THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING

I have suggested that the answer to the problem posed by the existence of 'evil', arises from the essential part it has to play in providing choice. Without it, there could be no 'good'. Without it, there could be no free-will. Without it there could be no personal spiritual development. We must now tackle a related problem, the problem of suffering. For it is the twin problems of evil and of suffering that provoke either the agonised cry of the faithful "Why, O Lord, Why?", or the cynicism and despair of the atheist.

THE CAUSES OF SUFFERING

An analysis of the causes of suffering suggests that they might be roughly divided into three overlapping categories.

Into the first category we might put those causes of suffering which are to some extent our own responsibility and therefore partly self-inflicted, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. Examples of these are jealousy, envy, feelings of inferiority and inequality, or of failure; fear, whether fear of loss, of suffering, or of death; thwarted ambition; material loss.

Such causes of suffering might be termed self-inflicted because they seem to arise from defects in the understanding of an individual Aether. Jealousy, for example, is a manifestation of excessive self-love, which has its origins in our animal past. Envy is also misconceived: the only thing enviable in another individual would be his or her higher level of evolutionary development and this is something no human Aether is equipped to judge. Feelings of inferiority and inequality are also misplaced, and for the same reason: certainly, everyone is inferior (and superior) to someone else, in that he or she may be a member of a lower (or higher) class at the School of Earth; but equally, everyone also enjoys the same human dignity as a divine individual part of Alpha-Holon.

These causes of suffering are all ones which could be mitigated, or even avoided, since they stem from a basic misunderstanding of the purpose of life. Suffering from these causes serves an important purpose: it motivates us to overcome them and thus promotes our higher evolutionary development.

In a second category we might group causes of suffering which are largely unavoidable when they are inflicted upon us by others. Examples of these are loneliness, rejection and unpopularity; gossip and slander; lack of liberty and enslavement, oppression and ill treatment.

Such suffering might serve an important purpose. It might teach its victims never to inflict it on others. Those who learned that lesson would have strengthened their own love attribute and thus advanced their education at the School of Earth.

In the third and last category, we might group causes of suffering that are wholly unavoidable, either because they are an intrinsic part of the material environment or because they are inherent in the nature of Aether.

Of these, the first are the old enemies: pain and sickness. The second are remorse and love.

PAIN

Pain causes suffering, but it is not the same as suffering. For while suffering is known only by the Aether, pain is known only by the physical body.

We know that pain has a material cause and generally we know what that cause is. It is the action of outside instruments, of chemicals, bacteria or viruses, on the nerve cells of the body. If proof of this were required, it is furnished by the fact that we can banish pain by anaesthesia and by pain-killing drugs, whose action is entirely on the material plane.

We also know that pain plays an absolutely essential role for the health of the body. For example, there is a type of rare disability where the afflicted person is born with no sense of pain. This is a highly dangerous condition which often proves fatal.

Indeed, we can discern the first 'pain' reaction in the bacterium hastily backing away from an unhealthy environment and thus prolonging its life and ability to sire future generations. Without this red light warning which we call pain, there might have been no learning from experience and therefore no evolution, no advancement of the Aether to culminate on earth in that of man.

Pain then, or rather its perception by the Aether as suffering, serves an important purpose.

THE EVOLUTION OF PAIN

Recent scientific studies have demonstrated that in human beings the suffering due to pain is very variable, largely conditioned by the state of nervous apprehension or of attention of the sufferer. In other words, the more fearful and tense the sufferer, the greater the pain; while the more his attention can be diverted away from it, the less he will feel it.

This has a most important moral implication. We have noted that apprehension, the fear of future suffering, is rudimentary or absent in the lower animals. We can also note that attention is very much a function of mind.

This means that suffering due to pain is an evolving characteristic. It means that we are not being simply anthropocentric when we assume, as we do, that the more primitive the creature, the less pain it suffers: that the trout suffers less than the hare; that a blade of grass or a mosquito does not suffer pain in the way that a song-thrush does.

