Dear brothers and sisters.
Prompted by a question in another post, i've decided to answer that question here, in a new post, but in a more general way, as opposed to answering the specific question (regarding receiving down-votes for no apparent reason) about why something seemingly bad was happening.
I will speak from the perspective of unity (ie. All being One, there just being One Being, One God, One True Self, Allah, Christ, Krishna, Cosmic Consciousness, the background of stillness, or whatever one wishes to call "it").
My understanding is that this human life we appear to be living, is more like a dream, a movie, which is a secondary reality, an illusory duality of separation, of opposites (hot and cold, black and white, left and right, good or bad, for example), but none of this is ultimate truth, it is only relative truth in the dream of duality.
So, back to the question, Why does bad stuff happen?
This could be rephrased as Why does Upsetting stuff happen? As who are we (dream characters) to judge what is good or bad as we are not seeing the whole picture (in Unity)?
Well, the strong conviction that i (dream character/movie star Atma) currently hold (but not too tightly), is that anything that happens to up-set me is a set-up by One True Self, to help awaken me (this ego persona dream character) from the dream of life, from the misconception that (little) i is real, from the for-getting who or what i really am.
Put another way, any-thing that upsets me is a wake up call, to re-mind me, to dismiss the image-in-ary stories which i have been dreaming which have created the upsets, and the world itself. When i am fully able to be present in this way (without mind wandering into past or future), to just BE in the present moment, then apparently the world and all that appears within it disapears along with all the worries and suffering and other imaginary dream characters, as we all merge back into and rest in the background of stillness from which we appeared.
So, if i get down-voted, or if my car stops working, or if anything upsetting happens, my job is to remain present, to fully and unconditionally feel all the bodily sensations, to be unconditionally loving, to take full responsibility (no blame, as to blame is to b lame), and to Bee Kind, in thought, word and deed, to any apparent other (who is just me anyway) and to my little self. In this way life will become joyful.
This is more and more becoming my experience as i chose to believe this is the way life works.
Amongst the many teachings / philosophies i have experienced over the last 16 years of waking up to these eternal truths, The Presence Process by Michael Brown stands out as a phenomenal self-facilitated emotional integration procedure to help me to stay present and embrace responsibility for all that appears.
Sat Nam
Atma
Ps. As a result of my "beliefs" as above, this is what i did and what happened as a result when i got a down-vote yesterday: @atma.love/q9dtvku5ox3lrnmdfzw4cy
