[davidsun]

Originally Posted by Altair

No miracles indeed. Why would there be? We have to fix our own mess. All these traditions and religions that offer quick salvations or tell people to wait for some miracle should be discarded. Change happens through human action, individual or collective.

How we consume, eat, and live will have an impact on our shared environment and some practices will be far more harmful than others. Other practices will barely have impact. This is a ''great'' time to live in to test our own worth and merit, though it seems many of us have gotten enamoured by a sense of amoral capitalism where nothing matters and everyone is king/queen without impact on others. Every consumer seemingly living in his/her own little bubble, becoming entitled princes/princesses.

Individualism by itself is fine, as is freedom. The problem starts when people assume they are practising their freedom when they have the means to abuse other people, animals, and the environment. That is not 'freedom', but pure ignorance. Freedom doesn't mean you can abuse or reject someone else's freedom. Both individualism and freedom are concepts that are routinely abused, either by the privileged within human society, or at a larger scale when it comes to 'humans vs other life'..

Anyways. Very difficult times indeed, but also 'good' times for individual growth.

Right on, Altair! And very meaningfully (IMO) stated.

Analyzing the same kinds of issues, in my treatise I wrote:

Though self-gratifying physiological and social support systems as well as imaginative projections which lead people to hope and emotionally anticipate that they will, even if not right away, at least experience relief, ease, fulfillment, happiness, etc. in the future may indeed be Love and Joy sustaining up to a point, the fact remains that soulfully encountering and experiencing the kinds of ‘troubles’ that are, in the final analysis, inescapable [footnote*] aspects of being ensconced ‘in’ a physically limited, temporally transient personal body that is subject to frustration, pain, loss, ego‑defeat, death, etc. is necessary for the kind of self‑transcendental ‘i’dentity expansion and psychospiritual growth spoken of in this chapter to be situationally ‘called’ for and stimulated to ‘come’ forth. [footnote**] A soul’s capacity for psychospiritual fortitude and interpersonal empathy (stemming from cognition and appreciation of the ubiquitousness and transcendency of the Presence and Power of Life Itself), for instance, would never develop otherwise; albeit these are just a couple of a whole host of psychospiritual awareness and adeptitude based capabilities which must be conscientiously directed and devotionally deployed in service of Life Itself for a nodal soul to transcendentally e‧merge from the ‘womb’ of its embryonic other-dependency and infantile selfishness (note: I use the word must here only to state what is functionally necessary for such outcome, not to assert any kind of moralistic ‘should’ in this completely free-choice regard.)

[Footnotes:
* “In the world ye shall have tribulation!” (John 16:33)
** Here’s a ‘fable’ worth contemplating in the above regard: “ 'God' gives people every (kind of) thing they could possibly love and enjoy or imagine loving and enjoying and then, one by one, takes these away from them and/or places the possibility of their ‘having’ them (again, in the former case) out of reach, such that all they are then left with (that is, should they then choose to themselves be and continue so) is the Love and Joy they were thereby soulfully introduced to, which Love and Joy is Life Itself!”]

Elsewhere in the same treatise, I wrote:

People who ... more or less ‘blindly’ not only fail to beneficially seed and nurture but also unduly detract from and unconscionably degrade the quality of Life’s Love and Joy flow present those of us who wish to holistically optimize and augment said process with troublesome issues to philosophically diagnose and situationally resolve (to whatever extent we may be able to pragmatically do so) as well as with potential impediments to circumnavigate (to whatever extent said issues remain intractable). In either case, the ‘task’ at hand – opportunity for soul maturation, really – being to develop and implement the wisdom (self-mastery, really) necessary to do so without getting side-tracked (by the temptations of selfishness) from and losing sight of (hence the idea of ‘lost’ souls) Life’s indigenous goal, which is to maximally experience and express Love and Joy in the context of worldly, i.e. multi-nodal, existence.

Quite the 'furnace' we are in, which burningly separates the sludge from the gold!