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.