Suffering arises from ignorance of laws of existence
While suffering is the result of breaking the natural law, it is also an important clue to align with it. Suffering has a dual characteristic that way. The painful effect of transgression as well as a tool for alignment.
Furthering the example of gravity, suppose you spent an enormous amount of time suffering because of your ignorance of the law. You are hurt, confused, fearful of the dangerous uncertainties. Also, very angry at the senselessness of it all. Suppose you realize that there was something you do not understand, and that it is actually your own mistake. You will go about analysing the cause and effect and eventually discover the law of gravity. Once you knew the law, life would become much simpler, by simply aligning with it. No? Isn’t that what physics has done? By aligning with the natural law of gravity, Physics has not only protected us from harm but also used it for our tremendous benefit. It has utilised gravity for stupendous progress. Knowledge of the law of gravity has given us the wonderful gifts of elevators, airplanes, rockets, space programs, and so much more!
Don’t you see the point I am trying to make? When you discover a law, you can use it to your tremendous benefit, simply by aligning with it. All benefits apart, aligning with the law will end all your suffering! Don’t you see how suffering is a tool, an indicator, a clue to tell you that you are not aligned?
Suffering is an alarm that will beep continuously till you wake up. So many times in life we won’t wake up to our ignorance until the roof caves in on our heads!
About the evil of the gratuitous variety; the killer natural disasters, the tragic accidental losses, the Hitlers and the holocausts, we tend to say “That is undeserved! It should not have happened! It means God does not exist. A loving, kind God would never allow such a thing to happen”.
Maybe it is exactly a loving, kind God, if it existed, who would allow such a thing to happen. Because it would care less for your short term comfort and more for your long term evolution. Such evil and suffering is a shortcut to evolution, to the fast-tracking of Yogic progress in your system.
You might learn the true nature of death from the loss of a loved one. You could learn the true nature of attachment from such a tragedy. You might learn the importance of the laws of surrender in a situation that is far beyond your control. You might learn the role of emotions which you have suppressed for long when you face the deep abyss of a terminal illness. You might learn the necessity of persistence when your entrepreneurial ventures fail again and again because of outside forces. You might understand the true impermanence of material possessions when you lose everything in an earthquake or a flood.
Suffering carries tremendous compassion in itself because it brings a wealth of opportunities to learn. Even if you do not want to learn, you will be forced to. To upgrade, to enhance yourself and to ultimately become super-human. Remember the greater the tragedy, the deeper the learning. The intelligence of suffering has an unbelievable end- state in mind for you.
Just change your vantage point. View the problem with a different lens.
Ask yourself-” What am I supposed to learn from this situation?”
Look, I do not mean to trivialise these excruciating tragedies, I have empathy for the pain they cause. Of course suffering is terrible, but screaming about it being undeserved and gratuitous is foolish. Why should suffering care about your pain today when it can unleash your unknown potential, put your evolution into a higher gear? Analysing these unimaginable sufferings in a different light will lend them much more sense. You are being taught new laws, maybe it is crash-course in a new chapter of the laws.
The highest goal of life: Not comfort and pleasure but evolution to a post-human
Remember, the highest goal of life is not comfort and pleasure, but a higher level of existence. A post-human state of ultra-cognition and an ultra-sensory happiness. An uncaused and unbroken bliss. Nothing could cause or mar it. We are all headed to this post-human state; old or young, fast or slow, willing or screaming about it. This life or another. It will happen. It is the software of your life which is running its course.
Everything else, all external suffering and pain is just a tool to move toward it. It is our evolutionary impulse. It is the imperative of our human psycho-biological complex to urge in this direction. Nature, in form of experiences, is your teacher, your interactive tool to learn the ropes. Nature will force you to unlearn the wrong and relearn the correct principles of life, again and again, till you do not willingly understand. Nature will bring on situations which teach you new laws too, through suffering.
That is the program of evolution.An interactive, self- directing system. A self propagating, self-organizing code.
Tragedy is the greatest teacher, we learn quickly from suffering. Suffering is a shortcut to further evolution, biology has shown us. External, environmental challenges invoke quantum leaps in mutation, not a piece-meal gradual one. Suffering is an essential feedback tool, in the self propagating, self organizing feedback loop of evolution. Remember the anecdote about a goat born with extended hind legs which learnt to walk like a human in the first year of its life?
Debilitating tragedy is the chance, the opportunity for unimagined growth, of unparalleled transformation. We must milk its blessings once we have shed enough tears for the discomfort it brings. No, I am not being heartless, I only want to exemplify the immense compassion any suffering carries within itself. It will not let you be just what you are, just where you are, average and ordinary. It demands you to evolve, it drags you, kicking and screaming out of your warm little nest of ordinariness into the palatial wonders of extra-ordinariness. If you allow it.
Unexpected tragedy teaches you about laws you did not know existed. It as a part of your human education. It forces you to take exams of the graduate level while you are yet at school. At first you think you might die from grief and overwhelm, some do, but then you learn new truths, new principles, new laws. You become extraordinary in some way, and if your time has come, if your samskaras are ready, you win the biggest prize of them all. You transcend your humanness to become supra-human. You become hyper-cognitive, hyper-sensory. You experience unimagined bliss. Bliss you never felt being human.
Does it then mean that suffering is the only way of evolving? No, but it surely is a fast-track to unprecedented, unimagined levels of being.
Suffering is an illusion then, because it arises out of misinterpretation, out of misjudgment. It is painful, no denying that. But its purpose is to be a tool for higher alignment, the ice axe which will take you up to the peak of Everest. We need to unlearn and relearn; we need to dismantle the old crumbling fortress of our misconceptions, which strain under the weight of its poor construction.
What are these laws that must be re-learnt, correctly understood? Like any serious field of knowledge, one starts from the basics, ground up. You cannot teach the Godel’s incompleteness theorems to a mathematics sophomore, nor can you expect a high school physics enthusiast to solve the Hawking’s radiation equation. Similarly, the well-defined exhaustive, empirical scientific theory of Yoga needs equal, and I suggest greater seriousness of study. After all it is a matter of our existence, of our lives.
It is not a topic of flimsy debate, nor of a priori hypothesising by armchair philosophers. That is a sheer waste of time.