The World Is Damaged

I claimed in my last post that the world was perfect and I am not going to backtrack on that in this one because I do maintain that this world is primarily framed as a spiritual training ground, and that the purpose of life here is educational which means there must be trial, difficulty and even suffering. So, from that perspective, the imperfections of the world make it a suitable arena for spiritual evolution.

However, it often seems that, even with those aims to it, the world need not be as bad as it sometimes is and that suffering need not be as terrible as it occasionally turns out to be. Something else appears to be going on. What might that be?

A materialist would say there is no need to look for an explanation. The world is as it is because there is no meaning, no purpose to it and therefore we can expect what we see which is a mixture of what to us seems good and bad, but really there is no good and bad unless we make it so. But this is a superficial explanation which disregards vast chunks of our experience and ignores intuition not to mention revelation and the spiritual insights of millions of people. It might provide some kind of rationale for evil and suffering as we experience them but at the expense of dismissing so much else that is just as significant in our lives from love to the sense of beauty to the yearning for truth and so on.

So where else can we look for an understanding of the prevalence of suffering in the world?

Perhaps, first of all, we should look to the teaching of the Fall in which human disobedience to spiritual truth was the initial cause of suffering and death. In some sense, we turned away from the good and decided to place ourselves at the centre of life instead of God. By rejecting God (which we did if he was no longer central) we created an environment in which suffering and death became possible.

But I don't think that is sufficient explanation. It does explain much of what we experience but not everything. Not the depth of evil in the world. To get a fuller picture I believe we have to accept that there are spiritual forces that seek our ill. These forces work against God and they have sufficient power to damage God's plan for humanity, in the short term anyway. Now God could eradicate these forces in an instant if he chose but that would probably mean bringing his experiment with humanity to an end because this experiment requires the existence and exercise of free will.

These dark forces do have power but it is a limited sort of power and I don't think they can affect us on an individual level unless we allow them into our aura, if I can put it like that, through manifesting negative energy, otherwise known as sin, ourselves. They are the fallen angels and those human souls that have allowed themselves to be corrupted by them. They are combatted by God's angels on a spiritual level using that word to mean the non-material realms between the heavenly planes (to which they cannot gain access due to the darkness in their being, like attracting like on these levels) and the physical world. But we must also counter their attacks in our hearts and minds.

The dark forces have damaged the world and made of it a worse place than it might have been but God allows their existence because the purpose of creation is free will and he has renounced some of his supreme power to allow the exercise of free will. If he overrode our freedom he would effectively have to destroy the world. Perhaps the myth of the Flood provides an example of that. 

At the same time, I do believe that the power of the demons is relatively weak in that if we did not respond to their temptations to sin they would be ineffectual. The Masters frequently warned me about attack from evil forces but said that if I did not react to them (in thought) they would go away. They have no power if one does not allow oneself to descend to their level.

In conclusion, I would say that all spiritual teachings worthy of the name recognise that this world is a battleground between good and evil which is permitted to take place because of the need for free will. God has forfeited some of his power to make his creation free. But evil will never be allowed to go too far even if it does not necessarily always feel like that to our restricted view. We have the Flood to remind us of that. God may have promised not to use that particular method again (so the story goes) but no doubt there are other possibilities.

A final thought. A propos of whether God knows how humanity will turn out, people sometimes ask whether he can see the future before it happens and, if he can, where does that leave free will? This is based on a confusion of levels. God is above time and he can see the future now. He sees all time now. Past, present and future are all now to him. So there is no conflict between free will and the fact that God knows the future. He does not know it before it happens because to him it is happening now. So he sees it but does not determine it. He can also bring good from evil and even if the dark forces have attempted to sabotage his plan, they cannot prevent it and its eventual glorious fruition.