Is the World Perfect As It Is? Ram Dass’s Reflections on Karma
As I was doing some research for my current series of articles on quantum physics and spirituality, I was dipping into My View of the World by Erwin Schrödinger, where I came across a passage mentioning the opposing positions of philosophical optimism and pessimism. He wrote: “There have been, we know, very notable philosophers — such as Schopenhauer — who have declared that our world is a sad and ill-made place, and there have been others — like Leibniz — who have declared it the best of all conceivable worlds”¹.
This was very striking. How could two men, looking at and experiencing the same world, come to such opposite conclusions? This presumably had something to do with their psychology, or their preconceived beliefs. My immediate thought was that Schopenhauer might be looking at the world as a human being might react, while Leibniz was looking at the world, as it were, from the point of view of God.
It would seem that this was only half the story, however, because Leibniz’s optimistic worldview, although related to God, appears to be more of a logical deduction. He derives this from the starting premise that a rational God exists who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, so that “it would be inconsistent with his goodness and power to realize a world that is not as good as possible”². The problem, of course, with such a statement is that we have no way of knowing whether the ultimate creative principle is indeed omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent; this is merely an assumption or a belief on Leibniz’s part.
It is not surprising that Leibniz’s philosophy was attacked and satirised by Voltaire in his novel Candide, in which the hero’s tutor Pangloss, who claims that “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds”, is obviously intended to represent Leibniz. During his life Candide experiences war, earthquakes, cannibalism, slavery, and so on. Voltaire would seem to be in tune with Schopenhauer’s later viewpoint.
Reading that reference to Leibniz in Schrödinger’s book reminded me of something I once heard in a talk given by the spiritual teacher Ram Dass on an audiocassette called Seasons of Our Lives. I’m going to transcribe the relevant section here.
The context is that he had been contacted by the parents of a two-year-old girl who had fallen into a swimming pool, and had been pulled out, having been a long time underwater. She was taken to hospital alive, packed in ice, and her functions were kept going, but it was not clear after a few days whether she would ever recover, having suffered brain damage.
Ram Dass says that what was obvious from the telephone conversations “was the incredible pain, fear, confusion”, yet they were seeking guidance, a “perspective on what was happening”. He found himself saying things like: “It isn’t for us to know for what function this being has taken birth, and whether the particular work that she needs to do is over or not”, and “we can pray that she will be healed, but we have to relinquish our attachment to the outcome. This is a moment at which we can grow strong”.
Having established the context, now we come to the main point. He relates how his guru in India had said to him “Ram Dass, don’t you see that it’s all perfect”. This is somewhat different from Leibniz’s philosophical logic, rather a statement by a noted spiritual teacher, presumably based upon years of deep meditation and reflection.
Ram Dass’s immediate reaction would probably have been applauded by Schopenhauer: “And that used to offend me. We were only a hundred miles from Bangla Desh, where at that moment millions of people were starving. There was anger, there was violence, there was paranoia running rampant in the cultures of the world. I was suffering, everybody I knew was suffering. How could he say a stupid thing like that?”
He then continues: “Now my dealings with him had gone on over years and I had come to have such a profound appreciation of the depths of this being, that when he said something that was different from the model of the universe that I held, instead of rejecting it out of hand, assuming that I’m right, I would let it in, and just sit with it, and stir with it, and work with it, and pain with it. And then he would say ‘Ram Dass, serve everyone, help people, you’ve got to feed everybody. There’s a lot of suffering, you’ve got to help people’. And I’d say, he just said there’s a lot of suffering, I’ve got to help people, and he said it was perfect. How does that all go together?”
“Buddha said all sentient beings who take form (suffer); there is inherent in the taking of form suffering. It’s the first noble truth of the four truths of Buddhism. And then he also said ‘You must work to end suffering’. If you get into Buddhist studies deeply enough, you will begin to see that you are dealing with a paradox, that if indeed suffering ended, so would you. Since you are a separate form, and all forms are suffering. So you are faced with living with the paradox that the nature of existence has inherent within it suffering. You work full time to end suffering, even though suffering won’t end until you do, and everything else does. Can you hear that paradox at all?”
