Once, I was sitting near a lakeside in a nature reserve. After a while I saw a duck and its chicks swimming by in the shallow water. At that moment, a great blue heron landed nearby on the lakeside. The heron spotted the duck and its chicks and came flying towards them.
I saw what was about to happen, so I screamed and made some angry guestures at the heron, but it was in vain. The heron caught one of the chicks and started chewing the stunned poor thing to pieces while tossing it around in its beak. I was shocked at this display of the cruel reality of nature.
For the next several hours I could not let go of the memory of the grim scene I had witnessed. I did not want to believe that nature, reality and the universe for that matter, were cruel in essence. Then an idea came to my mind that could explain what happened without it being cruel in the conventional sense of the word.
Astronomers say that at the beginning of time our entire universe was packed into a point smaller than an atom. This means that everything that exists originally was one. This in turn means that in essence all things (still) are one. Looking at the cruel scene that I witnessed from that perspective, oneness was killing itself and being killed by itself. That is not cruel.