This is of the greatest moral importance, because it makes much more endurable the ugly spectacle of universal suffering which we see all around us in the struggle for survival: weeds choking the life out of other plants, the tiger tearing the throat out of its prey, the spider draining the life blood of the fly.

But not only does the fact that the more primitive the creature, the less it suffers pain, have this moral implication: its converse, that the degree of suffering increases with the higher evolution of the Aether, has an important metaphysical outcome, which I shall be discussing in a moment.

SICKNESS

Free-will is a necessary attribute of all consciousness, of all Aether. Even a bacterium or an amoeba can choose. A human cell probably has much the same level of Aether, and therefore much the same amount of free-will, as an amoeba.

So a cell may choose, may choose to deviate from the collaborative programme laid down by the higher order Aether of the whole. Such deviant behaviour can cause perceptible malfunction.

Similarly, the main cause of sickness is disease, caused simply by the drive of all creatures to flourish and to multiply. The bacterium invades the body for this purpose and so, at an even more primitive level, do those half animate objects we call viruses. The right to struggle to survive and to procreate, which over the eons has resulted in the evolution of man, cannot be denied to any creature, no matter how primitive, just because it is inimical to the cells of our bodies.

Thus the suffering which derives from sickness is a necessary consequence of the world scheme I have been suggesting, since it insists on the omnipresence in all Aether both of the attribute of free-will and of the imperative to develop.

REMORSE

What we call 'Conscience' is the interpretation of that higher guidance which is communicated to us subconsciously via the telepathic link which binds us to Alpha-Holon and all His other parts.

Although free-will is ours, it remains partial as we ourselves are parts. We are not therefore wholly free to disobey the laws which prescribe for the development of our Aether.

Conscience then is a mechanism whereby our free-will is constrained so that, however hesitatingly and however much we may zig-zag or even try to go into reverse, we are nevertheless drawn to obey the laws of self-development. Thus Conscience is an instrument of the attractive love force.

This of course emerged quite clearly when we discussed how it is communication, the exchange of thoughts, that is the 'binding energy' of the love force, and that it is this subconscious communication with Alpha-Holon which manifests itself as Conscience.

The suffering due to remorse, then, which is the source of man's endless search for 'forgiveness', results directly from Conscience and is the instrument whereby it disciplines the Aether, constrains its free-will and directs it along the path towards the higher good.

But there can be no question of Alpha-Holon having to 'forgive' us, for we are His parts. We are what we are only because He is what He is. And we are slowly evolving according to His guidance to serve His purpose. Those who seek His forgiveness, then, are wasting their time.

For us there is only our own Conscience, our own knowledge that we have not moved in the right direction, that we have not yet thrown off behaviour which is primitive and inappropriate to our human level of Aether, that we have not matched up to our Alpha-Holon-derived aspirations. What we must seek, therefore, is not the forgiveness of some mighty Judge, but self-forgiveness.

No, it is not forgiveness that we should be begging for, but to be purged of the illusion that we need it. Our human burden is not the error of "sin", but the errors of guilt and remorse.

It is to help us on our march towards the goal of self-forgiveness and the liberation which must flow from it, which would be the moral purpose of the suffering caused by remorse. Indeed, one might speculate that it is when, and only when, an individual Aether has reached the goal of such liberation, of such self-forgiveness, that it is truly ready to leave the cycle of incarnations and move on to the next higher plane of existence.

This, for Christians, offers one key to the mystery of the Crucifixion: for those who believe that God has forgiven them for Jesus' sake are clearly well on the way to self-forgiveness. This would mean that Jesus did not die as a horrible and blasphemous sacrifice to propitiate the Almighty (for the God of Love he preached needs no propitiation), but as a gift of love to help guilt-ridden mankind to achieve self-forgiveness.

But until such achievement, remorse will cause suffering which, because Conscience endures through both phases of existence, will afflict us just as strongly in the aetheric phase as in the incarnate phase. Indeed, because we shall not sufffer from pain or bodily misfortunes after death, and since the aetheric phase allows us clearer reflection and meditation, the suffering that remorse will bring us will be even more influential in the aetheric phase, hastening our learning and propelling us along our upward path.

