“Liberation (vimukti) is nothing but the mere freedom from the bondage of the afflictions.” — Asvabhāva

“Freedom is thus: not being liberated from saṃsāra and yet not being afflicted in it.” — Vasubandhu

Saṃsāra is the beginningless individual existence of transcendental subjects, their universal transcendental intersubjectivity, and subjectively/intersubjectively constituted phenomenal experiences, including the experiences of death and rebirth in this particular intersubjective realm. Liberation is not liberation from individual existence but liberation from certain transcendental causal structures, aka “karmic seeds”, including those which constitute this particular world of suffering. If you happen to have a nightmare, you must not terminate your existence but terminate the nightmare.

“Nature is not divine, but demon-like.” — Aristotle

“Had God designed the world, it would not be a world so pail and faulty, as we see.” — Lucretius

“Men are not in hell because God is angry with them; they are in wrath and darkness because they have done to the Light, which infinitely flows forth from God, as that man does to the light of the sun, who puts out his own eyes.” — William Law

“The cognizances that [appear as] the pleasant realms, the miserable realms, and the deaths, transitions, and births [in those realms] are the various forms of existence in saṃsāra, which arise from the appropriation of the [karmic] seeds [of transcendental consciousness (ālayavijñāna)] that are the latent tendencies of the links of existence.” — Vasubandhu

Theodicy is ridiculous, for Transcendence has nothing to do with the infernal type of this particular intersubjective world of suffering. The dream is the dreamer. The world is us, whereas Māra is the egregore-concentrate of our egoistic self-will. But how can I explain what Māra is to those who don’t even realize that there is Māra?

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” — Charles Baudelaire