He goes on to discuss the implication of the perfect, and its relationship to the concept of God. He might say like Job (in the Old Testament) : “If that little two-year-old girl dies, ‘God, what are you doing? Why are you screwing up?’ ”. He then reflects that he has “this little teeny, limited vision, mainly controlled by my rational mind which is a little sub-system of a little sub-system. It isn’t even a very interesting way of knowing the universe. I sit there like this little ant with an elephant. I say to him/her/it ‘you really blew it that time’. I’m saying that from my own fear of death, that’s where I’m saying it from”.
He then goes on to present what he claims is a thought experiment, but which we suspect is close to what he actually believes: “Let me give you another metaphor, just to play with, this is just illusion, we won’t treat this as real. Just imagine, there are millions of beings in the cosmos, lots of them. And they all have unique stuff they have to do. I’m talking about karma. They all have karma. They all have a psychic DNA predisposition; does that make you feel more comfortable? Except that it’s not heredity, it’s karma. And it’s psychic, not physical.
And each being is going through a series of experiences that are working out the disequilibriums that are what are composing karma. You can call them disequilibriums, you can call them attachments. And it comes time to take a birth, because of certain work… This being says ‘I’ve got to clear this up, clear this up, and clear this up. I wonder if I can clean them all up in one birth. Why not? I’ll be born into the poorest tribe in Africa. I’ll be raped when I’m 9, that would clean that one up. I’ll get syphilis and die when I’m 17. I can clean the whole thing up quick’.
Just imagine now, this isn’t real. This being looks around in the cosmos for a couple of other beings who happen to have a karmic configuration, that makes them need to have born to them this being. And they find each other. It’s a huge computer, imagine it, a monstrous computer in the sky, ok. And they come together, and the conception occurs, and this being says ‘see you later, here I go’. Goes in, goes through the route, gets raped, says ‘I’ve been raped’. Terrible, everyone’s saying ‘ shame on you, you’ve been raped’. And they shun her. She gets syphilis, and she’s not treatable and she gets sicker. Everybody has pity and sadness, and her parents say ‘don’t leave us, don’t leave us’, and there’s a tremendously melodramatic scene at the deathbed. And psychologists are called in to help heal, and everybody’s saying ‘don’t go, don’t go, heal, stop, stay’. But she dies anyway. And the moment after she dies, she says ‘well, that takes care of that, that and that’.
Now we’re just imagining, this isn’t real of course. The real stuff is the suffering we’re all having here, right. Don’t lose sight of it; we’ve got to keep the seasons of our lives real. We’re just playing games. I’m crazy and we’re playing games. That’s fair enough isn’t it, this won’t threaten anybody, I won’t tell you it’s real”. (That should reassure anyone who actually believed the scenario he described.)
On a similar theme, he mentions the story of another child: “I correspond with a lovely woman in Alaska who had eight children, seven children then her eighth child was mongoloid. And at first there was a lot of trauma and fear. And over the years, this woman teaches yoga, she has written me such joyful letters, how that child who has continued to live has brought such incredible joy and awakening to so many beings. All the mother had to do was give up the model of what it was she expected the child to be”.
A frequent argument made by atheists, and non-believers in general, is that they cannot understand how a merciful and benevolent God could allow suffering. This has always seemed a somewhat shallow argument to me, even apart from the obvious objection of how anyone can know the nature of a being they don’t believe in. I’ve always assumed that we should think more deeply about the issue, although I don’t think that I could have expressed myself with such clarity as Ram Dass. I don’t know what you’ve made of his account, but at the very least he has made a coherent case for why this objection is invalid.
As he then concluded in that talk: “Suffering is grace, because pleasure keeps you asleep in the habits you are used to, the way you’re used to thinking about the universe. Suffering is the disconfirmation of your expectations, forces confrontation, and gives you the opportunity, and in that sense suffering is grace. That’s part of the statement ‘don’t you see, it’s all perfect?’ ”.
I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics and astrology. All these articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here).
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Footnotes:
1. Cambridge University Press, 1964, translated by Cecily Hastings, p11
2. Catherine Wilson in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
