I say: karma.

But maybe it's not really like that. Where does evil come from then? And why there is so much of it in this astral plane.

I suffer a lot.

Regards.

So, that to which your reaction is 'suffering' is evil?. That which you find unacceptable is evil?. I don't see evil. I only see beings with conflicting desires.

And if there is evil indeed one might want to consider it as tasks to grow with/learn from and utilize the "suffering" as sign for where one is in ones development.



Harry

I say: sugar and oil.

...with a touch of karma.

i think there is no definitive answer to this question, i dont think it is ment to be one.
it is our perception of it.
some perceptions are educated, some are innate.

i really dont know

there is no conceivable concept to justify the horrors of the miriad ways of suffering in this world

it's a fact of life

a mistery that each of us has to give a personal sense to it

if the suffering has a meaning, it can make you stronger, this is our task to give it a meaning, for us

if not, it is just a force that tears everything apart. such a strong force

Karma stemming from mountains of ignorance would be my guess.

Well it didn't start with us, even animals suffer. Maybe it came along with life and the whole evolutionary urge. Natural selection needs some sort of obstacle, without it there is no criteria for selection. But hell, even planets and stars are in a battle against entropy. Are these obstacles evil? Who's to say.

Here's a Chinese fable:
塞翁失马 - The old man loses his horse
A long time ago, in a kingdom far far away there was a peasant man who lost his horse. All his neighbors came over to console him. "What bad luck!" they would cry. He said, "maybe." The next week the horse returned with a family of wild horses. His neighbors again came over. Astonished they complemented the farmer, "wow, what good luck!" He said, "maybe." He and his son spent the next days breaking in the wild horses. On the third day he heard his son's cry. He son had broken his leg, thrown from one of the wild horses. Story is story, the neighbors and doctor again all came to gawk and said, "what bad luck!" "Maybe." Days later the King's army came through the village in need of able men to go to war. All the towns people said good bye to their sons except for the farmer. "What good luck!" And what did the farmer say...

Good and evil, everything changes.

Only focus on the amount of negativity as you can handle with a smile. In the case of Mother Teresa, Jesus, Kwan Yin, etc that's a large amount. For the rest of us, it's much less. Mother Teresa said the most important thing is to smile and be happy and to make others smile and be happy. If you can't do that, you have to remove your thoughts from the subject altogether. Your happiness is the most important thing. Start from there and you'll help others.

There's that fable of the wandering taoist who enters a land of drought and famine with the inhabitants begging her for divine assistance. Since she was distressed at the state of affairs she had to leave the people and stick to the forest and meditate a lot. When she found her inner peace again, the rains returned.

Yoda

Why questions are tricky. Let's assume that the infinity of existence has a specific reason to this question. Why is it that we would expect, as humans with finite intellectual capacity, to understand such an explanation? I guess what we are looking for is some reassurance that there is an answer, somewhere, whether we can understand it or not, and that the answer would somehow justify what we perceive to be evil. Why should there be? Does a salmon perceive the bear to be evil as it tears it to pieces for it's meal? Clearly there is behavior in the world that causes pain. Resistence to that pain causes suffering. Why should there be a reason?

The way I rationalize the existence of evil is by evoking the concepts of taiji and mutual arising. There is no evil without good and no good without evil. They arise together. One is not recognized until defined by the presence of the other. When there is a capacity to experience good then whatever is other than good becomes evil. The more extreme the capacity to appreciate good, the more extreme the evil can be...

Balance,

It can't be all orgasmic bliss

Agreed. If you are experiencing pain, it is a strong message something is wrong and must be corrected.

Evil is a judgment. To Americans, Osama Bin Ladin is evil. To the Taliban, he is a saint. Different sides to the same coin.

true, but you can bounce around between bliss and peace and bliss and compassion, etc no need to dip into pure pain.

"For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"

My favourite Shakespeare quote.

It's actually quite precise... 'Thinking' comes from our limited ego-mind... If you lower your awareness to the level of the heart you may notice that there is an exact balance - there is exactly as much good as there is bad... If you lower your awareness even further down to the level of the belly, you might notice that even that collapses - there is no good or bad - only everything...

Our whole culture is based on the illusion that if we somehow manage to capture, hold on to and hoard more 'good' that life will be better... To do this we must basically suppress and ignore half of reality... and then build complex illusions to try and hold on to the good and stay away from the bad... This creates suffering and unconsciousness.

Its part focus. We read the newspaper and its a concentration of the worst happenings in our city/state of millions, country of 100's of millions or our world of many billions. The millions of things going right, people helping others, feeding their kids, going to school and jobs. The ordinary good all around us matters much less then the sensationalistic horror 100's or 1000's of miles away.

Thats not saying horrors should be ignored, but we should have balance in our views. Balance that makes us grateful for what we have. Instead of impotent screaming at the state of things and THEMS that caused it; we should find the little goodness's we can do, whether charity or simple kindness's to others and work from there.


Michael


on the other hand;
There is a time to scream and rage at the injustices of the world. Get it out, don't let it fester.
There is a time for silence and selfishness.


We live in the world.
We draw circles.
Us, them,
good, bad.
ME, everything else,
(thats the big one)
Before we leave this world
we need to work on that
last one.

This is a very beautiful question. One of those simple questions who has no simple answer. Which does not mean that it has no answer. Just that the answer is composite of many parts. All of them true.

The first thing that we observe is that this world is limited. One of the first thing that kids learn is that the pie will end. The fun will end, and after Christmass there is another day which is not Christmas. Now this is a very big lessons that spiritual people tend to throw in the trash as soon as possible. Coming from well off families, the idea that the amount of food in this world is limited is somehow an easy to ignore truth.

