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.
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 actions of a person's past or even previous life that determine the conditions of their next birth or reincarnation.
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 found to be ignorance. But ignoring that an act is culpable does not mean that if it is committed, it avoids its undesirable consequences, which give rise to other culpable acts.
On the other hand, we distinguish two kinds of faults: those which have, so to speak, “reached maturity”, and those which have not yet matured. By “mature faults”, we must understand those whose consequences we are currently suffering. The others are those which, numerous, are accumulated in us and have not yet produced their fruits of suffering.
The man who commits a crime may not be immediately caught and sentenced, but sooner or later he will be. Likewise, for some of our faults we will have to suffer in the future, just as for others, “matured,” we suffer today.
Here then, mistakes and suffering follow one another, plunging the conditioned soul into pain, life after life. In her present life she is suffering the consequences of the acts committed in her previous life, and is preparing, through her present acts, for further suffering in the future.
“Mature” or “successful” mistakes can result in chronic illness, trouble with the law, low birth, inadequate education or poor physical appearance. Our past deeds overwhelm us today, and our present deeds prepare us for future suffering. But this chain can be broken at once for one who adopts the consciousness of God and serves him with love and devotion. This means that the service of love and devotion offered to the Lord is able to reduce our sins and all defilement to nothing.
But three miseries also continually come to make us suffer. These are those caused by body and mind, those caused by other living beings, those caused by material nature (hurricanes, drought, heat, earthquakes, floods, etc.), and those caused by birth, sickness, old age and ultimately death.