The Wisdom of the Overself
Paul Brunton
Chapter IX: The Shadows of
Evil and Suffering
All
apparent evil is not real evil. Who has not known someone who has been turned
from a wrong course by sickness ? 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.
… the universe could not be manifested without
manifesting the pairs of opposites, such as light and darkness or life and
death. This duality is inevitably inherent in its very structure. Consequently
it is an inevitable accompaniment of our own human existence too. 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.
This is not to be taken as a victory for evil powers but as a manifestation of
one side out of a pair of opposites.
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.
The coils of karma which entwine themselves around
the wrong-doer are primarily there as a natural consequence of his own acts,
not as a fiat of punishment. Time is educating and developing him to perceive
the right. When he has the humility to face the responsibility for his own past
errors, he may see how many of his troubles were self-earned. Where he cannot
trace the cause to his present personality, he must needs believe it to lie in
his previous ones.
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.
The first error which most people make when
accepting the tenet of karma is to postpone its operation to future
reincarnations. The truth is that the consequences of our acts come to us if
they can in the same birth as when they are committed. If we think of karma as
being something whose fruits are to be borne in some remote future existence,
we think of it wrongly. For every moment we are shaping the history of the next
moment, every month we are fashioning the form of the month which shall follow
it. No day stands isolated and alone.
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! But it is often not possible to work out these consequences in terms of
the particular circumstances of this birth. In such cases— and in such alone—
do we experience the consequences in subsequent births.
… although whilst evil endures we must accept the
fact of its existence as the price to be paid for the self-limiting of an
emanation from the Infinite into the finite, we need not therefore complacently
tolerate its activity .
Because we believe that karma operates to bring
about sometimes approximate, sometimes adequate justice in the end, we must not
therefore for example stand indolently aside from aggressive wrong-doing in
passive trust to its operation. For karma needs to utilize instruments and its
effects do not spring miraculously out of the air. Hence we must not shirk if
we are called upon to co-operate with its intended educative effect, to work
with its intuited operations and to set those causes into motion through which
its reactions may be produced.
… 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.
Freedom exists at the heart of man, that is in his
Overself. Fate exists on the surface-life of man, that is in his personality.
And as man himself is a compound of both these beings, neither the absolute
fatalist nor the absolute free-will position is wholly correct and his external
life must also be a compound of freedom and fate.
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. We sew the tapestry of our own destiny but the thread we
use is of a kind, a colour and quality forced upon us by our own past thoughts
and acts. In short, our existence has a semi-independent, semi-predestined
character.
The materialists paint a terrible picture of the
universe as a vast prison where man’s fate, thoughts and acts are wholly
determined by his physical environment. The ignorant among Orientals live in a
locked-up world where man paces helplessly to and fro— a prisoner to divine
predestination.
Karma refutes both these dreary contentions and
assigns to man sufficient freedom to shape himself and his surroundings. By his
own development the individual affects or enriches his environment, helps or
hinders Nature, and the reverse is also true.
Karma does not say that we must stand waiting like
ragged beggars before the door of fate. Our past freewill is the source of our
present fate, as our present one will be the source of our future fate .
Consequently the most powerful factor of the two is our own will. There is
therefore no room either for foggy fatalism or over-confidence. No man can
escape his own responsibility in the matter of shaping his internal outlook and
external environment by laying the blame on something or someone else.
Every man should study his mistakes in action and
ascertain their source in himself. Let him frankly admit his partial
responsibility at least and set out to make what amends he can. This is painful
but it is better than continuing to dwell in illusions from which severe checks
or sustained disappointments may later bring him down to earth. For once a
thought-series or deed is strong enough, its karmic resultant is as inevitable
as a picture on an exposed photographic film.
When karmic force has attained a certain impetus
its onward movement can no longer be stopped although it may be modified. This
is why it is a philosophic maxim to nip undesirable growths in the bud and thus
extinguish karmic energies before they become inexorably decisive.
A thought which has not attained a certain
fullness of growth and strength, will not yield karmic consequences. The
importance of nipping off wrong thoughts at the time of their arising is thus
indicated. The way to fight a bad tendency in oneself or a bad movement in a
nation is to check it during the early stages before it has gathered momentum.
For it is easier to scotch it at the start when it is relatively weak than
later when it is relatively strong.
Nevertheless the philosophic student must
understand that if he should fiercely resist karma’s decrees at some times, it
is also right that he should bow resignedly to them at other times. For if he
has not learnt the lesson of letting go when it is wise to let go, then every
mistaken effort of his fingers to hold on against those decrees will only bring
him further and needless pain. He should not rebel against them blindly. How to
comprehend which course is to be taken is something which he has to deduce for
himself. No book can tell him this but his intuition checked by reason or his
reason illumined by intuition, may do so.
