And actually, even if we don’t or can’t yet see it, it’s still grace. But this doesn’t mean we have to put some comforting gloss on all the painful things happening in our lives and in the world. We don’t have to deny the pain or tell ourselves it’s only a dream or pretend it doesn’t hurt, nor do we have to cling to the pain and endlessly reincarnate it as if it were more solid and more set in stone than it actually is. There is a different, more radical possibility. These three quotes all point to this:

No matter what state dawns at this moment, can there be just that? Not a movement away, an escape into something that will provide what this state does not provide, or doesn't seem to provide: energy, zest, inspiration, joy, happiness, whatever. Just completely, unconditionally listening to what's here now, is that possible?

—Toni Packer

We live in a world that is not perfectible, a world that always presents you with a sense of something undone, something missing, something hurting, something irritating. From that minor sense of discomfort to torture and poverty and murder, we live in that kind of universe. The wound that does not heal—this human predicament is a predicament that does not perfect itself.

But there is the consolation of no exit, the consolation that this is what you're stuck with. Rather than the consolation of healing the wound, of finding the right kind of medical attention or the right kind of religion, there is a certain wisdom of no exit: this is our human predicament and the only consolation is embracing it. It is our situation, and the only consolation is the full embrace of that reality.

—Leonard Cohen, from a 1994 Shambhala Sun interview

Practice is not about overcoming human problems. It’s not about becoming serene and transcendent.  It’s about embracing our lives as they really are, and understanding at every point how deep and profound and gorgeous everything is—even the suffering, even the difficulty.  So we forgive ourselves for our limitations, and we forgive this world for its pain. We don’t say, “That’s not pain.”  It is pain.  You don’t say, “It’s not difficulty.”  It is difficult. But when we embrace the difficulty… we see this is exactly the difficulty we need, and this difficulty is the most beautiful and poignant thing in this world.

—Zen teacher Norman Fischer

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Love to all…