Customer Reviews

Why God Permits Evil and How to Rise Above It (How-to-Live Series, 2)

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How refreshing to hear a level-headed, non-dogmatic exposition on an eternally "hot" topic. This yogi makes a lot more sense to my heart than ninety-nine percent of the stuff I was brought up hearing.

Compassion, loving the doer of evil, turning toward the light...
It is wonderful that Yogananda shows how the tragedies of the world deserve our compassion - and also our dedication to renewing our own connection to the Light. He doesn't deny all the pain of living in a human, fallible world - but he offers a compassionate view of The Divine - and Its call to work our way out (and love our way out) of the pain of a material existence.

The rational mind may balk when it sees no explanation for the suffering and evil that exists in The Creator's Universe. This little volume offers revolutionary insight - for more see Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi.

Give Peace a chance. Give Love a chance. Find, in a genuine EXPERIENCE of God, the love that changes your whole world.

The deeply moving words of truth from Paramahansa Yogananda show us all how God endowed us with free will, so that we may come to learn, know, feel, practice, and act with love and peace.

This little gem and treasure of a book is as great and as big as the cosmos with Divine truth, which will illuminate your mind, and speak to your soul.

It teaches us to go within, and discover our own Divine God-Self within, where we CA N prevail in peace in our world, once we each choose to individually. It is then that the world will know peace collectively.

HIGHLY Recommended to discover your own Divinity within.
Deserves 10 Stars!

Barbara Rose, Ph.D. author of Know Yourself: A Woman's Guide to Wholeness, Radiance & Supreme Confidence and Stop Being the String Along: A Relationship Guide to Being THE ONE

I learned much from this book. It explained how to rise above any suffering I have experienced, and brought me a lot of hope contrary to how I was raised.
This is a wonderful book of the few I recommend that will speak to your soul and teach you how to overcome adversity. An excellent read and highly beneficial for all. Most Highly Recommended!

Yogananda addresses the ultimate questions that torment the heart of all sensitive human beings. From his deep study of yoga principles and from years of meditation in samadhi, this revered 20th Century Indian saint provides answers that satisfy - because he is not just regurgitating scriptural dogma but mining the Truth that underlies ALL scriptures.

In these three powerful expositions the yoga master comforts us with awareness of the Divine Assistance that is always available and simultaneously keeps us on track by reminding us of the Great Learning in which we each need to participate to co-create a more divinely loving environment for our brief stay in the earthly realm. As in all his writings, Yogananda impresses upon the reader the importance of both our inner and outer work as contributions to our own lives and the world as a whole. The overall effect of his teaching is to instill a positive vision of one's own place and work - a vision of grandeur and yet of humility - with an immediacy and clarity unparalleled by any other writer in the modern age.

I am currently researching the many views re: evil - for some reason, it has become quite important to me now...

In this book, Paramahansa Yogananda discusses his view on life -which is that life is the dream of God, a play of sorts. Therefore, if we can realize that we are esentially actors in this dream, we can become detached - watching our life as if we were watching a movie on the screen.

According to Paramahansa, the goal of this dream is to bring us all back to God (of which we are a part)- and that through good as well as evil, this is accomplished.

Evil is viewed as being essential for us to be able to enjoy the good, because if everything was already perfect, we would be much less likely to realize how wonderful and joyful life can be. Basically, we need the bad to appreciate the good.

Although I agree with many of the viewpoints espoused in this book, there are some that just don't resonate with me - at least not yet. Of course, this does not mean that they aren't true, it just means that they don't "work" for me just yet. Regardless of this slight difference of opinion, I still believe that this is an excellent book on the topic of evil.

Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone questioning why evil exists in our world. Even if you don't agree with all of the author's viewpoints, it still offers a lot to think about.

Religious leaders are at their worst when trying to explain evil. Though I do not agree with C. S. Lewis's Christianity, I hoped that I might learn something useful from reading THE PROBLEM OF PAIN. Alvin C. Plantinga's GOD, FREEDOM, AND EVIL presented what he thought was a logical justification of why God cannot prevent evil. Though Christian readers raved at their success, I thought they were both ridiculous. Readers also praise the Yogi's book. I must belong to a different species.

The Yogi defines Self-realization as knowing ourselves as divine beings (John 10:34), and Christ-consciousness as the projected consciousness of God. I also feel to be true because this has been my experience of God. The problem with Saints and Scriptures that claim to speak God's Ultimate Truth is that mere mortals are not permitted to disagree with them. However, "God" is invariably colored by the culture and the temperament of the Saint experiencing him. Though it is de rigueur for religious liberals to maintain that all Saints agree with each other -- I once did - all the actual evidence speaks against this. The Yogi does not understand evil; without understanding evil, how can one understand "God?"

The Yogi insists that God created evil (Isaiah45:6-7) because it provides the contrast that enables us to experience good. Misery is our best friend because it starts us seeking God. If joy were ceaseless in this world we would be content and never seek another. Once we realize our true nature, we will not mind the pain. Unfortunately, only an infinitesimal number of people, including the Yogi's devotees, have ever achieved this level of enlightenment. Since evil is omnipresent, we have no choice but to learn to experience it with detachment, or perhaps go mad or commit suicide, but I do not even want to reach a state of mind where I don't mind it.

God created the world because he recognized his own Perfection so he divided himself into many souls so that we could all enjoy him. The purpose of life is to realize that we are nothing but God's hobby, a toy created so God could entertain himself. Our existence has nothing to do with God's evolution, because God is already perfect. I find it mind-boggling that anyone can find comfort in a God who entertains himself with Auschwitz, Ted Bundy, and Tay-Sachs disease, but that's just me. God strikes me as seriously narcissistic.

The Yogi takes it as a self-evident fact that the only true thing to strive for is happiness because true happiness is God. All people, even atheists and the evil, are seeking happiness, so they are actually seeking God without knowing it. If being one with God is the Only Good Thing, one has to wonder why God was not content with knowing himself instead encaging part of himself as human souls so that part of himself is ignorant of and even hates himself. When the Yogi says God is sorry we have lost sight of Him, how can he not mean that God has lost sight of Himself?

We are not "the very Consciousness out of which this Universe has been created by God;" We are the very consciousness that we are inclined to think of as "God." There is no good reason for supposing that there is a "God" external to this consciousness. Wisdom does not consist of seeking bliss; it consists of striving for greater self-awareness. "God" can only achieve Self-awareness through humanity. Most people who do evil are people guilty of the sin of self-ignorance. But some people seem to be evil by nature, and evil does not seek happiness; it seeks destruction. Evil is a flaw in consciousness itself, a seemingly autonomous archetype within the human psyche that hates existence. (I do not imagine that these ideas will be taken seriously by many people who might read this; but at least they are coherent and far more optimistic than dismissing mankind's pain as God's purposeless entertainment).
(Peter Payne, author of CAPTAIN CALIFORNIA: A YOUNG MAN'S ENCOUNTER WITH THE EVIL WITHIN HIMSELF)

Reading this book helps to give some reasons why bad things happen to good people. It won't change your circumstances but may help you in coping with them.