Most of the questions that I receive for radio are about suffering. People wonder why there is suffering, why there is illness and why there is death. All of this seems so unreasonable to most people. Few persevere beyond the questions themselves to find the real core of suffering. We get sick, suffer and eventually die because we LOVE what misleads us. Ah…the truth that sets us free. It is not always very inspirational is it?

From the overt to the subtle, we live without any real regard for the truth of Love as our life. Our Karma is due to our total obsession and complete obedience to compulsion and its impulses, causing us to suffer needlessly and repetitively. We have little or no interest in the manner of our “spirit” and what we authentically are as spiritual beings.

We simply want to use what we have to get what we want and make it all seem “right.” We paint mental pictures of people in ways that are both favorable and unfavorable in order to secure our own precepts and opinions, which sets into motion a Karma that we are completely unaware of. It is all about being “right” through self-righteousness. This appeals to the “lesser” part of our humanness and offers us nothing but misery later in life.

Most of us never consider how we “love” and how this affects us, how it causes our life to take a course of action that forces us to live compulsively with total disregard to the manner of our loving spirit. Anything spiritual is simply disregarded as mere philosophy and does not matter in our day-to-day life. We live in total absoluteness of our desires and values as virtuous and never truly realize that we are setting into motion a Karma that ultimately becomes the utter bane of our own existence.

If we wish to overcome the suffering of this world, we must consider overcoming the “love” that emerges from the human self that gives rise to the emotion of pure greed. Greed is an emotional state that grows in those who simply live for the passions of the body. When we remain dispassionate through the greed of both pleasure and pain, we attain to a state of being where karmic suffering no longer occurs in this lifetime…thus, we find that true mastery has nothing to do with control over the world and its circumstances, but by the compassion that allows us to no longer be deluded by the ideals and seeming morals of the self.

How do I tell anyone that Karma occurs due to how we “love” and enjoy being misled into all sorts of emotional forms of mischief? Another word for this “love” is indulgence in emotional gratification. We “love” what appeals to our need for pleasure to overcome the pain that causes us to suffer. It is really that simple.

This simple equation eludes most of us in the course of our lifetime. The more unwilling we are to question the “love” that we live for and by, which causes us a great many karmic reactions in the course of our life span, the more painful our living becomes. Hence, the more we suffer, the more Karma we create for ourselves. So around and around all of this goes to endless nauseam and few people ever seem to question it or realize the futility of living in such ignorance.

Let this be your criteria in life: if you find yourself in an impossible situation or one that is constantly repeating itself throughout your life as a “theme,” find a compassionate way to replace your “love” with kindness that is beyond the confines of human affection and seeming righteousness. You see, it is here that we are no longer misled by our gratifications.

In this life, I have learned to respect my Karma. I never try to change the Karma I have or try to make it more pleasant for myself. I have suffered as you have with my own ignorance and the “love” that I used to indulge in when I was younger. I have learned a great deal about how to suffer without really suffering. It is through the willingness I have to live in compassion that I find my place in this world is to simply be here as I am and as it is without fighting it. In fact, to give thanks for it all as my life is an honor and not a matter of punishment.