Hi Larsof Norway, What you have written is very, very mature, and very much appreciated by me.
Catholicism does not accept what I am about to write here (my thought). But as you say this world is filled with evil. And God gives us free will.
We are not in heaven. We are in the material creation. This is God’s insane asylum for disoriented souls. All of us are rebellious souls, placed here for our rehabilitation, our redemption.
The story of Adam and Eve actually applies to all of us. And because of misuse of our little free will, we have been placed outside of the Garden of Eden. God said “Do not partake of the fruit of the tree of good and evil.” This is the world of duality. There is no duality in the spiritual world. Only good, only happiness. But God said, when He excommunicated Adam and Eve, that in the material world, we will have to earn our livlihood by the sweat of our brow. Hard labor. Everything hard. And much suffering.
God is not unkind. But we are in therapy. Suffering causes a man to repent. To re-evalute, to desire to change his ways.
Jesus says we are all like “prodigal sons”. This means that the material world is not our real home. And He sends His son, to call us to come back home. But to regain entrance into the spiritual realm, we have to get our credentials together. Only one credential: “Love the Lord thy God with all of your heart, all of your strength.” This means, every thought, word will be with profound feelings of love, only for Giving pleasure to God. Being an official “church member” is not sufficent. It is only the beginning, a start.
There are so many social codes in scripture. The Jewish law books. Jesus says in Bible that the rules are good…….but he has come to give the “next step”, which is: “Accept the yoke that I wear.” We have to become controlled by the quality of love of God, that is now dormant within our hearts.
We are here in the material world, outside of the Garden of Eden (the spiritual world). Rebellion has taken place in our hearts, only for one reason…………we are envious of the dominion of God. Eveyone in the material realm is envious of God. We want His fame, His power, His wealth, His knowledge, His beauty, His equanimity. We all have a desire to be number one……we want everyone to be our servant, everyone should adore us. We want to be God.
This desire puts us all in competition with each other. The history of this planet is the history of imperialism, slavery, exploitation and wars. We cannot live without these anomalies. All the sin of this world is an extrapolation of our original sin……that we want to God, the cental figure, the most important person.
No one here is innocent, except God’s representatives, that He sends here to counsel us. We are powerless to stop sinning. The only power to stop sin is by virtue of the degree of the love of God that is being re-awakened within our hearts. Everything that happens here is referred to in Bible as “sewing and reaping”. We all get what we deserve. But the church has rejected the concept of reincarnation……..the idea that if we do not become perfect in this lifetime, we have to return to this material creation and reapeat the course, with another chance to go forward, in our march back home, to God. Therefore one is born beautiful and wealthy, another is born crippled and ugly, etc. That is the “reaping”, for the “sewing” we have done in previous lifetimes.
The spirit soul is eternal. It cannot be wet or dried. It cannot be burned by fire. It cannot be withered by the wind. It cannot be harmed by bullets, or disease.
We have these material bodies. But we are not these bodies. We are eternal spirit. But we are in therapy. We are forced to identify with these material bodies. It is like a bad dream. In this dream we experience old age, disease and death……although these things do happen to the spirit which we are. These experiences are for teaching us to repent. These experiences are for causing us to become humble. Humble enough to accept that God is in control. But nothing is really happening to us as eternal spirit soul.
When love of God re-awakens and becomes mature in our hearts, God enables us to understand that “I am not this body.” All the desires of the flesh “evaporate”. This is called self-realization. The evils of this world are part of the bad dream of bodily identification. One who knows himself as spirit, considers these experiences to be superficial. He doesn’t care about apparent good or bad fortune. He knows that he is eternal. He knows he is not this material body. His pleasure is spiritual pleasure. He doesn’t look for pleasure in the things of this world that cannot endure, that are fleeting.
The bottom line is that the only evil that is in this world is the evil that exists within our hearts, and the evil that we have earned in the process of “sewing and reaping”. And one who is self-realized and has love of God alive in his heart, he thinks to himself. “All these things that are coming to me, these pains and misfortune…….actually I deserve a lot worse……but God is so kind….he is only given me a token of what I really deserve.” And he goes on praising God, glorifying God, and loving God with all of his heart.
Spiritual life is not about making our lives materially perfect. Spiritual life is about becoming qualified for leaving this place and not coming back again. But people are always praying to God for making their lives nice in the material world. This is the worship that Jesus rejects, the worship of mammon. These people are like the prisoners in jail, who are not trying to qualify for getting out…..they are wanting to make it into an nice place. It is not a nice place. God told this to Adam and Eve. He told that they were now entering a world of hardship and struggle, because they had left the spritual world, the Garden of Eden behind, by misuse of their free will. Then he sends His son to advise us properly, and to take us back home. But most of us want to make this jail into a nice place, and pray to God to help us in this way.
