Opening to Universal Kindness
Goodness of the Goddess
The fact of human suffering has long been referred to as evidence of lack of an intelligent creator of the universe, and indeed of any divine order whatsoever.
I want to question this premise, and instead explore the notion that human suffering is evidence of a very profound gift: the gift of freedom.
That we suffer because we are free.
It’s a pretty challenging idea, sure, but so so worth the investment of time and energy to welcome into your life and heart. Hopefully this piece of writing will allow you to do exactly that!
Of course, given all the suffering of the world, some might call it the curse of freedom. Many are those who have shaken their fists at God — or at the cold silent nothingness of a dead and unresponsive universe.
However: when we upgrade our worldview to include the perspective of a reincarnating soul, a living cosmos contexted in an infinitely deep meta-universe, and the agency and autonomy with which we can live as interdependent-yet-free adult individuals, we gain the ability to re-consider our embodiment in four-dimensional spacetime as an intense and profound learning experience. A gift beyond all comprehension!
As children of the living cosmos, we are literally learning how to create, in collaboration with the immortal intelligence of the Meta-universe. And it so happens that suffering is integral to how we learn.
Here I am drawing on Duane Elgin’s conclusion that God / the Meta-Universe / the Divine Creative Intelligence who originally manifested the universe is ‘radically non-interfering’ in human affairs. This non-interference is not a symptom of indifference, but of an impartiality on the part of the Creator that enables us to make our own choices, learn from them, and thus determine our own course of evolution, transformation, and creative (self-)manifestation.
The radical non-interference of the Creator / Meta-universe allows and enables us created beings to enjoy radical responsibility, creative self-determination, and total freedom to evolve.
Check it out:
“The Meta-universe does not interfere with our actions and learning. We humans can devastate the ecology of the planet, drive into extinction millions of life-forms, and doom a billion or more humans to lives of utter poverty and desperation — and still the Meta-universe will not intrude. The fierce and uncompromising liberty we have to make mistakes demonstrates how much our actions do in fact matter. With no benevolent deity to intervene and soften the suffering of life, or to reduce the destruction of the environment, or to incline humanity in a more altruistic direction, we are obliged to recognise the immense gift of freedom that is given to us.”
— Duane Elgin in Awakening Earth.
How about that, eh?
Recognise the immense gift of freedom that is given to us.
This is such a radical notion, it really astounds me…
To look upon the horrors of human civilisation, to fully feel the unspeakable tragedy and ugliness and wretchedness of it all, and to then conclude that yes, this is all the result of a profound divine generosity… it is a challenging idea indeed.
But if we can digest this, and indeed weave it into our lived understanding of who and what we are, and who and what the world is, then we pave the way for a profound opening of the heart to all suffering, everywhere, through all time. And that is a learning — indeed a liberation — like no other.
We become able to see the divine generosity evidenced in absolutely all phenomena — even the distorted insanities and oppressions of human behaviour. We realise that we participate in that generosity, every moment of our endlessly creative incarnation.
Even in the deepest evil, we can sense divine love.
Far from leading us into denial or ‘idiot compassion’, we are drawn into a profound heartfelt compassion and solidarity with all suffering beings. We recognise that they too, just like us, have freely incarnated into this cosmos in order to learn, create, and participate in the great cosmic play that seeks beauty above all else.
Only, apparently you have to do a lot of experiments in making ugly things (and experiences) to really know and appreciate the meaning and value of beauty. And we have got really good at making ugliness, as modern society so cruelly demonstrates.
But could it be that this age of excruciating-yet-profoundly-deep learning is actually taking us somewhere… is setting the foundation for a collective awakening to the unspeakable beauty that is possible for human living, here on the ‘original flowering Earth’?
To a communion with the divine creative intelligence of the infinite Meta-universe?
Yes… well.. but…
“To know God, you have to stare evil in the face”, said the Indian saint Ramakrishna.
God isn’t going to grab your head and twist you to confront evil and all the suffering wrapped up in that vast energetic vortex. In just the same way, God isn’t going to force to realise and embrace your total freedom and radical responsibility for all that is. You have to choose to do these things for yourself. This is part of the process of accepting the gift of freedom and putting it to the best possible use: the (co-)creation of beauty.
Realising your capacity for evil, indeed your unconscious complicity in the evil of the world, is an awakening to your power, agency and autonomy to self-determine, to affect others, and to co-create this entire universe in collaboration with innumerable feeling, intelligent, and similarly freedom-gifted beings.
Just think: if the Meta-universe did intervene, and remove the possibility of human suffering, even to a small extent, our learning and agency would be compromised.
If God forced you to be a certain way, or robbed you of an ounce of the learning that is available here… well, that wouldn’t be very kind at all, would it?
God (the Meta-universe) clearly has total faith in our ability to learn, grow and evolve from even the most unspeakably painful experiences. This may not be at all clear from the zoomed-in personal perspective that we inhabit while incarnated, but from the zoomed-out perspectives of the reincarnating soul, the collective species-soul and the cosmic world-soul (who we may well equate with God), it is crystal clear that all suffering is noble beyond words. (Note: we are gradually learning how to inhabit and operate from these perspectives while incarnated. Not bad. Let’s keep going with that…).
