Life is a fleeting moment

When contemplating the mysteries of life, the mystery of suffering seems to me the most mystic of all mysteries. Difficulties and challenges seem to be part of the make-up of our world. Few hearts are not afflicted by sorrows and few lives are spared by sufferings. Is there a meaning in this, I often wonder, is this a necessary step in a bigger process? Is there any good in bad?

This physical world is a world of opposites. Thus polarities exist universally: light and darkness, positive and negative, health and disease, yin and yang, life and death… More specifically, there are two opposite forces operating simultaneously upon the world of human being: physical and spiritual, thus creating tension between good and evil, moral and immoral, right and wrong. To make things more complicated, we, humans, are given the free will to choose between the two. No wonder suffering is generated. Suffering, in its essence, is our struggling between our desires to satisfy physical needs and our desire to be good as well as to be near to the source of all good. Thus all forms of unhappiness come from one form or another of attachment to the material world. This is the condition of this physical world and for as long as we live here, no one seems to be able to escape.

Why then do we have to suffer?

This question is closely related to the purpose of life. If life does not have purpose, of course suffering does not have any meaning (This is an awful situation, isn’t it? We have to suffer anyway, but without meaning, we suffer in vain!). But suppose that our purpose of living here on earth is to grow our soul, then this physical world might be the special environment in which our soul can make true progress. That is exactly some have suggested that this physical world is a vast “Soul School”, and everything in the world is but a tool to help human souls to learn.

And the suffering is the one condition under which our soul can be best trained:

“The mind and spirit of man advance when he is tried by suffering. The more the ground is plowed, the better the seed will grow, the better the harvest will be. Just as the plow furrows the earth deeply, purifying it of weeds and thistles, so suffering and tribulation free man from the petty affairs of this worldly life until he arrives at a state of complete detachment.”

Guy Murchie also suggested that “human soul thrives on a challenge or a problem and, once it is stretched by struggling with any sort of adversity, it can never shrink all the way back to its original dimensions. And so it grows bigger. Therefore, one should think of adversity as a kind of growth hormone at the opposite pole from, yet absolutely essential to, spiritual development.”

It might be comforting to know that this special condition of physical world does not exist in the next life. There are no opposite forces in the next world, thus test and suffering do not exist there either. Sound pretty good, but there is trade-off like everything in life: the trade-off is we don’t progress as fast in spiritual world as we do in physical world! We don’t have test, we don’t have opportunity either. So rather than to look at it as vale of tears, this life with its multitude tests and sufferings could also be seen and more correctly seen as an unique opportunity. It is an opportunity to get a jump-start to eternity. By struggling against the resistance of material world, it enables us to make enormous amount of spiritual progress in a very short period of time.

However, understanding the cause and the reason of suffering may make it easier to bear the difficulties of life, but it does not completely erase the pain of suffering (to me at least). At the end of a day, whenever sorrow threatens to overtake me, it is always the words of Baha’u’llah that provide consolation to my heart:

 “Sorrow not if, in these days and on this earthly plane, things contrary to your wishes have been ordained and manifested by God, for days of blissful joy, of heavenly delight, are assuredly in store for you…”
 “Live then the days of thy life, that are less than a fleeting moment, with thy mind stainless, thy heart unsullied, thy thoughts pure, and thy nature sanctified, so that, free and content, thou mayest put away this mortal frame, and repair unto the mystic paradise and abide in the eternal kingdom for evermore.”