Why Is There Suffering? Insights from Spiritual Traditions and Near-Death Experiences

Why Humans Create Stories About Suffering

I’ve noticed something about human beings: we can’t stand ambiguity for very long. When faced with mystery, pain, or paradox, we instinctively reach for stories. We create narratives about God, karma, the soul, or the universe to explain why things happen the way they do. Some say suffering exists because of a malevolent entity called the devil. Others believe we chose our struggles on a soul level to learn and grow. It’s human nature. The unknown can feel unbearable, so we look for meaning, even if the meaning is borrowed from an old text or a comforting belief.

For years, I tried to make sense of my own suffering through two spiritual systems I studied deeply: Vedic astrology and Christian theology. Both paths offered purpose and moments of undeniable truth. There were insights that felt divinely precise, almost too accurate to dismiss. And yet, underneath the wisdom, I was left with questions that no one could truly answer.

Both traditions gave me explanations about suffering that seemed complete on the surface, but somewhere deep down, they never fully clicked. Something about them felt circular, as if the answers existed mainly to protect us from the discomfort of not knowing. And that’s what this article is about: my exploration of how these stories, while beautiful and profound, often contradict themselves, and what it really means to live inside that mystery.

The Contradictions in Choosing Our Suffering

Take the idea, common in Vedic astrology and many spiritual circles, that our souls “chose” certain hardships before incarnating to grow and evolve through them. If that’s true, then why do we forget? If the purpose of suffering is to learn, why would the soul enter life with no memory of what it chose to experience or why?

And another contradiction: people often say that someone who has endured deep pain “chose it” so that they could one day become a light for others who suffer. In many cases, this is indeed how people transform their suffering. By channeling it into compassion, healing, or service, they turn personal pain into a source of guidance and hope for others. Using suffering in this way can be one of the most powerful paths to overcoming it, giving it purpose and meaning.

But even this approach does not fully resolve the paradox. If all souls “choose” their experiences, then why would one soul choose suffering in order to help others with their own chosen suffering? If those they help also chose their pain, what is the purpose of becoming a light for them? The logic folds in on itself. Then there’s the question: does suffering always lead to growth? Sometimes it does, but other times it breaks people. It sends them into psychiatric collapse, leaves them traumatized, or traps them in a kind of living hell that no amount of spiritual reasoning can justify.

I’ve consulted psychics and mediums who have given profoundly accurate insights, so accurate that I can’t dismiss them. But this part of the narrative always bugged me. It never provided complete clarity. Why would a loving soul design a life of agony just to forget the reason behind it?

How Spiritual Traditions Try to Explain Suffering

Throughout history, nearly every spiritual or philosophical tradition has tried to make sense of why we suffer. Each offers its own story, some poetic, some metaphysical, and some deeply contradictory.

In many Eastern philosophies, particularly Hinduism and certain schools of Buddhism, there’s the idea of the soul’s amnesia: that before birth, the soul chooses its circumstances and lessons, but forgets them upon incarnating so that learning can be genuine and unbiased. The forgetting, they say, ensures that growth is authentic rather than premeditated. Yet this theory raises a haunting question: why would anyone design a life of pain they can’t even remember choosing?

Another popular idea, found in both Hindu Vedanta and New Age spirituality, is the role-playing metaphor. Here, incarnation is compared to a divine play, what the Sanskrit tradition calls lila, or “the cosmic drama.” In this view, the soul is an eternal actor taking on temporary roles to experience itself through contrast. The problem is that actors don’t actually suffer; real trauma isn’t symbolic. For someone in agony, the idea of life as a “play” can feel dismissive, even cruel.

Then there’s the doctrine of karma, shared by Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Karma is often misunderstood as punishment, but it is more accurately seen as cause and effect, the energetic consequences of one’s actions over lifetimes. While it can offer a sense of moral and cosmic order, its main problem is that it assumes all suffering follows a coherent, just logic. In reality, suffering often appears random, disproportionate, or incoherent, and there is no way for us to verify the supposed causes from past lives. This makes the explanation feel unsatisfying, especially in the face of extreme or arbitrary tragedies, because it cannot fully account for the chaotic reality of human suffering.

Some esoteric and mystical traditions, including Theosophy and certain interpretations of quantum spirituality, propose nonlinear time: the idea that the soul’s choices exist outside the human concept of past, present, and future. From that perspective, what looks like suffering might make perfect sense on a higher plane our limited minds can’t yet comprehend. Philosophically, it’s fascinating, but practically, it remains untestable and offers little comfort in the midst of real pain.

