The imperfection of the world
Creative people have always felt particularly strongly the imperfection of our world. Thus Stendhal, in a moment of despair, exclaimed: “The only justification for God is that he does not exist.” The ancient Roman philosopher Seneca, reflecting on human behavior, observed, “Guilt must not fall on our age. Our ancestors complained and we complain, and our descendants will also complain that manners are corrupt, that evil reigns, that people are getting worse and more lawless. The English writer Richard Aldington was even sharper on Homo sapiens: “The desire for absolute justice for all men is a very noble dream, but it is only a dream. Bad clay will not make a good pot, and so it is with human society – well, can such bad animals as man create a perfect society?”
Our contemporaries were not left out either. “I don’t like men, I don’t like women, I don’t like people. I would give this planet a zero. This is the assessment Planet Earth received from director and film actress Renata Litvinova.
Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky once dreamed that in the future peace would reign on Earth, an ideal society would be established, and man himself would turn into a perfect being, a “radiant man. Alas, many years have passed since then, but there are no fewer wars and monstrous crimes on the planet, and man is far from perfect.
Perhaps someday we will really have to move to a new round of evolution, but it will not happen in the way we can imagine.
Prison Planet
As if recalling something important and eternal, the human soul asks itself: Who am I? Where did I come from? What is the meaning of my stay on Earth? Where will I go when I die?
These questions are not accidental, if you consider that one of the versions of our planet’s origin is that the Earth is a place where human souls undergo a stage of re-education, comprehension, adjustment. It is the place where we all serve our sentences. A place called a planet-prison. That’s why it’s hopeless to expect happiness and perfect order of the world order deserved by the very fact of birth, because living on this planet has no such goal. The aim of everyone is personal – to sort out his/her own self, to remember one’s divine origin, to develop the bright sides of one’s soul and return… to one’s homeland.
The Book of Genesis tells us that we once lived in another divine place and our souls were not enclosed in physical shells: “And the Lord God sent him (Adam) out of the Garden of Eden…”; “And the Lord God made leather clothes for Adam and his wife and clothed them”; “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the land from which you were taken.
The wheel of endless rebirths
If we turn to Buddhism, we can find the definition that human life is a chain of continuous suffering. To live, as understood by Buddhists, means to suffer. Perhaps that is why, when a child is born, it cries, as if the soul realizes that it has been born again in the material world, on planet Earth. After a while, the child’s memory is blocked, and he forgets who he is and where he dwelt before he was born. Buddhists believe that a person does not die forever and that after a while our souls are born in a new body, experience suffering, then die and are born again. If a person leads a righteous life, he or she improves their karma and gets rid of suffering in the future. If a person does bad things, they will cause more suffering in the next life. The basis of Buddhism is that man is able to break the wheel of eternal rebirth and obtain spiritual liberation by reaching nirvana.
The 17th century Jewish spiritual leader Isaiah Horowitz wrote in his work The Two Tablets of the Covenant, “Now that man is imperfect and the world has not yet reached the perfection provided at its creation, it must be understood that if man is corrected and reaches perfection, the ‘garments of leather,’ which are now dark and impenetrable, will again become light, and even brighter than they were before the sinfall.”
Up the evolutionary ladder
To return to the Garden of Eden, man will have to climb the same ladder from which he was once thrown down.
Through experience, trial and error, with sweat and blood, on the path of inner perfection, man climbs up the evolutionary ladder, returning to the Creator. On each step one has to work hard, working off a personal lesson. Each new upward transition has to be earned – one may get stuck on a step or fall down. There is only one path: to ascend from the coarsest low matter to the highest, the Divine. When this happens, the human soul will complete its earthly incarnations and pass into a qualitatively new form of being.
One would assume that if this is indeed the case, there is nothing easier than to interrupt one’s imprisonment and voluntarily leave this place. But such an action as escape would only worsen our plight and prolong our stay on this planet. It is not for nothing that suicide is considered a great sin in all religions. The program of spiritual development together with the Divine Law gives a man an opportunity to understand why he is here, to make an inner reorientation and to fulfill his lesson correctly.
But there is also a category of those souls who could free themselves and leave this place, but they stay here for the sake of their loved ones, to support them and together go through the hardships of earthly life. Such people included the teachers of mankind, the sages and saints.
The Road Home
The harder a person endures the aggression and imperfection of this world, the more he feels pain and suffering at the sight of hungry children and homeless animals, the brighter his soul becomes and the closer his road home.
Our soul yearns to look at the distant stars of the infinite sky, it remembers its extraterrestrial origins. Someday we will return to a place of harmony and joy, where we once came from, where a true mission awaits us, and where our existence will be filled with love and high meaning. Where man will change so much that he will become, as the great Tsiolkovsky suggested, “an unprecedentedly intelligent … radiant being who will live happily and eternally.
