“So, Lord Buddha, what are your impressions of your new job?”, Azrael grinned at his new buddy.

“It’s actually not that different from my previous one”, shrugged Lord Siddhartha. “I was a very famous spiritual teacher and founder of a major religion. People came to me for magical solutions to their problems, and the problems usually revolved around poverty, sickness and death. There would be a famine, and they asked for my blessings so that the rain would come. There would be a slaughter, and the panicked women would ask when their husbands would come home. There would be a plague, and they would ask me for magical healing. At least here I am not expected to perform unreasonable miracles, and the part I am expected to do – offer advice, consolation, or psychotherapy – I can actually do better and more easily. So, as far as I’m concerned, this is Tuesday”, he shrugged.

Azrael considered this. “Truly, you must be the most qualified person for this job. Not only have you been a human, so you know how it feels; you have also been doing work that is incredibly similar to this one. We are fortunate to have you, my Lord”, he bowed, and Buddha smiled and bowed back.

“So, what is your perspective on all this?”, his wife asked. “You’ve seen it from both vantage points, so you know more than anyone; certainly more than me, since I never went more than twenty miles away from my village, and I hardly knew more than fifty people”.

“It is obvious that people suffer. It is less obvious why. Previously, I concentrated on sources of suffering, and on attachment and projection, but as you eloquently pointed out before, Lord Shiva takes on terrible suffering upon himself, and he’s one of the happiest, most wonderful people imaginable, and not only is he not harmed by his suffering, but in fact seems to grow stronger from it. Also, the Gods suffer greatly when they see suffering of others, because they are incredibly compassionate and beautiful. They could easily choose to detach themselves from others, but then they wouldn’t be such beautiful people, and they wouldn’t be persons of God. You can even argue that indifference would make them into omnipotent psychopaths. So, what is it about suffering that makes it soul-crushing? Let’s take your example. You experienced pain of childbirth, typical pains of human life, occasional episode of poverty and deprivation, occasional sickness, but none of that really harmed you. What harmed you was the loss of loved ones, feeling of helplessness when they were attacked, and the impression that human life is all there is. How am I doing so far?”, he asked and kissed her temple.

“Your analysis is spot on”, she smiled and blushed. “When I endured physical pain, I could contextualise it – it would pass, it was for the greater good, or in case of pregnancy and childbirth, I chose this, I want this and I would do it again”, she nodded. “But when my children would get sick and die, I didn’t suffer because I was in pain. I suffered because they were in pain, I was losing them, I couldn’t do anything about it, and endings and separations in the physical life feel terrible and final. Most of all, the fact that something terrible was happening, and I was helpless to either stop it or avoid it was what broke me”, she shivered briefly.

“Let’s go further”, he continued. “When you were a demoness, in the astral plane, you didn’t feel physical pain, hunger or sickness, right?”

“No”.

“You didn’t care about people, so if something bad happened to them, it didn’t break you?”

“No. In fact, it would entertain me or make me laugh”, she admitted.

“You also didn’t age, and poverty had no meaning. So, would you say that such a life, devoid of classical elements of material suffering, was a blissful one?”, he grinned.

“No. In fact, it was a nightmarish existence, and in hindsight, I would say that I suffered terribly, and the emptiness from not having loved anyone was much, much worse than the suffering from losing loved ones, or seeing them suffer and not being able to help them, although pain of the latter was absolutely soul-crushing”, she remembered. “But when I lay there in the astral plane with my soul broken from loss, I felt dignity and fullness I had never felt in my demonic life”.

“So, this would conclude my demonstration. Suffering, in itself, is not necessarily a problem, since it is merely one of the elements in a more complicated equation. From what I have seen, people who inflict suffering on others are usually in a far worse spiritual condition than those who suffer. You were an extreme case, because you would have literally died without expert help, but most victims of terrible things recover successfully and quickly here. The perpetrators of evil, however, feature prominently among souls too far gone to be salvageable”, he concluded.

“I am amazed at your presentation, my Lord”, bowed Angel of Death. “Your analytical prowess is indeed staggering”.

“Thank you, my noble friend”, bowed Buddha.

“But let me summarise. Committing sinful acts is far more harmful, in general, than being a victim of sinful acts?”

“In general, but not always. Sometimes, if one is intentionally and systematically broken over a long period of time, and they have no transcendental perspective to guide them out, that can have devastating effects. We’ve seen slaves who have been castrated, raped daily, mutilated and humiliated as a matter of course, and treated as things rather than persons. On its own, that would be bad enough, but in Sanat Kumar’s world, where they are separated from a wider context of everything, such pressures can indeed kill a soul. I have been through all kinds of things down there, but I had strong will and perspective. Someone else would have been in serious trouble.”

“Also, there’s context and choice. Let’s say a woman gives birth. She knows what’s going on, she knows it’s her choice, that it’s a good thing, and that she would do everything the same again. She is in pain, but her suffering is minimal. But now imagine that she has a sickness that has similarly painful symptoms, and she knows she would suffer greatly and die from it. Her suffering from the same amount of pain and discomfort would be terrible”.

“I completely agree”, Zina nodded, “And seven pregnancies and childbirths make me the resident expert”, she smiled.

“Indeed”, both men nodded.

“So, knowledge that something is your choice, that it has a good purpose, and that it’s normal, makes terrible agony completely endurable; in essence, Zina before childbirth was in the same position as Lord Shiva when he absorbed evil karma intending to spend it, and fully knowing it would be a terrible agony for him”, Buddha looked at both of them and they nodded.

