Dr. Marc Gafni

Pain's an objective phenomenon in the universe, but evil's not.

Evil's a judgment of value.

And so paradoxically, and this is the trickster, this is the God trickster, and one of the principles of Tantra, which people understand to be about sexing, but actually about 1% of Tantra texts are about sex.

Tantra is about a worldview, 99%, and out of the worldview, a vision of sexing comes.

So in the West, we skip the worldview and go to the 1%, but that doesn't actually work well.

But the...

One of the principles of Tantra is reality is a trickster.

It's a joker.

So here's the joke.

We ask the question of how could there be a beautiful force for the good in cosmos that we call God and there be evil?

We ask the question.

And we try and answer it.

That's theodicy.

We try and answer it.

But none of the answers work because there is no logical formula.

There's no theology.

It's theologic.

There's no theological logic that can remove suffering.

But the answer is in the question itself.

That's the trickster.