Why Is Life So Difficult?
We Endure Difficult Lives Because of What We're Made Of
We have difficult lives because we are unaware of what our nature is: that we use everyone and everything purely for self-benefit, and that we need to rise above this.
How do you get up in the morning feeling joyful, confident, feeling like life has a purpose, that you feel like you’re doing everything right, inspired by everything you see, and you head into your days with all your heart?
In other words…why is life so difficult?
Our lives are designed to lead us to a stage where we have to recognize why we live here and why we endure difficulties. It’s not that we’re born with the purpose of having a difficult life; the difficulty is only in the time it takes for the question “Why am I alive?” to ripen, intensify, and make us feel increasingly dissatisfied with life until this question is answered.
The Ego – The Reason for Life’s Difficulties
The ego is our will to receive pleasure. I will perform any one of my calculations based only on how I can please myself, and using others and anything in my environment in order to do so. This is the only “evil” that exists in the world, and any pains or difficulties in life are only due to it.
Our ego is that I want to benefit at the other’s expense. Moreover, I not only want to benefit at their expense, but I also want to feel good when it is bad for them. The other person has to have less than me. I need to be able to justify my position in relation to every person. My opinions and viewpoints justify what I call “me,” and all these emerge and are based in our egoistic will to receive pleasure.
This is our nature; this is human nature. The general, altruistic nature situated opposite our ego arranges our situation in such a way that we will slowly come to recognize that we are actually the cause of the entire problem. This is why it is difficult for us to live.
“What are you talking about!?”
Jane is a housewife living in Alabama. She doesn’t steal, and she has no intention to. She doesn’t want a huge amount of money or to do bad to anyone. Jane lives a simple life, she’s a regular housewife who takes care of her family, but through all this, she still feels bad, like something's always missing. Somehow, she’s having a difficult life. So what about Jane?
It’s the same for Jane too. Until we arrive at the recognition of human nature, of what we are—the egoistic will to receive pleasure that is inside me—and that this is the cause of the world’s problems, we will continue to endure difficult lives without acknowledging our very nature as its cause. Once we arrive at this recognition, we then have a chance to rise above it, to exit our nature and enter into a new nature—the opposite, altruistic nature that created us.
The question is, how do we arrive at such a recognition of our nature, and moreover, how do we rise above it?
Further Reading:
- Kabbalah.info - concepts in this article are based on the fundamental principles of Kabbalah as taught at the Bnei Baruch Kabbalah Education and Research Institute: www.kabbalah.info
