Be truthful. Take miseries as Divine
blessings for your own good and be thankful.
This is one of the most difficult commandments especially as we are
not able to see the rightness or justness of our
sufferings which are of all sorts. For no fault
of ours we find ourselves humiliated and hurt
and we begin to question whether there is any
justice anywhere. The trouble seems to be that
in a relative world, what is one man's joy is
another man's misery, and the setting of one's
rightness above another's seeks to be difficult.
There are different criteria about what is just.
It appears to be just to punish anyone who had
the fortune or rather misfortune of having been
born in a higher class or caste and to readjust
the order of society so as to make the low class
or the poorer class the higher class. The haves
have to be made have-nots, and this is said to
be restoration of justice. So also we find that
with varying difficulties the concept of justice
is so thoroughly ambiguous and relative that
there is no (one) absolute principle by which
one can say that this is just. Even in regard to
our health where the restoration of it may be
said to be our aim, we have different voices,
which have no concept of health as the goal
while real health is that which makes one really
a thinking and intelligent and wise man, rather
than one who some how is protecting the body for
the body's sake.
Since this justice of the world's activities
and the deserts that one gets seem to be
inscrutable men are in despair. The only way to
see our way through this maze of despair is to
practice truth to oneself and in one's life
without caring for the consequences of such
life. Thus the practice and habit of
truth-speaking, and truth perception will entail
the change of attitude to the problems of
justice. The reality then begins to appear as it
is. Master Shri Ram Chandraji points out that
the life of man should be in conformity with the
highest state which alone will make us see truth
as it is and make us arrive at the knowledge.
'It is as it is'. The Upanishad (Isa) speaks of
the soul that sees things as they are in
themselves (tathya) eternally or from
beginningless time as a kavi, a Paribhuh, as
Swayambhuh, poet, all becoming seer and self
creative seer. Plato indeed speaks of this truth
speaking as fundamental, but truth speaking
cannot even take place unless one devotes
oneself to the highest goal or aim of life.
Justice will not appear to one who is all the
time engaged in doing the unjust, thinking that
he is doing the just. Unspiritual life usually
breeds these inversions of value and truth, so
much so that the truth begins to appear as
falsehood or lie. Indeed Plato in the 'Republic'
very apologetically and ironically says that he
will tell a lie or a false story in order to
illustrate his point, and the great scholars in
the West seriously have argued that he told a
lie and wished to use lie in order to preach
truth or make one accept his conception of
truth. Nothing can be more absurd than this for
inverted men hardly can see reality as it is and
truth to them appears to be false. Similarly Sri
Yamunacharya in his Gita-commentary speaks of
the extraordinary psychological difficulty of
Arjuna as not so much lying in his view that
'the false appears to be true' but that it lay
in his taking the right view to be false, for he
considered his dharma to be adharma; and the
entire Gita is undertaken to dispel this most
serious error. Similarly we find we take our
present miseries as unmixed evil, humiliation as
evil, and so on, and we think in the converse
that the joys and pleasures and wealths as
unmixed blessings of God. This is about as
mistaken a view as any that can be taken, for we
are obviously suffering from Vivarta or
inversion (which is the best translation of that
original term, and not illusion, though the
illusion arises from and can arise from this
inversion). Thus what are God's blessings could
be mistaken as punishments and what is intended
to purify man as injuring him. Many a man and
woman, child and widow, have complained, about
injustice of God, the poor and the lowly have
always cried to heaven against the death and
disease that overtaken them as well as the deep
indignity of life itself to them. Death seems to
be a good friend, alas! Suicide is seen to be
the only way out of this disaster or loss of
faith in the world and men and nature and
finally in God Himself.
Such being the case it almost appears than
men come to spiritual organization for knowing
the meaning of their misery and suffering, and
getting rid of them, but if we say that it is
God's blessing the whole explanations, to say
the least, is disappointing and disquieting. So
hopeless, is man's condition that it is
obviously difficult to convince himself of
goodness of evil or rather of what is misery and
humiliation. This being one of the greatest
difficulties of spiritual life one cannot get
over this by any means except by the Grace of
God and the Master Himself. If, of course, such
a grace seems to be lacking, then it is that one
turns against the whole spiritual way of life as
meaningless. To be thankful for our miseries and
trials obviously flows from the fact that all
that occurs is owing to Divine Will. Master
indeed writes (in a letter) that since God
cannot but be good all that occurs is good and
no one can think even that God gives the evil or
the wrong, or that adharma even prevails. If
this problem is stated in this manner then it
becomes clear that one need to nothing but
accept one's fate and suffer through all this,
and to seek freedom from misery is to accept it
as God's gift. Adharma and Dharma begin to have
no opposition between one another. But perhaps
it may be said that one pursues dharma because
it shows your love of God rather than that it is
dharma, and you would indeed do anything that
you are instructed by Gurus as Dharma even when
it goes contrary to your cherished traditions
and conscience.
However, the commandment is unambiguous. One
who accepts this path must accept all as God's
gifts and be thankful. This demands more faith
than reasoning and depends on it more fully than
anything else.
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