Why Does God Allow Suffering?
It’s something people either ask,
or use as a statement.
God/Pure Consciousness sees suffering as a conflict in the mind.
The mind and body suffer
while pure consciousness watches.
To say God allows suffering
merely shows an infantile understanding,
because we want someone to blame for our decisions.
When we realise our true essence,
suffering is seen as a residue of past ideas.
The body gets old and sick, and dies,
but all through this, pure consciousness simply watches.
When we ignore our true essence,
we suffer.
Pure consciousness never suffers,
but is sad for those who do.
BUDDHA IN THE MUD is a blog - a living book based on the Dzogchen teachings. Our teacher is life, and life is karma. In this way, Dzogchen is practical - no bells and whistles required. 
Although, I enjoy your writings I can’t agree with says suffering is trying to blame someone for our own decisions. Everything in life is definitely not. My dad dieing at a young age and putting us in poverty and close to homelessness was not my decision as well as many other things.
Hello John,
Nice to meet you.
The gist of your comment is sort of this, …“we suffer because we want someone to blame for our decisions.” to which you do not agree. That’s okay, there are many ways of looking at a situation.
From a Buddhist view point we suffer because of a self identity driven by thoughts and emotions, about self and other. This self confusion is also our path to enlightenment. As the text says, “May confusion dawn as wisdom.”
On a relative level the situation that we find ourselves in seems not to be our decisions, and rightly so. From a dharma perspective however, we unconsciously chose our family, like it or not.
How we deal with whatever happens to us depends on our state of mind. Do we blame ourself or others? Or, not blame at all, just see cause and effect.
In general our decisions are based on our past memories and judgements, so everything that happens is due to causes and conditions. There is nothing to blame accept when there is interference in the nature way of things. Nothing just happens.
Things happened in my family that I could blame for all my neurosis 😀 but reasoned that they too blame their parents and so on. We can all look at a situation and think, “If that hadn’t happened, this wouldn’t of happened”, and so on. We can either accept the situation and move on, or look for someone or something to blame, and smoulder. 😀
I’ve made some terrible decisions in my life, that created suffering, blaming it on following others, but on reflection they have accelerated understanding.
If I understood you wrongly please come back.
Tony