(This is Part 9 of a continuing series. Go back to Part 8.)
3. The Principle of Goodness
This principle expresses the mystery that Existence is Goodness itself. Or, to put it in a more colloquial way, that God is Good.
This doesn't mean that God is Goodness as opposed to something else that is Badness. Rather, it expresses the principle that since God is Oneness and there is nothing outside of God, that God or Existence itself is Good. And not merely good, but all-good—Goodness itself.
This is not easy to grasp, because the world seems to present us with so much evidence of evil, negativity, suffering, pain, defeat and so on.
But, for example, look at that word "defeat." "Defeat" of course is part of a duality composed of "victory & defeat." And notice that victory can't exist without defeat.
That is, the possibility of victory can't be there without the possibility of defeat. In order for the winning team to have a "victory" the other team must have a "defeat." Defeat makes victory possible.
Similarly, perhaps the negative in life is what makes the positive possible, because the one can't exist without the other. Perhaps negativity is, so to speak, the "cost of doing business" for existence to exist.
Consider your body for a moment. Your exquisite body makes it possible for you to enjoy a friend, to enjoy a sunset, to enjoy a song. If anything, we would certainly call this "good."
Yet this same body opens up the possibility of things we call "bad"—illness, pain, suffering, death. Having the possibility of the "good" inevitably opens up the possibility of the "bad."
The two possibilities arrive together and must do so since
they are actually two faces of one phenomenon. Just as "day" and "night" are actually one phenomenon—the spinning planet.—so perhaps "good" and "bad" are also
one phenomenon that the mind separates into two parts.
In this perception, the "bad" makes the "good" possible. The one can't exist without the other. Existence can't exist without what appears to our rational minds as "dualities."
Among all the things that existence makes possible, surely the highest and deepest and most profound is love. The existence of love in the world is a staggering blessing—the very thing that gives everything, dry and meaningless otherwise, meaning.
And yet this exquisite thing that we call love—or by its other names such as compassion or appreciation—is itself part of a duality called "love and hate."
We don't have to look around very long to see that hatred and anger and brutality exist. Yet perhaps, in a sense, these are the very things that make love possible. Perhaps the very purpose of the universe itself is to make the existence of love possible.
And where does this love come from? It comes through us. When divine love shows up on earth, it comes through us "separate" beings. The divine has no way to hold someone except through us. The divine has no way to tender the sick except through us. "We" are it's hands and arms and eyes.
It is through 'us" that the One expresses love to Itself, wakes up to Itself, appreciates Its own mystery and beauty and sublime majesty.
Since existence makes love and beauty and compassion possible, and since it could not exist except as it is, we might say that what ultimately makes existence good is that it exists at all. If it were otherwise, love and beauty and compassion could not exist.
In this sense, the ultimate Goodness of Existence is simply that it exists at all.
And what a miracle it is! We don't need to be looking for miracles in life. The true miracle is right in front of us all the time—the blue sky, the green trees, the eyes of others, the in-breath and the out-breath.
There's a lovely Zen story about two monks who were comparing masters. One said, "My master can perform miracles. For instance, he can write something on this side of a mile-wide river and the writing will appear on the other side."
Then the other monk said, "My master can perform an even greater miracle: When he's hungry he eats and when he's tired he sleeps."
In other words, the miracle is all around us, right here, in daily existence, if only we can see it. Existence itself—just as it is—is the miracle.
Another aspect of this principle is that this world, poised as it is between joy and suffering, pleasure and pain, is the ideal place to grow in consciousness.
As the Buddha pointed out, if we existed in a more "negative" realm our attention would be so rivited by negativity that we could never grow in consciousness. On the other hand, if we existed in a "positive" realm we would have no incentive to look deeper and discover the true source of our happiness.
Thus this world, finely balanced on a knife's edge between light and darkness, turns out to be the ideal place to grow in love and consciousness, just as we are doing. Perhaps that is the ultimate gift emerging from the divine goodness of existence.
(This is the end of Part 9. Go to Part 10.)
—jim sloman, 12.19.03 for May 20
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