Between East and West. Pain and inner growth

Painful experiences can help revise our behaviors. If everything that hurts, grieves and scares us, therefore it repels us, than the escape from mistakes is a source of education.

In order to correct and educate ourselves we must develop intelligence and critical sense; we have to turn our and other people’s mistakes into teachings. This concerns the realistic vision. In the dramatic version grief becomes punishment, the payment of a debt for all sins committed. This vision of deserved penalty comes from pessimism and it is far from the thought that the consequence of the mistake is the punishment for it. It is a form of skepticism that sees the body as an instrument of spiritual contamination. In the hope of disembodied redemption, its flesh and emotions must be punished and mortified.

This concept is quite distant from the idea of God as a principle of absolute love.

The man, who considers physical body and conscience the means used by the soul to move in the matter, is more confident in the divine intelligence. These means are imperfect until there is a big gap between physical mind and soul. The gap can be overcome, though, by gradually adapting the mind to the energy of the soul.

In this vision, the goal of the personal work is the transformation of the dense vehicles (saturnine) to allow the spiritual conscience (reflection of the spark of God living in man) to walk as a Man among men, talking through the mind and working through the hands of the Initiate.

In this vision, the goal of the personal work is the transformation of the dense vehicles (saturnine) to allow the spiritual conscience (reflection of the spark of God living in man) to walk as a Man among men, talking through the mind and working through the hands of the Initiate.

They are distant visions. For the apostles of pain life is only a long penance to suffer. For the disciples of light, on the other hand, the existence (which is more than one life) is a cosmic project which physical man as well can gain the right to participate to.

For the former life is hell, for the latter the existence is a future full of transformations.

‘...to accomplish the tasks of the personal work (dharma) without escaping our destiny (karma) is the behavior that suits best the idea of Initiation.’

Karma and Dharma and comment by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

The old brahminic philosophy compiled the fundaments of the principles called Karma (law of cause and effect that involves several lives) and Dharma (the action of accomplishing the duties fixed by the karma).

The karma is the becoming of the individual project; it has the accessory task to free man from the stock of sins through processes of atonement. It follows a series of corrections that the West has, at a later stage, re-modeled in a concept of inner metamorphosis.

From one life to another, through the dharma, man faces the karmic effects that follow him until every task has been accomplished and every debt paid. To accomplish our tasks is the fundament of liberation and illumination.

In the eastern philosophy pains and obstacles in life are not punishments but a consequence of previous actions. ‘Justice’ is a universal precept because to balance what had been disarranged is true for any kind of value. Therefore harmony and disharmony are cosmic as well as human principles.

According to karmic justice all bad and good happening to man has the only purpose to make him stronger. Merits and demerits are supports of the karmic action, aimed at transforming the passional instinct and impulse in strength, creative intelligence and sensible judgment.

In the comment to the Bhagavad Gîtâ by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the Dharma is the field of accomplishment of the karmic justice. It is the battlefield of spiritual warriors and not the occasional theater of a war tale. Radhakrishnan writes: ‘…it is a man’s prerogative to establish what is right or dharma. Hunger, sleepiness, fear and sex are common to men and animals. The difference between men and animals is the ability to distinguish what is right from what is not.

The world is dharmaksetra, namely the battlefield of a moral fight between good and evil (this is the Armageddon in Jewish religion). The final result depends on the human soul, where these battles are fought every hour of every day. The ascent from the earth to heaven, from pain to spiritual realization is achieved through the Path of Dharma. The battlefield is called dharmaksetra or field of righteousness, because the supreme Lord, protector of the dharma of every living creature, is always present. God as Terrible is an aspect that appears to Arjuna’s vision only on the field of trials. Life is a battle, a ‘war’ to change the evil of human nature. This is why the true mystic doesn’t hate evil, because it doesn’t contain any malignant Principle.’

by Athos A. Altomonte