Brocoli-Illustre | How Self-development Empowers You | Every person deserves happiness to escape life’s hardships. Like seasons and landscapes, happiness is normal. Suffering is unnatural and caused by ignorance. Wisdom brings happiness. To end all suffering and escape all ills and evils, we must attain perfect wisdom, fully understand the purpose of life, and fully understand human relationships. Joyful wisdom.
Life’s suffering: why? Because nature is forcing us to evolve and we lack the spiritual illumination that can guide us safely through the obstacles. Trouble usually sneaks up on us. One day our family is complete and happy. A week after death, joy is replaced by agony. Friend today. He will be an adversary tomorrow for no reason. We had everything before. We don’t know why we’re poor and miserable. We lost health and vigor without explanation. Besides these major disasters, many smaller things cause us pain. We really want to avoid them, yet we never see them until they strike us or we stumble upon them in our ignorance. We need spiritual illumination to see far and wide, identify the hidden causes of human misery, and show how to avoid them. If we can reach enlightenment, the evolutionary journey can be comfortable and fast. It’s like walking through a long, dark room with random furnishings. We would be slow and bruised in the dark. If we could touch a button to switch on the electric light, we could travel fast, safely, and comfortably.
The old technique of teaching was to fill the mind with information, or alleged facts, and polish the personality. The assumption was that a man was born complete and that all that could be done for him was to load him up with information that he would employ with more or less competence depending on his natural aptitude. The theosophical idea is that the physical man, and all that constitutes his life in the physical world, is but a very partial expression of the self; that in each ego there is practically unlimited power and wisdom; that these may be brought through into expression in the physical world as the physical body and its invisible counterparts, which together constitute the complex vehicle of the ego’s manifestation, are evolved and adapted to the purpose; and that Thus, the light that leads to happiness is kindled from within, and the evolutionary trip we all take may be painless.
Why does dying hurt? Mostly because it separates us from loved ones. We only fear death because we don’t understand it and its role in human progress. Fear disappears as we understand, replaced by calm happiness.
Why do we have enemies who hurt us? Because in our limited physical consciousness we do not perceive the unity of all life and realize that our wrong thinking and doing must react upon us through other people, a situation from which there is no escape except by ceasing to think evil and patiently waiting for the causes we have already generated to exhaust. When spiritual illumination occurs and we no longer stumble in ignorance, the last enemy will go and we will never make another.
Why are poor people sick? Our blundering ignorance makes their existence conceivable, and we don’t understand their meaning or how to treat them. They wouldn’t bother us if we understood why they came to people and why they’re required for their progress. These wordless teachers will disappear when nature’s lesson is learned.
Like all suffering. They are both responses to our ignorance and guides to better behavior. They depart when we learn their teachings. Men don’t become wise by learning facts. By developing the soul till it floods the intellect with genius.
