Logos 472
Suffering is useful and necessary.
In truth, our thoughts, words and deeds have effects that bring about consequences, good or bad, depending on the nature of our mind and heart.
It is the acts committed in the past or even the previous life of a being, which determine the conditions of his next birth or reincarnation, and existence. The sufferings linked to guilty acts have a double origin: the acts themselves, but also those committed during previous lives.
The origin of culpable acts is most often ignorance. But not knowing that an act is wrong does not mean that, if one commits it, one can avoid its undesirable consequences, which give rise to other wrongful acts.
On the other hand, a distinction is made between two kinds of faults: those that are “mature”, so to speak, and those that are not yet mature. By “mature” faults we mean those whose consequences we are currently suffering. The others are those which are accumulated in us and have not yet produced their fruits of suffering.
The man who commits a crime may not be caught immediately and condemned, but sooner or later he will be. In the same way, we will have to suffer for some of our faults in the future, just as we suffer today for others that have “come to maturity”.
So it is that faults and sufferings follow one another, plunging the conditioned soul into pain life after life. It suffers in its present life the consequences of acts committed in its previous life, and prepares itself, by its present acts, for new suffering in the future.
“Mature” or “completed” faults may result in chronic illness, trouble with the law, low birth, inadequate education or poor physical appearance. Our past actions burden us today, and our present actions prepare us for future suffering. But this chain can be broken at a stroke for one who adopts God consciousness and serves Him with love and devotion. This means that loving and devotional service to the Lord is capable of reducing our sins and all defilements to nothing.
Suffering is useful and necessary, because it allows us to know, through the pain we feel, what evil thoughts, words and actions generate, and thus to take the firm resolution never to do evil again in any form whatsoever, to anyone, human, animal or vegetable.
Suffering is useful and necessary, because it allows us to reduce the mass of guilty acts accumulated during all our previous lives, and to erase the sins inherent in these malicious and even criminal acts.
Suffering is useful and necessary because it gives us a clear idea of the pain felt by the person we hurt in our previous life, being indifferent to the cries they made. It also allows us to know “that what we have done will be done to us”.
Suffering is useful and necessary, because it allows us to become aware of our evil deeds, to do penance, to repent, to ask for forgiveness, to turn to God, to respect and definitively apply the divine precepts, laws and commandments.