Pain, Suffering and the Laws of the Spiritual Realm

By Angoo Ba

He was in his mid-60s now, and how his life had changed! Old interests had disappeared, and replaced with new ones. Passions that drove him once were now a thing of what seemed to be a very distant past. He now thought a lot about larger questions—questions like how and why the universe came into being, the purpose of human life, where we have come from and where we will go after we die. These were very basic questions, of course, that every person ought to reflect on, and nothing but his own heedlessness had prevented him from seriously reflecting on them before.

There was one issue which, when he turned his mind to it, really gave him the shudders—the fact of the enormity of suffering in the world and what appeared to him to be the sheer randomness of it. He had been through many rough patches in his life, to do mainly with interactions with other people as well as forms of religiosity that didn’t make people happy. He had also personally witnessed enormous pain that several other people had gone through. The pain of animals and other creatures also struck him deeply. And, the huge amount of suffering, caused by human beings and by natural phenomenon, that was relayed almost day in and day out on the television channels that he used to watch (he had recently given this up though, much to his relief), really tormented him.

The whole world seemed to be like one giant madhouse! Pain and suffering seemed so ubiquitous! It seemed to him that anything could happen to anyone at any time. No one had any idea what the next moment held in store. Today, one could be very happy and feel at the top of the world, but the very next day, something could happen—an accident, sickness, an assault, financial collapse, the outbreak of a war, a deadly disease, for instance—that could completely overturn one’s life. There was no certainty that even a close relative might not become a turncoat all of a sudden, that a seemingly friendly neighbour might not create a ruckus over a minor matter or that a harmless remark might not spur a violent reaction from a person or a mob. Really, there was almost nothing about the future—not even the very next moment—that one could know with certainty. Apart from the fact that one would inevitably die, one day or the other, the entire future was wrapped in an impenetrable cloak of uncertainty. Given that nothing whatsoever about one’s future except for this one fact was certain, life seemed immensely scary to him.

It was not only pain and suffering that so troubled him but also what he thought was the complete randomness of it all. There seemed to him to be no logic or laws or rules governing where, when and to whom and in what forms pain and suffering could strike. The more he thought of this, the less enthusiastic he was about living.

One day, as he sat in his chair agonising about the fact of suffering and how random it all seemed, it struck him that the physical world was characterized by a perfect exactness, certainty and predictability that he thought was in complete contrast to the human world. The more he mused about it the more amazing it seemed.

If you threw an object up, for instance, it would definitely fall down, he thought. There was no chance of it flying further up and into outer space. There was that predictability and certainty about it, the definiteness of which there could be no doubt. Similarly, the time it took for the Earth to rotate around its axis and the speed at which it rotated was, he supposed, exact, precise and completely predictable. This time and speed had been exactly the same from the moment the earth came into being, billions of years ago, he said to himself. They might not have changed by even a micro-second, he imagined. The same was perhaps true for the time it took for the earth to revolve around the sun and the speed at which it did so. He didn’t have much knowledge of science, but he supposed he wasn’t wrong in assuming this to be the case. Likewise, he thought to himself, two bits of hydrogen combining, under a given set of conditions, with one bit of oxygen always produced one bit of water. This rule or law applied, he supposed, in any part of the world with the same exactness and had probably been in operation ever since water or the world came into being. Similarly, he thought to himself, the speed of light and of sound, the force of gravity, the fact that two plus two equals four and many other such phenomenon remained always the same and thus certain and predictable, across space and time. A perfect order seemed to prevail in the physical world, where everything seemed to function in accordance with fixed laws that never failed or faulted. There was absolutely no randomness, uncertainty or anarchy in this realm.

The contrast with the human world was utterly stark, he thought. Here, everything seemed to be utterly random, uncertain and even anarchic. There seemed to be no logic in operation. Pain and suffering seemed to be able to strike anyone anytime anywhere and almost any which way. In contrast to the physical world, there seemed to be no regularity, certainty and predictability in the world of human beings at all as far as pain and suffering were concerned.

Why was this so, he wondered. It really tormented him. How he wished things had been different!

Over time, however, his perplexity began to dissolve. He began to read about the subject, discuss things with friends who also thought about such matters and spend time in contemplation. He gradually began to discover that happenings in the human world were not really random and uncertain as he used to think them to be. Just as the physical world was governed by certain physical laws, the human world was governed by certain spiritual laws—one such law being the law of action and reaction or receiving what one gives or sowing what one reaps.

Knowing about these laws reduced for him the sense of randomness about pain and suffering in the world, about the uncertainty of when what could happen. Recognising that our own actions (not just physical and verbal actions but also our thoughts) bring with them their consequences for ourselves—such as pain and suffering or joy and peace—according to their quality and the intention behind them made him realise that pain and suffering were not something random. There was definitely a certain logic that governed them.

Learning about, and reflecting on, issues such as free will and determinism, the soul, the possibility of previous lives and accumulated actions over infinite lifetimes, life after death (or the Hereafter), the role of challenges in helping one grow as a person, God, faith, devotion and Divine justice also impacted on the way he thought of pain and suffering. Gradually, things seemed to fall into place and make sense. The world did not seem to him to be unfair and as uncertain as he had once imagined it to be.