So much of our suffering is mental anguish. God does not avoid exposing us to pain. But, he does not make it worse through mental anguish. So much of our pain is actually caused by our mental reaction to reality. If reality is according to God’s purposes, and God is perfectly loving and all-knowing, then we must conclude that even the most revolting aspects of reality are actually for our good.
At its root, what is mental or emotional pain? It is nothing more or less than the revelation of a difference between our expectations and reality. Most people avoid this revelation at all costs. They will cut off their closest friends, dive into the deepest delusion, and cause themselves great harm to avoid it. This is highly irrational, and the worst possible behavior in the context of obtaining happiness. Avoidance of a more accurate perception of reality will more effectively prevent your obtaining greater happiness than anything else.
Physical pain is a mechanical reaction, but mental pain is not. Our emotional state is 100% subjective. Negative emotions are mental constructs. You can choose how you interpret anything. You can stop and think intentionally about how you are interpreting something, and you can choose to interpret it differently.
Our perspective determines how we interpret life. The difference between pain and investment is the perceived outcome and purpose.
So much of our pain and suffering in life is the result not of external events outside of our control, but our psychological framing of them. In other words, most suffering isn’t about what happens to you, but how you react to it. Pain—even physical pain—need not translate into the negative spiral known as ego death. It need not metabolize into the internal perception of loss, defeat, or failure. If you think for a moment, you might realize that a great many of the negative experiences you’ve experienced were actually events you chose to interpret as loss, defeat, or failure, even though that was not the only way to interpret them.
For example, if I dream of being a world-class ballerina, and due to overuse, I end up breaking my leg during a performance, I could experience a great feeling of loss at realizing that my dream has been shattered. But I wasn’t yet a world-class ballerina, and you can’t lose what you don’t really have. But, you may say, what if I was already a world-class ballerina? The situation is no different once you realize that we do not yet possess the future!
We have to grapple with reality how it really is, not how we would like it to be. It is good and essential to imagine the world how we would like it to be; this is how we determine our goals. However, we have to interact with the world as it really is. Our daily actions are based on reducing the distance between how the world is and how we would like it to be; they cannot be effective if our starting point is not how the world actually is. The elements of reality that we wish were not true are the richest source of new truth. Embracing these realities causes cognitive dissonance and psychological pain. Recognizing these holes as opportunities to learn is essential. These are moments to reflect and ask what our understanding lacks on these points. This is how we progress.
While expanded awareness can come in the form of a visible manifestation of an angel or an audible voice from heaven, it is available to you all the time through your conscience. You can increase your awareness by leveraging the faculties of observation and reason that God has given you. Heeding your conscience perfectly while actively contemplating and questioning your experiences and seeking improvement always result in greater light and truth.
If you seek solutions to the problems in your current level of truth, you will necessarily seek higher truth. Obtaining the next level of truth will solve the problems of the previous level, but it will also generate new ones. At any level of awareness, there will be problems. The question is not whether there are problems. They are unavoidable. The question is what kind of problems do you want? Most normal people go through their whole lives pinching their eyes shut, trying to ignore what they know is out of accord in their lives. They think that by ignoring what they know is not reconciled to their understanding, they can enjoy what they do like about their lives and avoid what they do not. This, however, never works.
As you progress, you encounter greater peace because you no longer suffer from avoidable consequences, and the unavoidable ones don’t bother you as much because you understand why they have to happen.
As you acquire the additional truth that you need to overcome the problems at your present level of understanding, you will inherit a new set of problems, but these problems will pertain to a higher order of existence.
Eventually, you will overcome all problems pertaining to this world. You will still have problems, but they will not be focused on what can or does happen to you. Instead, they will entail the well-being of others. Those who possess higher truth suffer in behalf of others. Your expanded awareness will include seeing the consequences of the limited perspectives of others, consequences they are blind to. You will suffer by knowing how far below their privileges they are living. You will also suffer through investing your increased capacity in others, knowing full well they will not recognize and in only few cases accept what you offer them. You will also experience a special kind of loneliness which is reserved for those who have excelled their peers in light and truth. The next chapter is dedicated to this topic.
One secret of constant peace is letting go of our perception of what the future holds. “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” (Matthew 6:34) This does not mean, however, adopting apathy towards all things future. We must learn to be both tenacious in our seeking to achieve future goals, and completely flexible and subdued towards future outcomes as the future shifts outside of our control. That is the key: laser-like focus on what we can control, and complete submission to what we can’t.
How can we mitigate our sorrows? Once, when Alma the Younger found himself in a particularly hopeless situation, he offered a powerful prayer. The Lord responded to it by blessing him with “strength, that they should suffer no manner of afflictions, save it were swallowed up in the joy of Christ.” (Alma 31:38) Note the very important fact that God did not remove his afflictions from him. Rather, he blessed him that his joy in Christ could surpass his sorrow. Disciples of Christ have always and will always have more earthly sorrow than most. However, their joy in Christ surpasses those sorrows.
