How many times in our lives have we asked ourselves, “What did I do to deserve this?” “Why do such troubles happen to me?”
A person might get fired, be stricken by a serious illness, or experience the loss of a loved one and start wondering how to receive answers to these heartfelt questions.
Sometimes, after giving our all, everything turns out wrong and it’s unclear why. So, what is the connection between our actions and the results we experience in life?
“Hardships serve to awaken deep questions about their cause and purpose, so that we would want to look outside our narrow individualistic worldview and seek to discover the true integral state we exist in.”
We live in a paradoxical world where a criminal could live a beautiful life while a simple worker, earning his bread by the sweat of his brow, could suffer. And we’re left wondering how life could be so unfair.
We all exist in a vast, intricate network of connection, and our inability to understand such contradictions in life comes from the fact that we fail to feel the full extent of our interdependence. As such, we neither perceive the far-reaching chain reaction of our influence in the world, nor do we feel the responses to our actions clearly and directly.
However, every nuance of our behavior and thought, whether conscious or unconscious, affects the system of nature we live in and enables a response. We are simply unable to connect the dots and understand exactly why things happen the way they do.
How Your Past Actions Influence Your Future
Although it is common to seek out past actions when we encounter negative experiences later in life, trying to connect the dots in such a way is an over-simplistic and incorrect approach that fails to take many variables into account.
Hardships serve to awaken deep questions about their cause and purpose, so that we would want to look outside our narrow individualistic worldview and seek to discover the true integral state we exist in. The more we suffer, the readier we become to match ourselves to the interdependent and interconnected system of nature we live in. When we begin to uncover the vastness of this system, we will see what kind of influence we have on reality, and what actions can be considered as good or bad.
Today, we evaluate our lives according to a very limited and linear perception. Until we develop a new perception and sensation of the integral nature, we will continue walking around in circles, accumulating more and more pain. In a sense, we are like a child who eats only sweets because it appears to us as most enjoyable, not understanding the harm we are causing our body, which will catch up on us sooner or later.
How to Deal With Difficult Situations
So what should we do when we experience various forms of suffering? Firstly, we must not blame or devour ourselves, nor should we delve into the past to see what we or someone else did to cause the suffering. Instead, we must accept the inevitability of the situation, and use the question about the cause of the suffering it awakens in us in order to increase our connection with our surrounding environment. In order for this to happen, we must be in a supportive society of people who also want to rise to a higher understanding of their lives. As the wisdom of Kabbalah explains, it is the only way to positively affect the world: to find a group of like-minded people and start uniting with them.
Under this new perception, we will see how our increasing unification brings us into increasing balance and harmony with nature, increasing our happiness, confidence and comfort. In other words, the cause of any problem in life is our incomplete perception that fails to see how we’re independently connected to each other.
In the upgraded perception of reality that matches nature’s connectedness, we will perceive every situation as good, since we would see anything happening to us at every moment as a means to rise above the situation-at-hand, and reveal the force of love, bestowal and connection that acts throughout nature. All events of our lives and throughout humanity’s history are leading us toward the realization of this lofty goal.