“Evidence for this is that Lord Shiva looked amazing today, and from the reaction of his wife when he returned, it’s obvious that it wasn’t child’s play. It was a God-level problem, let’s say of the same kind pregnancy and childbirth are for a human woman, but likely worse”, he continued. And yet, Shiva was empowered by the experience, the way Zina felt empowered when she gave birth”.

She nodded in assent.

“I also looked through her memories as she told me about her traumatic experiences. She shrugged off childbirths as if they were a mere inconvenience, although they were in fact physically more painful than her death”, he looked at her inquisitively, and she nodded in aggreement.

“So, suffering in that place is obviously a much more complicated affair than I previously thought. Let’s say there’s an element of choice. Let’s say if I allow you to take Tamara’s place, so that they rape and murder you, and she goes free, what do you do?”

“I would choose it instantly, and whatever they did to me, it wouldn’t matter, because I would know that I saved my girl and this thought would have comforted me through whatever ordeal”, she smiled.

“Exactly. And now we come to the point I want to make. The reason why that place causes such terrible damage due to suffering is because it deprives its victims of perspective. It cuts them off from knowledge that the entire thing is, for all intents and purposes, an artificially induced dream, where most characters are fake; beasts without riders, that work automatically unless a soul is bonded to them”, he concluded.

“Wait”, Zina started in shock, “Does it mean that my entire family, that I loved so much, consisted of mere uninhabited shells, with no souls or eternity of any kind beyond physical matter?”

“Have you met them here?”, Buddha asked.

“No”

“Have you tried to find them? Goddess, remember?”, he touched her hand gently to calm her.

“I tried now. There’s no response, no echo. Nothing”, she shrugged, but looked distraught.

“There is an order of magnitude of a hundred million human beings alive on Earth. The number of souls incarnated from both heaven and the astral nursery is a mere sub-percentage of that number, so multiple orders of magnitude less. And I am ignoring intelligent animals, which would raise one number significantly, and working with the upper range of estimates of the other. But let’s say it’s ten percent. It means that out of ten humans you know on Earth, you are likely to be the only soul among them. On the other hand, it is quite possible that all of them are souls. This would make treating others poorly a very bad thing. Treating others well, however, would give you an excellent opportunity for growth in love and kindness, which you personally experienced”, he smiled.

“So, basically, the best practice would be to treat everybody kindly just in case?”, Azrael asked.

“Yes, that’s exactly right. Treating others well is equally important for your benefit, and theirs. For instance, had Zina treated her family poorly, as some wretched people do, she would have remained a demonic being. This way, she became someone so beautiful, that Lady Shakti cried over her and did everything to save her, and in fact she became a Goddess within days since. Sure, the drawback is that her family was an illusion and she, basically, broke herself over nothing. But if we look at the actual energy equations and investments, she loved all the way to becoming a Goddess”, he concluded, and kissed his wife’s hand, as she blushed.

“So you say it’s like suffering in a dream, over dreamed, nonexistent people?”, she enquired.

“Have you ever had a dream in which you were scared, or in other ways suffered?”, he asked back.

“I have, many times”, she confirmed.

“Did you suffer less because it wasn’t real?”

“No, but I was relieved when I woke and realised it wasn’t real”, she said.

“Well, there you go”, he smiled.

“Wow”, she sighed and managed a true smile. “So it’s like entering a dark room and seeing a rope on the floor, and thinking it’s a snake, and you panic and try to see where the children are and if everybody is alive and safe. Then someone brings in a torch, and you see it’s a rope and your fear vanishes, because it was all in your mind”, she smiled in relief.

“Your family might have been in your mind; or, actually, in the mind of the Jewel that renders the simulation, but your love was absolutely real and you carried that with you. All your choices were real. All your suffering was real. And the quality of personality it all produced was real. You are one of the eight most real persons in the entire reality, and you have imaginary snakes to thank for it”, he joked.

“Also, let’s take the opposite example of Uriel, and let’s say that most of his victims were uninhabited shells. That doesn’t make his choices any less fatal, or make his soul any less terrible. Characters may be simulated, for the most part, but if you are there, and you think they are real, all of your choices are personality-forming. In fact, if you brainfuck yourself into thinking it’s all a dream and you can do whatever you want, it’s going to cause even worse damage and make you into a total basket case”, Azrael added.

“You are exactly right, which is why the only good choice is what Zina did without thinking or planning – treat everyone with greatest love and kindness, and if it turns out you were the only real person in that village, well, there will be a very good one person in the village”, Buddha concluded.

“Also, treat possibly empty shells with kindness, because you don’t actually know who’s in there. Imagine you have some people tortured and one of them turns out to be your best friend from before. That friendship is likely to end, I would say, so you will have eternal consequences of a temporary foolishness. Also, if you and I incarnated together, and we knew with absolute certainty that both of us will be in the same village; how would you treat people in the village?”

“The same way I treated my family down there – I believed that they matter greatly and I loved them”, she answered. “Which makes the ethics of the whole thing obvious, I guess”.

“Yes”, he nodded.

“How did you get so good at this, I mean analysis and explanations?”, Azrael scratched his head.

“I did this religious teacher thing for decades, remember?” Buddha smiled. “People would wake me up in the middle of the night with some emergency and I would do an excellent job half asleep and often with high fever”, he smiled.

Zina hugged him. “Never let me forget that I married the smartest person who lived on Earth so far”, she smiled.

“If anyone contradicts that statement, they will have me to deal with”, Azrael nodded in assent.