Finally, there’s a more symbolic approach that comes from modern psychological and humanistic spiritual thought: the metaphorical reading. In this view, when people say “the soul chose this,” they don’t mean it literally. It’s a poetic framework, a way to extract meaning or empowerment from suffering rather than drown in it. For some, this interpretation brings healing. For others, it feels like a subtle invalidation, suggesting that their agony exists only for a lesson’s sake.

Each of these theories helps some people and frustrates others. None fully solve the riddle. Suffering remains what it has always been: the most intimate and unsolved mystery of the human experience.

Christian Perspectives on Suffering

In Christianity, suffering is often explained as a result of humanity’s fall from grace. According to this view, pain and hardship entered the world through sin, disobedience, and the influence of Satan. But even here, the logic raises questions. If God created everything, then God also created Satan, the tree of knowledge, and the conditions for our fall. If God is all-powerful, then nothing happens outside God’s will. So even if Satan is to blame, isn’t Satan still acting within the parameters of what God allows?

It’s comforting, I get it, to believe the world is fallen, and that heaven awaits us in the end. Yet when you examine the logic closely, even this story starts to wobble.

Christianity’s Answers and Their Limits

Christian thinkers have wrestled with the same question for centuries, the question of why a loving, all-powerful God allows suffering. This dilemma, known in theology as the problem of evil or theodicy, has inspired countless attempts at explanation.

One of the most enduring is the free will defense, popularized by philosophers like Augustine and later Alvin Plantinga. It argues that God allows evil because a world with genuine freedom is better than one without it. Free will, they say, is what makes love and moral choice meaningful. But this view raises its own questions: why should freedom require so much brutality? And what about suffering that isn’t caused by human choice, like natural disasters, disease, or genetic conditions?

Another approach, called the soul-making theodicy, was developed by thinkers such as Irenaeus and John Hick. According to this view, suffering serves as a kind of spiritual gymnasium, shaping moral and spiritual maturity. Adversity refines the soul, making us wiser, more compassionate, and more resilient. Yet here too lies a troubling imbalance: why do some people face unimaginable agony while others live relatively easy lives? Why such disproportionate suffering if the goal is moral growth?

In the twentieth century, process theology offered a radical reimagining. Thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne proposed that God isn’t omnipotent in the classical sense but is instead evolving with creation, co-suffering with every creature and guiding gently rather than controlling absolutely. It’s a tender image of the divine, but one that redefines “God” so thoroughly that it no longer resembles the traditional Creator of Christian doctrine.

And finally, there’s the oldest and perhaps most common answer: mystery and humility. Some theologians, echoing the tone of the Book of Job, suggest that human beings simply can’t comprehend God’s plan. Our perspective is too limited to grasp divine reasoning. While this response encourages faith and surrender, it can also feel emotionally hollow to those in the depths of pain, offering reverence instead of relief.

Each of these answers, philosophical, theological, and pastoral, tries to protect a vision of divine goodness. Yet like every other tradition, Christianity ultimately leaves the question open: if God is love, why must love hurt so much?

What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Suffering

If we’re searching for clues about what might lie beyond this life, the only firsthand information we have comes from near-death experiences. They can’t be measured or replicated under laboratory conditions, but their consistency across time, culture, and belief systems makes them difficult to ignore. When thousands of people with no connection to each other describe strikingly similar events, it begins to feel like a kind of evidence, imperfect but closer to truth than speculation alone. In that sense, near-death experiences might be the closest glimpse we have into the mystery that every philosophy and religion has tried, in its own way, to explain.

Across the world, those who have come close to death often recount common themes: an overwhelming sense of unconditional love, reunion with deceased loved ones, encounters with beings of light, and a profound feeling of homecoming. Some describe meeting Jesus; others speak of ancestors or spiritual figures from their own tradition. Yet despite the differences in language and imagery, nearly all describe love as the essence of what they encountered, love not as emotion but as an all-encompassing state of being.

So what do near-death experiences suggest about the nature of suffering? Many people who’ve had NDEs report that their pain and struggles were not meaningless. In that expanded state, they say they understood why certain hardships occurred, not as punishment or arbitrary fate but as opportunities for the soul to grow in compassion and understanding. Unlike the deterministic tone of some Eastern or Christian theodicies, these accounts often describe suffering as both real and redemptive, yet never imposed by an external force. Instead, pain appears as part of a larger tapestry, one in which every experience contributes to the evolution of consciousness itself.

