Follow-up Question to "You Aren't Responsible"

Q: To quote your essay, you say everything in the universe is running perfectly. I have a question. There are so many murders, rape, violent child molestation, suicide bombings, murders by the army and so on committed each and every day all over the world. Who is responsible for such actions? And how can such actions be condoned or brushed aside as the creation of the mind? Who or what is responsible for so much hate and violence? How can such violence be brushed aside as irrelevant? If a body/mind commits a serial murder, then who or what is responsible for those murders?

A: Yes, everything in the universe is running perfectly. The only way it can be seen otherwise is to view it from a human perspective, which says all these events you list in your letter are bad. Only from your perspective as a human are these things bad, because of your ideas about how it should be.

Perhaps all these events you list are simply part of what happens when such a species as human beings are put on a planet with limited resources and limited capacity to have compassion for one another. Viewed from outer space, by an alien intelligence, we would look like a bunch of ants battling it out over the remains of some fallen fruit. Nothing horrible – just the way it is.

Think bigger than your limited human intelligence. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of the things you said above, unless you look at it as something that needs to be fixed. You can’t fix it. Can it be fixed? Will colonies of ants always die? Will humans always war,  and hurt one another? Will galaxies be swallowed up by other galaxies? It's all just happening. Should it be another way? It can’t be.

Does this mean you should not have compassion, and try to help where you can? Of course not. It is natural to have compassion, and try to help if you encounter a person who is suffering. But you can’t fix the world, and you don’t have to try. The world is running just fine. Some day all the humans in the universe will be extinct, and these particular activities will cease. It’s the blink of an eye.

Who is responsible for the act of rape, the act of murder? No one is. If there is an act of such a kind, the person committing that act is doing the only possible thing he or she can do, given all that came before in the life of that person, with the influence of their DNA, and their conditioning. There is no personal decision or action going on. That’s the case for all action. No one is doing anything they have individually “decided” to do. It all can be no other way, based on everything in the universe that led up to that action. As a society we hold people responsible, but all of that is just happening, too, as it must.

Just watch it happen, with your present awareness that takes it all in. The awareness that watches sees it all, and sees no problem with any of it. It’s the beauty of the unfolding of reality. This is the peace that is at peace with war. This is the love that loves hate. This is the beauty that sees beauty in ugliness. There is only this. The rest is simply your own personal ideas, superimposed on the truth. Truth
doesn't need your ideas.