Every person has an inherent need to feel joy and relief from the stresses of life. As inevitable as the changing of the landscapes and the seasons, happiness is the norm. Suffering is not in our nature, and it is only through our own lack of understanding that we experience it. Reality is the source of fulfillment. The only way to stop pain and suffering and free oneself from all evil is to have comprehensive understanding of the meaning of existence and the interconnectedness of all people.
Absolute Intelligence is Sheer Bliss.
Why do we suffer in life? Because, in the grand scheme of things, nature is pushing us to evolve, and we don’t have the spiritual light that can show us the way and help us get past the obstacles in our way. Most of the time, we don’t even know or see trouble coming until it jumps out of nowhere like a hidden tiger. One day, everyone in our family will be together and happy. A week later, death comes to an end, and happiness has been replaced by pain. We have a friend today. We don’t know why, but he will be an enemy tomorrow. We used to be rich and have all kinds of nice things. There was a sudden change, and now all we have is poverty and misery, but we can’t figure out why. We used to be healthy and strong, but they’re both gone now, and there’s no sign of a reason why.
Aside from these bigger tragedies, there are a lot of smaller things that bring us little miseries and minor heartaches every day. We try very hard to avoid them, but we never see them until they hit us, until we stumble on them in the dark because we don’t know about them. We don’t have the spiritual illumination that would allow us to look far and wide, finding the hidden causes of human suffering and showing us how to avoid them. If we could just get illumination, we could move through evolution quickly and comfortably. It’s like we have to walk through a long, dark room where the furniture is all over the place. In the dark, we would move slowly and hurt ourselves a lot as we went. But if we could just push a button to turn on the electric light, we could make the same trip quickly, safely, and in complete comfort.
The old way of teaching was to fill the mind with as many facts, or what people thought were facts, as possible and make the person look nice on the outside. The idea was that when a man was born, he was already a complete person, and all that was done for him was to give him information that he could use with more or less skill, depending on how smart he was when he was born. The theosophical idea is that the physical man and all that makes up his life in the physical world are only a small part of the self; that each person’s ego has almost unlimited power and wisdom; that these are manifested in the physical world as the physical body and its unseen equivalents, which comprise the complicated vehicle of the ego’s manifestation, evolve and adapt to the purpose; and that in the spiritual world, there are no limits to what can be done. So, the light that leads to joy is lit from within, and the journey of evolution that we are all on may not have to be so painful.
I don’t see why dying has to be so sad. Mostly because it forces us to be apart from people we care about. Death causes sadness or anxiety simply because we fail to see its significance in our own development as a species. When we finally understand something, though, our fears melt away and a calm satisfaction takes their place.
What purpose do our opponents serve if they must cause us pain by their words or deeds? Because our limited physical consciousness prevents us from perceiving the unity of all life and realising that our wrong thinking and doing must react upon us through other people, we are stuck in a cycle of suffering from which we can only break free by refraining from evil thoughts and acting until the effects of our actions have worn themselves out. As soon as we receive enlightenment on a spiritual level and are no longer fumbling in the dark of ignorance, the last enemy will vanish and we will cease to create new ones.
What causes people to live in such dire conditions as poverty and illness? Only because of our bumbling stupidity do they exist; we don’t understand their significance, their lessons, or the appropriate attitude to take toward them. If only we had the insight to comprehend why these things occur to people and how they contribute to their development, we could put an end to their annoyance once and for all. These silent instructors will disappear after we’ve internalised nature’s lesson in its entirety.
This is true for every sort of pain we encounter. They are both the fallout from our naive mistakes and the guides to the right path. Once we’ve learned their lessons, we won’t need them anymore and they’ll go away. Men do not become intelligent and powerful through the collection of information. To do this, one must cultivate their soul until their mind is flooded with the brilliance of their creativity.