Near-death experiencers often say that once they “saw the bigger picture,” their anger and confusion about life’s injustices dissolved. They describe realizing that souls are interconnected, that what feels like personal tragedy may ripple outward in ways we can’t yet see, and that love, not suffering, is the fundamental fabric of reality. The forgetting, then, isn’t a cruel trick, but a necessary veil that allows authentic experience.

In that light, NDEs don’t provide a tidy solution to the problem of suffering. They offer a broader lens. They don’t entirely validate the Eastern idea that the soul “chooses” pain to evolve, nor the Christian notion of a testing or purifying God. Instead, they suggest that while suffering feels senseless from within human limits, it may serve purposes beyond our comprehension. Many experiencers describe realizing that even their deepest pain had meaning in a larger web of connection, though not in a punitive or preordained sense.

Rather than dissolving the mystery, NDEs echo the wisdom found in the story of Job: that ultimate understanding may lie beyond the reach of the human mind. Yet what these experiences do reveal, almost unanimously, is that beneath all the chaos and loss, there exists a vast intelligence filled with love. From that vantage, pain isn’t the opposite of meaning. It’s part of a reality so encompassing that, as many returnees say, “everything makes sense there,” even if it never fully will here.

How to Live With the Mystery of Suffering

So where does that leave us? If none of the grand stories fully hold, how do we live meaningfully with the mystery? Over time, I’ve found a few ways to stay grounded amid the unanswerable:

Hold Two Truths at Once
You can acknowledge your genuine spiritual experiences and still admit you don’t know how it all fits together.
“I have felt divine love. I don’t know why suffering happens.”
Both statements can be true.

Reject Toxic Consolations
When someone says “you chose this,” notice how it lands in your body. If it feels silencing rather than healing, you’re allowed to let it go. Not every explanation is medicine.

Create Your Own Meaning Practices
Write a simple, compassionate truth you can live by. Something like:
“I believe suffering sometimes yields meaning, but not always. My task is to bring compassion where I can and tend my own wounds.”

Therapeutic and Embodied Healing
Sometimes pain can’t be solved by belief. When philosophy reaches its limits, body-based therapy, mindfulness, movement, and community connection can help integrate trauma in ways that words and ideas cannot.

Practice Epistemic Humility
Hold your beliefs gently. Use them as maps, not laws. Choose the ones that make you more loving, not more certain. Because perhaps the wisest way to live isn’t to solve the mystery of suffering, but to walk with it—open-eyed, humble, and kind.

Why We Make Stories to Understand Life

Our minds are wired for narrative. It’s not a weakness; it’s a survival mechanism. From our earliest ancestors huddled around fires to modern societies scrolling through news feeds, storytelling has always been our way of making sense of the world.

At the most basic level, we are pattern-seeking creatures. The human brain is built to detect cause and effect, even where none exists. When we can’t find a clear reason for something, we tend to invent one. This isn’t foolish; it’s how our species learned to predict danger, connect events, and survive uncertainty.

Stories also regulate emotion. Chaos is terrifying, but a story gives it shape. Saying “it happened for a reason” feels safer than admitting “it just happened.” Narratives turn the unbearable randomness of life into something we can hold, process, and even find comfort in.

On a collective level, stories are the glue of human connection. Shared myths, whether religious, cultural, or even scientific, create social bonds and moral codes. They tell us who we are, what matters, and how to live together.

And finally, stories fill our knowledge gaps. When something can’t be proven, measured, or understood, like consciousness, the afterlife, or the nature of destiny, we reach for meaning to fill the void.

Stories like mythology serve deep psychological and social needs. They help us live, endure, and find our place in a world that often refuses to explain itself.

Why We Tell Stories: Finding Meaning in Suffering

Because we’re human.
Because we crave coherence in an incoherent world.
Because stories give us enough light to keep walking through the dark.

But we don’t have to believe every story literally to let it nourish us. We can let myth be metaphor, let mystery remain mystery, and still live fully. Maybe the only truth we can all agree on, across religions, near-death experiences, and intuition, is that love sits at the center of it all.

Not as an explanation, but as an experience.

And maybe that’s enough.