Koan #28: A Simple Choice

If one wishes to determine whether he desires heaven or hell, he has but to answer a simple question. What is more important to one’s self: freedom or suffering? For no freedom and no suffering is the state that is heaven, while freedom and suffering is the state that is hell. And truly, the decision is as straightforward as this. Yet as straightforward as it is, there can be no more important one.

Koan #21: Too Little Suffering

It is always interesting to note that, in countless cases, those that use the so-called “Problem of Evil and Suffering” as their prime reason for unbelief in the Lord, are, by and large, the very same that live in regions of the greatest comfort, leisure and ease on earth, where their tangible suffering and pain is vastly minimized, sanitized and removed from the public eye. By contrast, those that are actually suffering in ways unfelt and likely even unimagined by the latter group have no uncertainties about the Divine Creator’s existence. Perhaps then, those that have such a problem with the Problem of Evil should, in fact, experience some truly hard evil to see just what their exact and full view on the question of God might be after such a practical and honest trial.