THE SUFFERING OF LOVE

We have discussed how the advance of the Aether is powered by the love force and accompanied by increased development of the love attribute. We have also discussed how the attractive love force increases as the Aether develops and how its binding energy is communication, the exchange of thoughts and emotions.

It must follow that the higher the order of Aether, the greater will be its compassion for the suffering of others and the more painful will its own vicarious suffering be in consequence.

At the human level, we see such vicarious suffering exemplified in the distress of the parent whose child is suffering. It evokes the noblest of sentiments: of sympathy, of pity, of compassion.

Many years ago, I tried to offer an explanation for the suffering and death of a child with this little poem:

"A child lies here. Death's mask Was quickly donned. The task Complete: to touch. Naught more: So softly, close the door."

Since such suffering is a necesary companion of Love, it must always be present both in the material and aetheric conditions and at every level of spiritual development.

THE ETHICS OF SUFFERING

"A pearl is a temple built by pain Around a grain of sand"

"The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, The more joy you can contain"

"Much of your pain is self chosen. It is the bitter potion By which the physician within you Heals your sick self"

Kahlil Gibran

Those of us who were schoolboys when caning was a standard punishment will recall the near ecstatic moments experienced immediately after the beating. Fear and pain were both suddenly over. So it must be for those who die after a long and painful illness, who suddenly find themselves still 'alive' but wholly liberated from physical pain - and from the fear of death. Yes, without such suffering there could not be such joy - at any rate, not at our human spiritual level of development.

So we come back to the point we arrived at in our discussion of Good and Evil. That is, if all things were white, we could never know black, but we could never know white either. If all life were continuously happy, we could never know suffering - but we could never know ecstasy either.

I remember climbing a hill on the west coast of Scotland. It was many years ago. I reached the top and threw myself down in the heather. I gazed at the breath-taking view: islands and hills and seas spread out below me in a panoply of changing colours. It was a moment of ecstasy that lasted for perhaps all of two minutes before my attention wandered and my eyes closed, satiated.

The point of this little memoir is, you see, that at our human level of development we cannot for long support uninterrupted joy. We cannot for long support beauty that is unrelieved by ugliness or mediocrity. Our restless spirits are always searching, always demanding variety, for ever ranging for fresh stimuli. Adam and Eve were not driven from the Garden of Eden as soon as they had evolved to the level of humanity. On the contrary, they went of their own free-will, gladly. For the Garden, the representation of unrelieved peace and beauty, really represented neither. It represented unchanging monotony, endless stagnation. So they left it, because the suffering and sorrow which are inherent in the truly human condition are also accompanied, and overmatched, by heightened awareness, by more vibrant happiness. Yes, we laugh at the old joke about the man who liked bashing his head against a wall because it was so pleasant when he stopped, but it contains more than a little truth.

This then is one of the purposes of suffering. It lends passion to joy.

And I have already described several other purposes. We saw that suffering could motivate us to overcome certain defects of character or understanding. We saw that suffering could teach us never to inflict it upon others. We saw that suffering is the indispensable adjunct to survival and thus to evolutionary development. We saw that suffering disciplines us and urges us towards our higher destiny.

THE HIGH PURPOSE OF SUFFERING

At several points in our discussion, I have claimed that suffering has a higher metaphysical purpose. What did I mean?

In an earlier discussion, I suggested that mankind's evolution from more primitive ancestors must have been effected by spending more and more time in the aetheric phase between reincarnations, the period of creative reflection and of 'disremembering' inappropriate behaviour patterns, promoting innovation and adaptation. I deduced that one or both of two factors must have been at work to bring this about. First, the evolved Aether must have discovered how to make the aetheric state more attractive. Second, it must have come to find the incarnate state on earth more and more disagreeable.

Isn't it the suffering on the material plane that must be a key element in this second factor?

