The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 3

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Origin and Nature of Suffering

Suffering there is, some say, because the soul takes delight in it: if there was not the soul's delight behind, there would not be any suffering at all. There are still two other positions with regard to suffering which we do not deal with in the present context, namely, (1)that it does not exist at all, the absolute Ananda of the Brahman being the sole reality, suffering, along with the manifested world of which it is a part, is illusion pure and simple, (2)that suffering exists, but it comes not from soul or God but from the Antidivine: it is at the most tolerated by God and He uses it as best as He can for His purpose. That, however, is not our subject here. We ask then what delight can the soul take when the body is suffering, say, from cancer. If it is delight, it must be of a perverse variety. Is it not the whole effort of

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mankind to get rid of pain and suffering, make of our life and of the world, if possible, a visible play of pure and undefiled Ananda?

On the other hand, we do find that suffering is not always mere suffering, that it can be turned into a thing of joy; it is a fact proved in the lives of many a martyr and many a saint. Many indeed are those who have not only borne suffering passively but have welcomed it and courted it with happiness and delight. If it is said it is a perverse kind of pleasure, and if one wishes to hang it by calling it masochism, well, we do not solve the problem in that way, we seek to hide it behind a big word; it is at the most a point of view. What agrees with one's temperament (or prejudices) one calls natural and what one does not like appears to him perverse. Another person may "have a different temperament and accordingly a different vocabulary.

An ascetic chastising himself with all kinds of rigours, a patriot immolating himself relentlessly at the altar of his motherland, a Satyagrahi fasting to death does not merely suffer, but takes a delight in suffering. He does so because

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he holds that there is something greater than this preoccupation of avoiding pain and suffering, than this ordinary round of a life made of the warp and woof of enjoyment and disappointment. There is a greater delight that transcends these common vital norms, the dualities of the ordinary life. In the case of the ascetic, the martyr, the patriot, the delight is in an ideal, moral, religious or social. All that can be conceded here is that the suffering voluntarily courted does not cease to be suffering, is not itself transmuted into or felt as delight but that it is suppressed or dominated by the other feeling and consciousness.

True, but even this is an intermediate state. For there is another in which suffering is not merely suppressed but sublimated, wholly transmuted: there is then nothing else but delight, pure and entire. That is the soul state, the state of permanent dwelling in the Spirit. Now, we come back to the question why or how does the soul, being all delight, become in life the very opposite of its essential nature, a thing of misery, why does the spirit descend or condescend to take the form of matter: it

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is an old-world and eternal problem that has been asked and faced and answered in various ways through the ages.

Here is, briefly, how we view the question. The soul accepts a mortal life of pain and suffering, welcomes an apparent denial of its essential nature for two reasons: (1) to grow and increase in consciousness through such experiences,— pain and suffering being one variety of the fuel that tends the Fire that is our soul; and (2) to transfer its inalienable purity into Matter, by its secret pressure and influence gradually transform earthly life into a movement of its own divine state, the state of inviolable Bliss.

All experiences, all contacts with the forms and forces of Life and Matter act indeed as fuel to the flame of the soul's consciousness, whether they are good, bad or indifferent according to some outward view or standard. And in response to the nature and degree of the growth and increase demanded, does the soul choose its fuel, its external mode of life and surroundings. If suffering and misery help to kindle and increase the flame, the soul has

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no jugupsa, repulsion for them. Indeed it accepts the forms of misery in order to cure them, transform them, to bring out of them theiroriginal norms of beauty and bliss of which they are a degradation and an aberration.

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