Why do people always say that everything happens for a reason or that whatever happens, happens for the best? If my relationship is going really well but for some reason we still have to part ways, I don’t want to see that as something Good or as part of God’s plan. I do have faith in God but I don’t believe that something that Failed or didn’t Work out should automatically be seen as “Good”. The relationship itself was good, but its ending isn’t. So why do people insist on saying that everything happens for a Good? How can I look differently apart from tagging it Good or Bad🤨?

Good and bad is obviously a question of perspective and hence cannot be the arbiter. One person’s good may be another person’s bad given exactly the same event and circumstances. Besides what seems good for now might turn out to be bad later on and vice versa. Our values hang on wrong premises and hence they fail to explain things. For example we almost unconsciously believe that the we are in the centre of the world and everything including others, world and God Himself are there or should be there to make my life easier, happy and comfortable. When that doesn’t happen we do not question our false premises, we simply start question why the Creator has done this. The Creator or whatever we like to call Him is not there to give good and bad experiences to each one. He is simply moving forward in a creative dance whose steps we find difficult to keep. But because we are intimately connected with Him and the all, everything experiences a pressure, a pull and a push to progress, to move forward towards the great goal of sharing His Knowledge and Power and Consciousness and Delight. Unable to keep pace because we cling to things as they are, because we are afraid of losing the past, because we are afraid and uncertain about the future, we fall back and the result is pleasure followed by pain. Besides we get too attached to the form which are invariably transient and temporary and cannot last. When they are taken away from us then we feel pain. 

The purpose therefore behind everything happening in everyone’s life is to push us towards progress, towards discovering our own deepest truth, towards our own highest possibility. Since to realise our own highest possibility is also our greatest good, we can say from that wider background and the larger picture that all that happens is for the good, not the good as we understand but the good as the Divine sees it, the highest good. It is like the physician giving bitter pill to cure or the surgeon operating us to return to health. So too we sometimes pass through pain to arrive to a happier state by making an inner progress.

Affectionately,

Alok Da