In every one of the categories of suffering, human beings are afflicted by deeper suffering than more primitive creatures. Suffering then is an essential factor in the higher development of the human Aether, for it provides the deterrent against reincarnating too rapidly, against cutting short the vital aetheric phase. Thus it helps to ensure that the Aether remains discarnate long enough to promote the development of its ideoplastic creative abilities.

But why, then, do we observe such great disparity in the extent and degree of suffering as between individual human beings?

I have suggested that the advance of the human Aether, its promotion to higher and higher classes of the School of Earth, must be accompanied by longer and longer intervals between reincarnations, graduating finally to a higher and permanently non-material level of existence. So are we to assume that this is effected by an increasing level of suffering? Are we to deduce, when we observe innocent human brothers and sisters enduring the agonies of long illness or the cruel atrocities of their fellows, that these sufferers are the most advanced Aethers, the most truly 'good'? That would be a most discouraging deduction, for it would mean that our reward for progress towards higher spiritual attainment would be more and more suffering, until finally we could stick incarnation no longer and graduated to permanent "disincarnation", permanent residence of the higher aetheric or celestic plane.

The answer to this question is that suffering on the material plane is only half the equation. Happiness on the aetheric plane is the other half of it, for existence on the aetheric plane grows progressively more attractive as the individual Aether advances.

To illustrate what I am driving at, let us take a look at a 'new boy' Aether, that is to say an Aether who has just won promotion from the animal to the human level of spirituality and has just experienced his first incarnation as a human being. Such an Aether will still bear much of the burden of its previous more primitive (i.e. what we call 'bad') behaviour and this will darken and impoverish its stay on the aetheric plane. Moreover, its previous animal incarnations, with their eternal struggle for survival and development, will still be very influential, reinforcing the more primitive urge to reincarnate quickly. So, if this 'new boy's' first human incarnation at the School of Earth had been agreeable, what would he do when after death he found himself disorientated in a far from agreeable ideoplastic environment on the aetheric plane? Surely he would try to reincarnate as quickly as he could - try to get back to the more familiar, more cheerful and agreeable life of earth!

But if he were to do this, if he were to reincarnate as soon as he could after death, then he would be cutting short a developmentally vital interval on the aetheric plane, a period of 'homework' and 'self-examinations' -and he would probably find himself back again in the bottom class of the School of Earth, having progressed little, his second incarnation being effectively no more than a continuation of his first.

So this is where suffering plays its part. If our new boy has endured his share of suffering, he will be less anxious to reincarnate immediately. He will be glad of a break and will thus benefit developmentally from a longer period spent in the aetheric phase.

But our new boy should not endure more than his share of suffering, for if he could carry into the aetheric state nothing but dark and dreadful memories from his incarnation at the School of Earth, his suffering would have been self-defeating, negating its metaphysical purpose. No, he must endure only enough suffering to deter him from over-hasty reincarnation and he must at the same time experience enough happiness on earth to be able to commence the adornment and enrichment of his aetheric condition.

But we are getting onto dangerous ground, for it could be argued that, since the metaphysical purpose of suffering is to speed the higher development of the Aether, then we should be doing our fellows good if we made them suffer. That might well be so, but since such primitive, even monstrous behaviour, is a direct affront to the love imperative, we should be doing ourselves much harm. Not only should we be degrading ourselves, moving downwards against the upward attractive force, but what a hell of remorse we should suffer in our next period of discarnate reflection and meditation.

Pity the sufferer, but pity even more his tormentor.

Here of course we touch upon remorse, another factor affecting the amount of suffering in any particular reincarnation. For remorse, or self-accusation, provokes the idea of expiation and then the desire to earn it. We may expect then that an Aether tormented by remorse during its aetheric phase might seek to 'purge' it by 'paying for it' in the coin of suffering in his or her next incarnation.

