08/01/2025
A friend just lamented, "If there's a God, at least any kind of God I would be interested in, why would that God create a world in which there is so much suffering?"
Though our conceptions of "God" might be very different, I approached the question seriously, not just for my friend, but for myself. Here's what I came up with. If God's Design Includes Suffering, It Must Also Include Liberation. (Spoiler: The silent mind is the key to liberation.)
The fact that so many wisdom traditions, across time and culture, point to transcendence--not just as possible, but as the point--suggests that this isn’t a bug in the system. It’s part of the spiritual curriculum of "Earth School."
But what if the pain is not a punishment--nor a flaw in the design--but a threshold, a sacred pressure that calls us to remember who we really are--to bring our attention to what we are when the mind is silent? Not to escape the world, but to rediscover the place in us untouched by it.
"But my mind won't be quiet, and if it did, I'd probably be terrified."
Imagine you’ve lived your whole life in a noisy train station. Suddenly, the trains stop, and there’s silence. At first, you panic--"Something must be wrong!" But then you realize: for the first time, you can actually hear yourself breathe. You can feel your own presence.
That stillness isn’t the absence of life. It’s the presence of the deepest you--even if you don't fully feel that at the beginning. (I find it takes a little getting used to.)
The teachers say, "I allow my thoughts to quiet. I do not fight them. I simply do not follow. They are clouds. I am sky."
That's all very poetic, but the gist is that we shouldn't struggle against thought, we just start by observing it. In that very act of observation, we differentiate our awareness from our thinking mind. We get to see that we exist independent of our thoughts.
Meditation isn't about achieving "enlightenment" in a single session. It’s about returning to presence—again and again. Each return is the practice. The more you fail and come back, the stronger that awareness becomes.
If you went to the gym and said, "I’m bad at weightlifting because the weights feel heavy," your personal trainer would smile and say, "Um, yeah, that’s kind of the point." Each time we "fail" and bring the wild little puppy of attention back to watching thoughts and/or sensations, muscle gets built. And in meditation, this muscle doesn't get built without countless repetitions of the rinse-and-repeat cycle of losing and recovering attention.
Try letting go of the idea that meditation is about ‘doing’ anything at all. Just sit and notice--what’s happening in the body? What’s here in the breath? What’s moving through the mind? If you do that for even one minute, you’ve meditated.
The teachers say, "In the growing stillness, I begin to sense I am not the one who suffers. I am the one who sees."
For a while, this just sounds like lovely, poetic bullsh*t. But the more often you dip your toe in, the more real and practical it becomes. There grows this peace and stillness beneath the noise.
They say say it can become unshakable, and even blissful. That's not my reality (at least, not yet), but the peace and stillness are very real. Coming to identify your sense of self with the stillness instead of the noise is an acquired taste! It feels pretty unfamiliar at first.
After I got more adept at being able to find the quiet place in my thinking mind, then I stopped observing thoughts and sensations and started to look inward, toward the source of "stillness" and then toward the source of the one who's trying to meditate, the one who's trying to overcome suffering, the one who suffers. That's what the wisdom-yogis mean by "self inquiry." You're not who you think you are. Literally.
Can't wait to hear what my friend says. If I were him, I would say, "But what possible use could a starving child in Gaza make of all this philosophy?" That's a very good question, and I don't have an answer. 
