The Shadows of Evil and Suffering

Excerpts from The Wisdom of the Overself by Paul Brunton

... The same hardship which weakens one man’s virtue strengthens another’s.

… We must begin to admit with Eckhart, however grudgingly, that: “The swiftest horse that bears us to perfection is suffering.”

… A man may be suffering what is really good for him and yet he will weep, as though it were really bad for him! Too much good fortune has already ruined too many good men. All experience tends to educate the intelligence and discipline the emotions. Consequently if suffering brings men back to the blessed life that transcends it, then if only for that reason and to that extent its existence is justified.

… In the physical body pleasurable nerve- reactions lure us on to eat and sustain its existence, but painful reactions are equally provided for to repel us from drinking poisonous acids , for example. It is useless therefore in a body built on opposing tensions to expect that we shall be so fortunate as to experience only one of them— that is the pleasurable one—during a lifetime.

… To look for impossible one-sided perfections is to invite disappointment. Just as the forces of winter wither the foliage of trees but are not therefore evil forces, so the destructive element in Nature withers the forms of individuals, nations, civilizations and continents when they have outserved their utility and the appropriate time of disintegration arrives.

… It would be senseless to ask for a world free from suffering. Imagine what would happen to a hand accidentally put into a fire if there were no nervous system to provide the owner of the hand with a warning signal of pain. It would be altogether destroyed and its use lost forever. Here the pain of being burnt, severe though it be, would really act as a disguised friend if it persuaded the owner to withdraw his hand from the fire. So far as suffering protects physical life, it possesses a justifiable place in the universal scheme of things.

Plato has even pointed out that it is a misfortune to a man who has deserved punishment to escape from it. After all, the punishment may awaken him to the recognition that wrong has been done and thus purify his character. Again, it is through pain that man’s cruelty and pride and lust may best be broken, for they are hardly amenable to correction by mere words.

… The pain inflicted on a swollen sense of ‘I’ for example by karmic compensatory working is not really punishment any more than is the pain inflicted by a surgeon who opens an abscess with his knife.

… Nobody likes to impose a discipline upon himself and that is why everybody has to submit to a discipline imposed by karma. Hence pain and suffering come to us principally through the operations of karma. Their seeds may have been sown during the present life and not necessarily during a past one.

… Karma is a continuous process and does not work by postponement. It is indeed incorrect to regard it as a kind of post-mortem judge!

… we weaken ourself and injure truth if we believe that all events are unalterably fixed, that our external lives are unchangeably pre-ordained and that there is nothing we can do to improve the situations in which we find ourself.

… It is true that we are compelled to move within the circumstances we have created in the past and the conditions we have inherited in the present, but it is also true that we are quite free to modify them.

… No man however evolved he may be has entire control over his life but then he is not entirely enslaved to it either. No action is entirely free nor entirely fated; all are of this mixed double character.

 

… all those elements of heredity, education, experience, karma (both collective and personal), freewill and environment conspire together to fashion both the outer form and inner texture of the life which we have to live. … In short, our existence has a semi-independent, semi-predestined character.