We need a massive, planetary paradigm shift. This all starts with our human state of mind. Let’s begin with a discussion about our current, collective belief about what is going on here when it comes to suffering.

A belief is merely an idea or perspective that is presumed to be true. We have presumed many things on this Earth, so let’s look at the big picture of what is commonly believed.

Here is the most destructive idea about what constitutes a human being: It is believed that to be human means to possess both good and evil in one’s consciousness. It’s believed that we are deliberately created this way by God.

Let’s examine this belief for a moment. Why would God create beings that possessed both good and evil? What would be the point? Can you think of a single, positive reason for this?

There is a strange discrepancy between what we know in our hearts to be true, and what we see all around us in terms of the conditions on our planet.

Our hearts tell us that all should be love, and that pain and suffering are wrong and shouldn’t exist. Our hearts do not believe that there is any validity whatsoever in pain. In fact, as human beings, we will do everything we can to avoid the experience of pain altogether.

Yet pain exists, nonetheless. So how do we cope with this fact? When we can’t avoid the experience of pain, we do the next best thing. We rationalize it. We tell ourselves all sorts of fairy tales about why pain, as unpleasant as it is, is necessary. We even go so far as to raise it to the level of a religious, spiritual experience.

If you pay attention to the news, you can see that the world is virtually in flames with suffering. This includes human beings along with plants and animals. In fact, did you know that along with our own human troubles, we are at the beginning of the sixth mass extinction event on planet Earth? (The last one was the dinosaurs.)

Perhaps positive thinking dictates that we don’t ponder such obvious atrocities. Yet those of us on this planet who are better off than most have a moral obligation to do so.

The majority of people on this planet may be experiencing too much suffering to have the luxury of contemplating human and planetary evolution. But there are a great many of us who can certainly afford to do so.

I want to invite you to go to a place in your consciousness where you may have never ventured before. I want to suggest that you allow yourself to entertain ideas that perhaps never occurred to you and to question things that you didn’t know you were allowed to question.

Look at the pictures of these gorgeous animals above this writing. I want to point out their beauty and adorableness for a specific reason. That reason has to do with the food chain. The food chain, in my opinion, is entirely incongruent with the creation of such magnificence. And these photos represent only a tiny sample of the breathtaking beauty of all living things on our illustrious planet Earth. Contrast that beauty with the nature of the food chain.

The food chain is a very bizarre phenomenon where in order for something to live, something else must die. Eventually, literally every living thing must die in order to keep things in balance. So living things are killed and replaced through reproduction in this very delicate balance where one species is not allowed to overtake another. But more importantly, the food chain represents a situation where the death of one begets the life of another.