And this is the first part of the answer: limited resources.
And here also you have the quote from my own icon: We are here to devour each other.
It is a bum eats bum world.

Then comes the second part. Because even when we have limited resources we are also quite good in dividing them in the worse possible way. I mean you easily can have in a society 2% of the population have 98% of the resources. This kind of percentages are quite common among economists. They speak about 20/80 and similar (meaning the 20 percent of the population has 80% of the resources), and so on. And here the keyword if you are REALLY interested in following this line of thought are Power Law, and Vilfredo Pareto.

So interestingly there are many systems in nature where if an element gets well off, then it has a higher chance to be more well off in the future. When this happens the result is a power law. Which means, few elements will have MASSIVE amount more than the median (the one element that has as many people richer than people poorer).

This law has actually been recognised many times in spiritual history. Jesus called it "to who has shall be given". If I remember well Lao Tzu spoke about the way of heaven, and the way of human. The way of human being to give to who already have, and to not give to who does not have. While the way of haven is to give to who does not have. In any case you have those two principles. And some systems follow one, and some follow the other. It turns out that is REALLY hard to make a system of one kind (say economy) into a system of the other. People have tried it for a long time. Some people think that actually power law are the more fair system, respect to the bell curve (which is what you get from the "way of heaven" system type) subdivision.


So we have this second law of nature: Most system are of a "to who has shall be given" type.

Add this to the limited resources system and you have a system where many people are in great need.


Now the big question is, if this is the natural state for living beings in this planet. Why do we have goodness, reciprocicity. Why do we have people like you asking this question. After all now it seems like a really dumb question, right?
Well, no. You are right to answer this question, because you are a member of the human species. And human beings for the great majority have evolved a sense of fairness, and goodness. And a sense of disgust for things that are really unfair. Most of us are willing to pay a serious price just to see unfair treatment being punished. And interestingly enough, other primates behave in similar way. So if goodness came from heaven it wasn't given just to us.

But if we all have been given this sense of fairness, why don't we all follow the way of heaven, and give to who needs, and to hell with the power law distribuiton, and so on.

Well, no, because our sense of fairness only reaches a certain point. Few people would be willing to die because they feel that it would be fair. We are willing to pay some, but not to pay with our own life.

Maybe there were some people in the past that were willing to die for the sense of fairness. Unfortunately enough of them did not reach a reproductive age enough so that their genes would be around.
Yet, some fairness is generally good. Both to the individual, and to the kins (people who are in the same group, and share the same dna).

And then according to some research there are also a minority of people who have NO sense of fairness at all. In fact they never feel love or warmth toward another human being. Life for them is simply a matter of domination. SOme people think that they are the cause of evil. Yet, they make great warriors. In the right context they can be very useful to the society. On the other hand are really dangerous as leaders.

And yes, because another reason why there is evil, is because most of us tend to respect authority. Even those of us who seem so rebellious. Now I don't know if we evolved to respect authority, or we were conditioned. But for sure most of us would be willing to make other people suffer if an authority people told us that it is ok.

Now sum this information with the fact that there is scarcity, the little we have is spread through a power law (also power), there are few people who have no sense of guilt, and that we are willing to cause suffering to be ok with authority, and you have an explosive mixture. A place where few people only desire to dominate. Some of them will do anything they can to emerge int he top part of the power law. Once they are there they have authority (either they have it or they buy it). Then with this authority they just can keep on dominating. And this gives to the rest of the people the evil sensation.

Now interestingly if there were no people with no sense of guilt there would also be less evil sensation.
But also if we were all with no sense of guilt. Because those people (also known as sociopath) tend to feel very little pain themselves. It is the mixture which makes the pie tasty.

Now this is the material background. To this add the rest that you know. The need to require revenge when you have suffer. A need that spiritual people try hard to overcome. But for the great majority is very much present. Also because it is just not easy to do it. You can't just wish it. Take a person who has suffered a lot, say tortured in prison. Free him, and you have a person who is psychologically a mess. And will often try to get revenge. AFter all this is just part of his heart trying to feel there is some fairness in this world. And we have already said how we like people who like fairness.

Hmm.

And then you have the other side. After you have suffered you will try to avoid that situation. And this makes you fearful, and unspontaneous. While sometimes is good to be fearful, some other is not so good. And here you have the middle age person who has been wonded by relationship, and never let himself (or hemself) slip into one. And this causes even more suffering.

And you might say that the last two are actually caused by ignorance, and anger, and fear. But they are also caused by a sense of fairness, and a sense of wanting to protect yourself. But I will agree on the ignorance bit.

And then the last bit (again on ignorance) is that we were not borned learned. We have to try, and test, and make error to make experience. But all this experience caused pain, that bounced around, until someone was able to forgive it, or just died of old age.

So you are asking why do we have evil? I would say there are many things (behaviour/people) that we would call evil. But all together the situation is a complex one that puts together a world of limited resources, with a fundamental law of nature of to who has shall be given, to a lot of ignorance (unavoidable in beings that are born innocent but ignorant, and die wise and guilty). And all this have evolved some control mechanism, of fariness, and self preservation, and testing around, and a psyche that works hard to avoid suffering, causing some time even more suffering (but to others). But somehow all those elements were succesful in making a species that manages in enough cases to produce viable ofsprings. Which is all Nature care.

In all this the question is, how can YOU be happy?

Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.
All can know good as good only because there is evil.

Therefore having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short contrast each other;
High and low rest upon each other;
Voice and sound harmonize each other;
Front and back follow one another.

Therefore the sage goes about doing nothing, teaching no-talking.
The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease,
Creating, yet not possessing,
Working, yet not taking credit.
Work is done, then forgotten.
Therefore it lasts forever.

Tao Te Ching