Two Sundays ago I joined the Ojai Valley Shambala Group for its morning practice, which included both sitting and walking meditation. While walking in a loose oval around the prayer area, I repeatedly passed a sign that read: “The suffering of this world is not real.’’ The quote was attributed to Byron Katie, a self-help guru who rents her Meditation Hall to my Tibetan Buddhist pals.

I’m always blissed out in California — Ojai is about 80 miles northwest of Los Angeles — but this bite-sized maxim about suffering disturbed me. Good grief, is the suffering of the world ever real! I’ve endured fewer hardships than most, but suffering stares you in the face every day, as an abstraction — in a news story, for instance — and as a reality. I wish friends of mine weren’t in pain, physical and psychic, but they are.

During our brief morning practice, I took in some of the Shambala teachings which, reduced to their simplest possible form, emphasized human goodness. “Humanity at the core is complete, good, and worthy’’ are the first words you read on the website of Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, a well-known Tibetan Buddhist teacher, scholar, and marathon runner who “has found physical activity to be essential for spiritual well-being.’’ Me too!

He further writes that “the Shambala tradition believes in the inherent wisdom, compassion, and courage of all beings. It holds that these noble qualities are ultimately more stable than aggression and greed.’’

Goodness and compassion have been on my mind since March, when I confidently predicted that “Donald Trump won’t be the next president of the United States’’ because the “better angels of our nature’’ would prevail. The “better angels’’ phrase appeared at the end of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, delivered just before the start of the Civil War, in 1861.

Lincoln hoped that “the mystic chords of memory . . . will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.’’ Just five weeks before the beginning of hostilities, he pleaded: “We must not be enemies.’’ But we were, and we are.

I thought the good angels would prevail at the ballot box, and that Americans would not bestow the awesome powers of the presidency on a broken, angry man like Donald Trump.

I was wrong, and am now left to wonder: Were there ever any “better angels’’ in the first place? A few short years after speaking those words, Lincoln was cut down by the avenging angel, John Wilkes Booth. Have the angels blessed Lincoln’s great achievement, the preservation of the Union? One hundred and fifty years later, the same bitter battles of race and sectionalism are being waged every day, with terrifying results.

I remarked to my Buddhist friends, you know maybe you have this wrong. Isn’t the Christian template of Original Sin more useful for making one’s way in the world? When the minister addresses “us sinners’’ in church, I know who he is talking about.

Surely we are the “crooked timber of humanity’’ that philosopher Immanuel Kant invoked in 1784. (“Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.’’) As James Madison drily noted in Federalist Paper 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.’’

The better angels abandoned us, and suffering continues apace. I look back at my uncharacteristically optimistic March column, and think of the famous final line of Ernest Hemingway’s novel, “The Sun Also Rises:’’ Wasn’t it pretty to think so?

Alex Beam’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him on Twitter @imalexbeamyrnot.