And what in fact do we observe amongst men and women upon earth? We observe the phenomenon of masochism, of self-denying abstinence, of asceticism, of puritannical bigotry, of whole armies of humanity prostrating themselves daily to beg for higher forgiveness and absolution, of mighty creeds founded on the "remission of sins" and, above all, of the incidence of psychosomatic illness, now discovered to be very widespread indeed.

This is NOT the Hindu concept of Karma, of retribution in one life for the misdeeds of a past one. I am asserting no such law of retribution, only the likelihood that an individual might choose, of its own free-will, to try to relieve its suffering from remorse and thereby hope to enrich its aetheric phase existence and advance towards that high goal of self-forgiveness.

And what about the top form boys, those nearing graduation from the School of Earth? We have seen that it is an evolutionary fact that sensitivity to pain increases with the development of the Aether, so we must deduce that the level of suffering of the top form boys will be much more intense. On the other hand, they will suffer less from causes which stem from defects of character. Moreover, since their aetheric state will have become richer, more creative and more joyful, they will be in much less need of earthly suffering to persuade them to linger there. Also, since they will be approaching self-forgiveness, remorse will be correspondingly less likely to tempt them into expiatory suffering.

In general, then, we should expect that suffering would be more obvious and widespread amongst new boys and less frequent but more poignant amongst the more advanced.

I hope I have now demonstrated that suffering has high purpose, but before I leave the subject, I'd like to speculate on our future fate, the fate of those who have evolved to the next higher spiritual plane, the fate of 'angels'. Angels will be largely beyond the suffering born of ignorance and folly. Since their companions will be as evolved as themselves, they should be generally free of the suffering inflicted by others. Being non-physical Aethers, they will be wholly beyond the suffering of bodily pain and sickness. Having reached self-forgiveness, they will be beyond remorse as we know it, though, since they too will be evolving to the 'archangelic' and yet higher planes, with a more highly developed Conscience nourished by their closer communion with Alpha-Holon, they may well suffer from awareness of their own lack of perfection.

But the last cause of suffering, the suffering born of Love - that they shall not escape. With their more highly developed love attribute, they will be much more sensitive to the suffering of others. As H H Milman wrote in his well known hymn:

"The winged squadrons of the sky Look down with sad and wondering eyes"

And if they are more sensitive to the suffering born of Love, then when we extrapolate upwards from them to Alpha Himself, who is aware of and in communication with all His parts and who is possessed of the love attribute in infinite measure, what unimaginable suffering He must endure of His absolute free-will from the contemplation of our suffering. And why? It can only be because our suffering is for our ultimate good: because it is essential to our evolution upwards towards Himself.

"Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the Unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove "

T S Eliot

FOOTNOTE: "THE HOLOCAUST"

The appalling tragedy that befell the Jews at the hands of Hitler's Germany is often cited by atheists to 'prove' that God cannot exist.

"If there is an omnipotent and good supreme Being, how could He permit such a monstrous example of evil and mass suffering as The Holocaust?"

This deceptively simple question in fact contains a number of unstated assumptions.

The first assumption is that collective murder is more evil than individual murder. We human beings think so because we look at ourselves collectively: "I am British", "They are Muslims" etc. But Alpha-Holon does not look at us collectively. He is concerned with individuals, with each and every Aether. Our collective labels are man made, not God given.

The second assumption is that the death of many people at the same place is more horrendous than that of the same number of people in different places. At the time of "The Holocaust", a total of more that 100,000 people across the world were dying every day, most from 'natural' causes.

The third assumption is that 'untimely' death is tragic. Here again, the adjective 'untimely' is man's, not Alpha-Holon's, and the tragedy is in the hearts of the mourners, not in the death itself, the transition from the material to the aetheric plane. To Alpha-Holon there is nothing tragic in death - or birth.

The fourth and final assumption is that God is some sort of benevolent and imperial tyrant, who totally controls the behaviour of mankind. This is a misconception: The God of Love gives guidance and exerts huge influence over all His parts, His children, but He cannot remove their portions of His own free-will: He does not control them. (I believe the Church has much responsibility for this misconception - "'all might, majesty, dominion and power" etc etc)

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