God has a Purpose....Or does Shit just Happen?

It is human nature to wonder at the purpose of life's events.  Especially the bad ones.  Few stop to consider why good things happen -- they simply rejoice and enjoy them.  But when bad things happen, we lament, "why?"

Why must there be a "why"?  Perhaps in a world full of cause and effect, it is only logical to assume the pattern holds true for ourselves.  Or perhaps we simply can't bear the idea of pure randomness, that things happen for no reason.

That ill befalls us for no cause violates our concept of justics, of fairness.  But as your mother might say, "who said life was fair?"  But in a world so full of beauty and symmetry, perhaps fairness just seems right.  Or maybe "reason" is a better word;  in nature, nothing happens without reason.  A lion kills a zebra calf because the lion is hungry and the calf is weak.  The "reason" for this seemingly brutal act is not only to feed the lion but to keep the zebra species strong.  It is nature's balance, her symmetry.

So it is only logical to apply such balance to ourselves.  If something bad happens, it must be for some reason.  But what?  So we make up tales to explain the inexplicable: God is punishing us for some sin;  God has some mysterious and divine purpose; that it's karmic payback for some past wrong committed in this life or one past.

The aspiritual among us will call this hogwash and say there's no reason.  Shit happens, period.  No reason, no purpose -- it is what it is, to no particular end.  And maybe they're right -- who's to know?  But if they are, then our lives would be the sole exception to nature's machinery.  How likely is that?  How could it be that among the vast and complex relationships in our world, that we are the only beings free from it?

Let us examine things from this framework then -- not one of Divine Purpose but of nature.  If the purpose of killing the zebra clf is to ensure the strength of the species, then might not our suffering be similar?  It would be a weak species indeed that curled up into a ball of self-pity and depressed inactoin every time tragedy struck.  That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger, after all.

This is not to say there is an Intent behind things that happen, for that would just replace God or karma with a personnified Mother Nature.  There is no intent behind the lioin and zebra, but merely a system of checks and balances that naturally arose.  As part of the natural world, we would be subject to the same balances.  While we have largely removed ourselves from the basic checks of the environment (though not for much longer), might not we, with our large brains and self awareness, be subject to a psychological version of the same?

Personally, I have gone beyond wondering why.  You may know that Shit Happened in my life recently, and rather than lament on the reason I find I am just numbly accepting it.  Allowing myself a little leeway for withdrawing into a little ball, but also carrying on with life.  Yes, friends are full of comforting assertions that there must be a reason for it, that something better will come of it.  And typically I would agree, but not this time.  Did god send me lemons because he wants me to make lemonade? Hardly.  It's not the lesson I "should" learn (intent) but what I "could" learn (opportunity).

Journeys with Krishna, Or How I Became a Hindu

Someone recently asked me how long I'd been a Hindu.  Of course, the real answer is that one doesn't become a Hindu; you simply are one.  But, semantics aside, I thought it was an interesting question and found myself wondering.  I mean, I know when I started using the label, but when did I really begin walking the path in a full, true way?

Ironically, it happened when I tried to become a Buddhist.  Meditating on the teachings of the Dalai Lama, I felt a bit of despair.  How would I ever conquer (notice the choice of words) the warrior nature that flows through my veins?  How could I ever achieve the sort of peace that is needed to "truly" practice buddhism? 

Thankfully, my despair didn't last too long.  My recovery from a childhood filled with Christian ideas of denying one's true self (because we are all sinners and flawed) prevented me from being able to consider, in even the tiniest way, the idea of dispelling my warrior nature.  The idea was completely anathema to my beliefs.  So, that put a quick end to that.  But what then?

Concurrent with this rejection of self-denial was the development of my discomfort with the idea of focusing my life and energy on reaching enlightenment.  Partly because an extroverted, warrior gal like me isn't exactly the best candidate for a successful hermit-on-the-mountain experience.  But more than that, I came to see that it would be selfish of me to seek my own personal enlightenment when there is SO MUCH suffering on Earth.  How could I free myself while so many others can barely survive, much less think of esoteric spiritual matters?

These two ideas collided to form a new path.  First, no matter how hard I try, I am not achieving enlightenment in this life anyway -- so why try?  I mean that in the sense of, why try in the sense of the hermit-on-the-mountain?  The ideals I have chosen to live my life by assure that I will be reborn with greater wisdom the next time around, and that's ok with me.  I don't think life here is all that bad anyhow.  Second, I am who I am in this life because of my past lives.  I am a warrior because that is where I am on my "evolutionary" path.  To use Christian terminology, this spirit is a god-given gift and to deny it would be wrong.  So, I choose to embrace it.

This acceptance of who I am in this life, who I might be in the next, and the seemingly odd contradiction of Fate and Free Will are the quintessential hallmarks of Hinduism.  And so I began calling myself such. 

Then along came the Mahabharata, that vast Indian epic.  It contains many, many treatises on many, many topics (maybe this is why Hindu gods have to have many, many arms?) -- but a main foundation is the concept of dharma.  I'll let you go wiki that for the general definition of the concept.  But as it applies here, the Maha discussed the dharma of the Ksatriya class -- warrior kings.  This is a caste you seldom here about as an American studying Hinduism.  But in the time it took me to read the sentence, it had filled the void I'd been trying to fill all along.

Ksatriyas find themselves in a bit of a karmic conundrum: as somewhat enlightened beings they are supposed to rule justly and all that.  But as kings, they sometimes have to do warrior things like attack and kill.  Hinduism has, as it does for so many things, a tidy way of dealing with that: the Ksatriya dharma is to be a good king, and to sometimes kill in the line of duty.  To do otherwise would be adharma, which might be best understood by an American as bad karma. 

So here is my religion telling me that it's not only ok for me to have warrior's blood, but that I am obligated to act on that nature for the betterment of all people.  (ok I aggrandized a little, but you get the point).  And that exactly reinforced the ideal that I had already come to on my own.  So, as far as being a good Hindu goes, I guess I'm on the right path. 

I have long described my spiritual evolution as a journey to find the religion that matched what was in my heart.  I have always been a Hindu;  I just didn't know it.