Are all spiritual explanations of life’s sufferings just mental adjustments?

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can be accepted as the most satisfactory explanation.
Thank you. Question. When something terrible happens in a devotee’s life, we offer many explanations that it is Krishna’s plan, that it is something for our spiritual growth, but all these are simply mental adjustments.
If somebody is devoted to Krishna, shouldn’t Krishna protect that devotee and especially if the devotee has made no mistake, but still somebody targets them, makes them, does politics against them and they get into trouble, how do we understand that? Answer. If somebody wants an explanation that is not a mental adjustment, well, every explanation is a mental adjustment. Now, the question is, is it just a mental adjustment? Say, for example, that when we say that somebody is coughing a lot and they have got tuberculosis.
And now, from the factual point of view, the cough still remains. But the explanation, the diagnosis, what does it do? It helps us to adjust our mind so that we can accept what, can get some idea of what we are going to experience and how to go about it. So, basically, mental adjustment means, say, we are not able to see things clearly and we start seeing them better.
That is a mental adjustment. Just like we could have a visual adjustment in the camera. Say, if the view is coming out distorted, unclear, then we adjust the camera zoom and focus and other things by which it becomes, view becomes clearer.
So, similarly, every explanation is a mental adjustment. That is simply a fact of life. So, now, the question could be whether it is just a mental adjustment without any change in the reality.
So, yes, we could say that the mental adjustment does not immediately change in any way the physical reality. But what it does, say, I have a cough and I am diagnosed as having TB and I still have that cough. So, giving any explanation does not change the physical reality, at least not immediately.
So, if we consider there is a physical reality, there is a mental reality. Now, the mental reality is something which is changeable for us. And the mental reality changes also our attitude toward the physical reality.
That means that if I understand that a particular thing is a disease and this is how it is going to grow and this is how it can be treated, then at least we can have some acceptance as well as some assertiveness. This is how it is going to be. But if I take this treatment and I push myself to take this treatment, then things can be changed.
So, there is both acceptance and assertiveness, which is combined together whenever we take a treatment. So, similarly, in the world, terrible things happen. Terrible things happen and the worst of terrible things are when we ourselves have done nothing wrong and still we become the brunt of somebody’s perversity or maybe someone’s stupidity.
Perversity means they are evil and they deliberately want to hurt us. Stupidity means that they just made a foolish mistake. Like somebody hits into, we are walking on a footpath and somebody deliberately drives on us and injures us terribly.
That’s perversity. And stupidity is maybe somebody is just, they are good people but they were maybe talking on phone or trying to text while driving and the car veered out of control and came upon us. So, now whatever blow we have faced, that physical reality is not going to change, no matter what we do, at least not immediately.
So, now a mental adjustment can help us to face that physical reality better. Now, some mental adjustments may actually make things worse. Like say somebody is sick and they are told they have cancer and they go into denial.
No, I don’t have cancer. Then that kind of mental adjustment, which is basically a denial of the physical, that can make things worse. But a mental adjustment where they accept the diagnosis and then focus on the treatment, that can make things better.
So, now it’s up to us to then choose to believe or disbelieve whether beyond the physical and the mental, is there something like spiritual? Is there something divine to us and divine to the way the world functions? So, the skeptical way would be to say that there is nothing beyond the physical and the mental. And the ultra-skeptical way, the materialistic way would be to even reduce the mental to the physical ultimately and just leave things at that. But does such an approach actually solve any problems? No, atheism does not remove the problems from our life.
It only removes the hope that the problems have a purpose. That whatever bad is happening, there is something good that may come out of it. So, we ultimately have to choose whether we just accept the physical for it, for what it is.
And actually even when we reject God, even when we say there is nothing spiritual, that is also a mental adjustment. Because after all, we human beings are innately designed to look for meaning. We are constantly seeking to make sense of the world around us and to live thereby in a way which will be coherent, which will be cogent, which will be productive.
So, in fact, the search for meaning, the search to make sense of things which apparently don’t make sense, the search for looking for invisible principles beyond visible phenomena, that is what led to advancement in the field, including the field of science. So, the idea that gravity is what makes fruits fall from the trees, that is also a mental adjustment. And that’s a mental adjustment that makes us better in harmony with reality.
What does that mean? That means that whenever we experience any kind of difficulty, it’s up to us to choose whether we accept the difficulty as it is. And we’ll have to make some adjustment. Usually, whenever there is a rejection of God and any higher spiritual reality, there are broadly, the responses that people come with can be in two categories.
It is either nihilism or totalitarianism. Nihilism means that nothing makes any sense, life stinks, and we are unfortunate to be alive and it’s better that we die. There are existential philosophers who said that it would be best if we had never been born.
Best is to never be born. Better is to have died soon after birth. Worst is to have a long life because life is itself suffering.
And what do you do about all this suffering? Well, there’s nothing that we can do. So, just have to live through it. So, nihilistic worldview is where we reject all meaning in life.
Then totalitarianism is where we believe in some material authority to fix all kinds of all problems. So, communism, at least Bolshevism or Stalinism if you want to say, the version of communism which was attempted to be implemented in the USSR and then China was totalitarianism that the idea that some government knows how to fix all things and that government should be interested in the absolute power and they will take care of all things. And that experiment has not worked well.
More than 150 million people died because these governments tried to disrupt existing social structures to create something new but nothing new developed actually speaking. What developed new was devastation, large scale devastation. So, we just take it this forward that the fact that so much of our life has meaning that every day when we make choices, our choices do have consequences and we can certainly make things better and we can make them worse.
So, at least in a short term, at least in a day-to-day way of functioning, our choices do have consequences. If we eat a particular food that our doctor has told us not to eat, that spoils our health. If we go out in the cold without having anything protected, without protecting ourselves, we get cold and sick.
So, basically when we are facing difficulty, we have a choice and that choice will definitely have consequences. Now, the choice is that this difficulty has some higher purpose and plan behind it or that there is no purpose or plan behind it. And I would say it requires a certain amount of arrogance, if I may use that word to say that life doesn’t have any purpose.
That there is no God in charge and that we are just unfortunate, that we are just unlucky and life stinks. That is not a very hopeful way of living. Now, we have to focus on this world and the other world.
So, the spiritual understanding can help us to transcend the world and to transform the world. And we need both to live effectively in the world. That means there are certain spiritual practices which will help us transcend the world and there are certain which expect us to transform the world and certain which may empower us to tolerate the world.
So, our spiritual practices, our devotional practices, rather than thinking that they should give us, that they should give us a guarantee, protection from distress, we can say that even now these are the best ways I have for coping. These are the best ways by which I can tolerate or I can transform or I can transcend. Transcend means that we absorb ourselves in higher consciousness and slowly if something material is there which is not changeable, we can better tolerate it through transcendence also.
Or if we are transcended, then we have risen, we have got some strength and then we can transform. That inner strength at this particular difficulty has some purpose. Let me find out what the purpose is and let me pursue my part in that purpose.
So, gaining a spiritual or devotional vision of things, it’s a mental adjustment, no doubt. But it’s a mental adjustment that brings us in alignment with a higher reality. And it’s at least reasonable to be open to that possibility because we have no conclusive evidence for saying that that possibility is just an imagination.
And that possibility can very well help us to make the best of whatever life has sent our way.