All suffering, without exception, is continuously informing our species-wide collective intelligence, and indeed the very ability of our living cosmos to evolve towards ever greater consciousness, complexity, richness, depth and harmony.
All experience feeds the Meta-universe with new energy, new information, and new possibility.
All suffering can and will be metabolised into ongoing beauty-making, soul-making and world-making.
You wait and see!
I guess this is the precisely the kind of prophecy I need to hear (and share) right now… an affirmation that it’s all meaningful… if only we choose to make it so. If we choose to let ALL of the suffering into our hearts, break us open, and initiate us into the infinite expanse of creative freedom that we inhabit and enjoy for all eternity.
“All is gain” concluded explorer Chris Bache following his psychedelic travails into the abominable depths of human suffering, and emergence into the infinite fields of divine love-light...
All is gain… could it be?
The Meta-universe, in its all-embracing generative kindness, clearly does not wish for an ounce of our freedom to be compromised. It wishes for us to realise ourselves as creators, standing at the crucible of consciousness, free to dream, weave and alchemically recreate entire realities. And to make it all the sweeter we are invited to do this together, in radical and sacred collaboration. Divine non-interference is a gift that allows our full freedom to create, discover and learn for ourselves, on our own terms, at a pace that is suitable and appropriate for our unique soul.
As Elgin writes:
“Our universe is deeply caring but intent on giving us the precious freedom we need to develop our unique capacity for reflective self-determination. The universe exemplifies a masterful and elegant design throughout that seems entirely intent on supporting our process of becoming self-referencing beings and civilisations”.
I sometimes think of all this in the following way: the Divine Goddess so enjoyed her infinite creative powers that she decided to gift these powers to countless, countless, children, who are each given the chance to realise themselves each Creator-Gods and -Goddesses (or divine souls) in their own right… all indeed inseparable from the original infinite immortal intelligence of the Mother… yet utterly free to self-determine and self-create!
What paradoxical miracle… what magic… what genius!
Ultimately we are invited to realise that we are able to self-create and co-evolve with precisely the same level of freedom of the primordial divine creative intelligence. And that freedom is total, unparalleled, unfathomable…
Realising this culminates in our communion and identification with the ‘Diamond Luminosity’: the awakening of the Diamond Soul and the birth of the Future Human.
That’s where we’re going, as a collective, as a species, as a cosmic community of beings..
Now all this is far-out prophesying is (fairly) easy for me to write from my relatively privileged, safe, comfortable lifestyle. Yet not one street away there is a single mother with no money to feed her daughter, an opioid addict losing touch with reality in a filthy alleyway, and a good-hearted but heavily oppressed young man, eyes red from a night of drinking, sitting down for another day at a job he hates, but sees no alternative.
I think all of these words could very likely isolate me from that reality of suffering, and help me inhabit a bubble of self-congratulating ‘kindness’ while my brothers and sisters starve all around me. So I am putting myself to the test: do these (heartfelt) philosophies make me more actively kind? I can say affirmatively that they do.
Sensing divine generosity, seeing the gift of freedom that all beings have accepted and embraced… this enables me to see and relate to my fellow souls in radically new ways.
As I meet all kinds of people in my day-to-day life, my unconscious reactivity to ‘how they are’ is increasingly obvious to me. This transparency makes available a whole new range of possibilities for seeing and relating to others. Qualities like listening, generosity, empathy, and kindness all become available. And I am stepping into them, scary as they are, slowly and humbly. It’s slow progress, but I am becoming more generous with my energy… because I’m relaxing the attachment to any of this life-energy belonging to me, and instead simply allowing it to flow where it clearly wants to go: through my heart and straight to the pulsing hearts of the people around me. It’s such a beautiful journey in recreating oneself anew, ad infinitum — and none of it would be possible without our shared suffering.
“Instead of being so bound up with everyone, why not be everyone?”, wrote Rumi.
The moment we recognise that ‘their’ suffering is our suffering, then we have entered a life-changing, soul-making lesson in expanding our consciousness. This is always a creative act: an opportunity to re-create ourselves as a wider and vaster being than the “small survival-mode ego” and to accept the invitation to be more, be vast, indeed to be everyone.
As far as I can tell this is an infinite process of learning, recreation, collaboration and transformation, proceeding through an open-ended number of embodied lifetimes…
Be radically and unapologetically yourself, by all means — the universe wishes nothing less for you. But be everyone as well, and we are well on the way to realising ourselves as a unified humanity, inseparable from one another and from our surrounding more-than-human biosphere and wider cosmos. That’s the invitation here: to imaginatively experience yourself and others in an infinite multiplicity of different ways. Clearly, we have already accepted this invitation, and are now reckoning with the full implications of receiving the gift of total unexcelled freedom!
I will leave you with a little more Elgin. Read his books for more — they are absolute goldmines of visionary wisdom and practical thinking.
“If we celebrate our freedom, then we should not curse the pain and distress of our world. We are here to grow in compassion and respond to that suffering. Reality is not an illusion or game. It is a process that grinds through living systems in a fierce and unrelenting flow of learning. The undeniable reality of needless suffering teaches us compassion and responsibility, awakening these qualities within free individuals.”
