Questioner: I look at the world around me and am witnessing a very chaotic world. With wars, corruption, pandemics and it seems to be on a downward spiral. Is this just my own projection? Or is this something that needs to happen for a mass realization or is this just consciousness unfolding as it is and we who are on a spiritual path just accept this, or is it that myself (that does not exist) is just seeing through the illusion with more clarity and can see the flaws, imperfections of human existence and should keep on peaceful Vedanta path and just be more dispassionate about what I am witnessing?
The world just seems a tad topsy turvy to say the least. I am quite good at not becoming emotionally involved and dispassionate, but when I see the pain and suffering of others, I still have questions that I struggle to answer.
I understand I need to embed knowledge gained through readings, meditations, satsangs which can take a long time. I know we are all one, however as a father the future seems a tad shaky.
Have you any advice or wisdom that may settle me more so?
Rory: Your question is a good one.
Life in duality is certainly not easy. We are indeed living in a turbulent and high stress world; wars, conflicts, economic issues, social entropy, warped values, and so on. I recently saw it expressed that humanity’s problem is that we have palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. It’s quite a predicament, particularly given that human beings have not been advancing a fraction as fast as our technology is.
I think one of the things that makes the world feel so chaotic and out of control is that we are now constantly subjected to the media, including to 24/7 newsfeeds and social media in all of its lunacy. Unfortunately, negative headlines generate the most clicks by far, so we are constantly bombarded by terrible news stories and frightening narratives. That’s to say nothing of the widespread deception and misinformation that circulates in our “post-truth age”.
I think it’s actually been shown, however, that in spite of the immense challenges we face, for most of us, there’s still never been a better and more peaceful time to be alive. Our duration and quality of life has never been higher. We have advancements such as human rights, animal rights, environmentalism, antibiotics, vaccines, painkillers and treatments for diseases that a century ago would have wiped people out with impunity. There’s generally less war and conflict than at most points in history (although, unfortunately, when there is it tends to be on a larger scale owing to globalisation and interconnectivity).
The imperfections and chaos have always been there and always will be. There’s no getting around that fact. As I sometimes say, “duality is gonna duality”. The Vedas and Puranas dramatise the nature of duality as a timeless war between the devas and asuras, or angels and demons. This is actually a war also waged inside each and every human being, for we each have a higher, divine nature and a lower, demonic (ie selfish, greedy, violent) nature. The two are often at loggerheads until we really make a commitment to dharma and spiritual enlightenment.
With regards to duality, the Bhagavad Gita advises us to develop as much dispassion as we can; to help us transcend the ups and downs of duality, and to cultivate a mindset of evenness and equanimity. Not easy! It does help, in my experience, to really streamline our media input and to create as much time and space as we can to simply remain in our own space of peace and freedom; to keep aligning our mind and heart with the Self, the truth of our being, rather than the objects and outer world, which are driven by an unfathomable chain of karma; of cause and effect. I truly believe this simple act, in itself, helps to contribute to peace in the world.
The phenomenal world is best seen as a kind of big “karma machine”. It’s all about karma; about dealing with the flow of both fortuitous and not so fortuitous karma.
We cannot really judge, either. Only Ishvara has all-knowledge and can see the entirety of the big picture. There’s a quote in the Tao Te Ching where Lao Tzu says that good fortune rests in bad fortune and bad fortune rests in good fortune. That’s so true. At this level of maya, it’s often bad karma that can lead to good karma and sadly sometimes the other way around, too. We can see this when terrible things like wars actually lead us to new innovations, breakthroughs and technologies in peacetime.
And sometimes what seems like good karma can lead to less favourable results and reactions. Sometimes what we think we want and need turns out to be the worst possible thing in multiple ways. That’s because any action will have both knowable effects (drista phala) and unknowable effects (adrista phala) which we simply cannot anticipate.
I think it was Aldous Huxley, one of my favourite authors, who said that experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.
Speaking personally, I came into this lifetime with a lot of difficult health karma. I actually first developed cancer when I was only about 7 years old and have struggled with it and other conditions ever since. However, I’ve tried to use it as positively and wisely as I can, to develop spiritually and psychologically, to become stronger, more dispassionate and more compassionate. Often people who go through life with no significant challenges don’t have the impetus or the need to grow as a person. Many Vedantins and spiritual seekers are so devoted to liberation because of painful experiences and suffering in their lives. The ability to turn that around and make something good out of it is the true alchemy of living.
Maybe we need the challenges to help push us forward and to grow, evolve and finally realise who/what we are and then break free of the wheel of rebirth? There’s a divine, creative Intelligence running this whole show and, I believe, everything that happens to us is an invitation and opportunity to awaken from the dream of self-ignorance and to realise who and what we truly are.
The Vedic view of life is very cyclic in nature, which ties in with the modern scientific view. From a cosmic perspective, the unfolding of the universe/cosmos is a result of fructifying karma. The creation unfolds, things operate according to cycles, the various ups and downs and ins and outs of duality…and then, when the karma has run its course, things eventually resolve back again into the unmanifest. That’s until the karma, stored in seed form in the causal body, again begins to fructify and Ishvara “breathes out” the world of the manifest once more. In all that time, the stars and galaxies are born and die and then are reborn, and this includes the countless jivas in existence. It’s all just the dance of karma throughout eternity.
Ishvara is unfathomable to the human mind. We can never really know the “why” of creation and the “why” of all the world’s problems and challenges. We just have to navigate it as best we can and stay committed to keeping our own minds and hearts as pure and as aligned with God as possible.
Because this is a field of karma, and our ultimate goal in life is liberation and Ishvara wants us to be free (otherwise we wouldn’t have Vedanta and the scriptures) we can trust that we’re always in the right place at the right time. Ishvara does have our backs—even though, from our limited vantage point, that may not always seem readily apparent. We may have tremendous difficulties to deal with, but as I remind people, there’s always much more “right” with us than is “wrong” with us—and, so too, with the world. The karma yoga perspective is key because with it, we’re able to accept the issues we’ve been given, individually and collectively, and, by working in alignment with dharma, we can find ways to navigate and transmute our difficulties until such time as we are fully grounded in Self-Knowledge and no longer bound by karma.
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