What is joy in Christ? In part, it is the peace that can only come when you fully trust God. This is a state of rest, because you cease worrying about things outside of your control, and you are empowered to interpret all negative situations as being blessings sent from an all-knowing God.
If you love God and earnestly reconcile your life to your understanding of his will, everything in your life is precisely what is required to direct you towards the greatest happiness. If you really believe that what happens is the will of an all-loving God, then any perceived loss is actually a better aim towards happiness, not a deviation from it.
Attaining awareness and reconciling yourself fully to it is the only way to find more purpose in life: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” (John 8:32) Trust in God is the only thing that can provide sufficient hope to cross over the unavoidable suffering that exists here. Hope is only efficacious when it is based in reality. Abraham was successful in his endurance towards the contrarian goal of his long-barren wife bearing a child because he was told by God that it would happen. He “against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations, according to that which was spoken, So shall thy seed be.” (Romans 4:18) If God had not told him his wife would have a child, it would have been foolish for him to hope for that in spite of ample observations of her infertility. Our knowledge of God is the source of contrarian hope: “I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope.” (Psalm 130:5) Wishing will not suffice.
God allows the righteous to suffer for two reasons. First, their willingness to suffer for the benefit of others allows blessings and opportunities for growth in those who otherwise would have no claims on greater light and truth because of the law of justice. Second, God allows the exact minimum amount of suffering required to reveal to the righteous the ways in which they do not trust God, that they might repent and grow into a fullness of trust. When someone reaches a fullness of trust in God, nothing in mortality remains that would overcome their trust in God, and their calling and election is made sure.
All it takes to reveal your distrust in God is disobedience to the light he has given you so far. It isn’t as easy to know the limits of your trust in God once you are reconciled to the light you have. That requires experience. As you encounter more and more suffering, you will discover the limits of your trust in him. You can rest assured that you do have a limit, because if you did not, you would already enjoy a fullness of his glory.
Of Jesus we read: “Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered.” (Hebrews 5:8) What does this actually mean? Jesus already trusted the Father to the degree that he kept the commandments he knew. Through his suffering, he acquired the greater trust in the Father necessary to keep the next commandments as he would receive them. These lessons take a deeper meaning when you replace the concept of commandments as explicit instructions (“thou shalt” or “thou shalt not”) with the act of reconciling your actions, feelings, and desires to the character of God as far as you understand it. Through his suffering, he became better acquainted with the character of God while simultaneously deepening his trust in God, which is the inescapable result of knowing him better.
The key to salvation is trust in God, and in a sense, the entire point of this experience is to provide a place where we can necessarily experience a lack of obvious reasons to trust him. As God inflicts more and more severe situations upon us, we have the chance to develop our trust in him in harder and harder situations, until our trust becomes stronger than anything this world can produce.
The branch of a bush can become its own plant through scraping the bark off of the base of the branch and securing moist soil around it (say, in a cup). This gives a signal to the plant to change the purpose of that portion of the branch from a conduit connecting the plant and branch to a selfsustaining root structure for the branch. In time, the roots grow and the branch can be cut off from the plant and placed on its own. The branch then becomes its own bush.
God scrapes off our bark by placing us in seemingly undesirable situations. Whether internal or external, we are given these situations so that we can sprout roots. He makes weakness strong. He does this by first exposing weakness. When we see our inability to cope with something, it is a signal that God has something to teach us there. If we are sufficiently humble, patient, seeking, earnest, and obedient, he will teach us what we lack to make us strong in that area. We can then take that strength to others who have not had the opportunity or means to learn what the Lord has taught us through suffering, and we can help them learn what we know without their having to pass through the sorrow required to teach us.
What is the role of awareness and good and evil in terms of trust in God? You can say and think that you trust God up to the point where nothing in this world can overcome you, but if you are not actually aware of what this world can produce, you can’t really say or think that—at least it is meaningless when you do. As we become more and more aware of things as they really are, we can see the limits to our trust, and in each instance, decide whether or not we do trust God. This is akin to our applying the light he gives us to sorting what is good and what is evil. Being whipped nearly to death and hung on a cross while seemingly cut off from the Father probably seems like evil, but it was the most righteous thing ever done by anyone on this earth. In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus’ prayer was sorting his increased awareness into good and evil: what he would willingly pursue, and what he would not.
One way of quantifying your trust in God is by measuring the amount of suffering you can endure without understanding it before doubting God’s love for you, his wisdom, and his knowledge. The Lord said:
44 But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
45 That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth his rain on the just and on the unjust.
46 For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? (Matthew 5)
Everyone trusts God when he is sending sunbeams and rainbows. This is the least valuable type of trust. We have to grow to trust him when he sends us rain. This is an apt metaphor, because rain is only bad for those who aren’t aware of its necessity to sustain life. Rainy days are just as needful as sunny days.
Just as we are to pray for those who hurt us, and just as our prayers are of limited charity when we pray for those who love us, we are to trust God, especially when his will causes our suffering.
Perfect trust is when you can’t enumerate anything that would cause yourself to doubt God.