The Test of Suffering

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THE TEST OF SUFFERING

Dane Rudhyar

Because man is both a unit of consciousness and an agent for the release of power he must undergo the test of suffering. Because he may use the power inherent in his total organism for goals envisioned by his consciousness, goals which do often conflict with the ultimate and ineradicable purpose of human evolution; because he may use his energies in ways which violate the natural character of the power itself - man must experience pain. Caught in the very wheels his engineering skill constructed, he mechanizes his life into disease. He splits, together with the atom, his mind quartered by the pulls of selfgratification, self-denial, self-aggrandizement and stultifying fear.

Suffering is the shadow of man's unlived life, the pressure of unactualized potentiality, the kick-back of unspent energy. Pain results from deviated or frustrated instinct where there is consciousness to assess the loss and to struggle toward self-restoration. Suffering is the ransom of freedom - the freedom to be "man" against "nature". Pain is the tenaciousness of life fighting for survival against depredation.

All that lives is subject to pain. Man alone suffers. In him alone the consciousness of pain, of defeat and futility, gnaws at the core of his selfhood. Man alone suffers, because he alone can be beaten by earth-life. He may know defeat, because he alone can experience victory. All suffering is defeat. It may be direct defeat. It may be defeat shared with those that are loved, shared with humanity - an inevitable sharing. No man is truly victorious whose prowess implies the defeat of other men. The only human victory is over the entropy of nature - the victory over death.

Christ said, according to the Gnostic hymnist: "If you had known how to suffer, you would have had the power not to suffer." The only way to overcome suffering is the way of the Resurrection. He who uses his suffering as a foundation for his Resurrection needs, in time, no longer experience suffering; for the Resurrection is the full living of life, the complete actualization of human potentiality, the total release of natural energy, as man pierces through and emerges from nature. The Resurrection neutralizes suffering, though it may not obviate the inevitability of pain wherever there is life and conflict.

To know how to suffer: this is the test. To make suffering serve the purpose of the Resurrection: this is the essence of spiritual living in individualized man. To use frustration, fear and defeat as springboards to immortality: this is the ancient and eternal technique which leads to eventual mastery. To do it, man requires a courageous attitude toward failure, an objective evaluation of the causes of failure, and emotional detachment from the past - any past.

First, courage. He who is not willing to fail can never truly know the Resurrection. To close one's consciousness even to the suffering of the most distant human being is to bargain with eternity - and to fall back, empty handed, in the lap of time. Every individual defeat is Man's failure. Ultimately it must mean pain for all. Every man is involved in the suffering of all men. Yet, to experience victory one must dare court defeat and assume one's part of the responsibility of any suffering any man may experience as a result. What such a responsibility might be, no one may know beforehand. This is the test of courage, and of faith. Faith in God. Faith in Grace: the vibrant sustainment of the spiritual Whole, which no one lacks who has courage, who risks annihilation for immortality.

Courage. The spirit within the soul has courage. Where the desire is strong or the despair unbearable enough, the daring word or deed goes forth easily enough, perhaps. The living of that which follows; the everyday bearing of the darkness and the pain; the watching of the ripples which the stone of one's decision makes, larger and larger, in the pool of destiny - how hard the suffering these summon, how poignant the unfathomable pain! Further testing comes; not only of the will, but of the mind. The causes of the failure must be confronted, met in almost blinding lucidity, and objectively evaluated.

Objective evaluation. This is the test of vision and understanding; one factor, then another, isolated, measured, and weighed against the whole of the values which life, culture, society, and the words of God-inspired men who spoke in centuries of long ago have presented to the individual since birth. To measure, one compares visually with a paragon of accepted value. But spiritually to weigh, one "stands under" and symbolically experiences the burden, in an act of understanding. To understand is to experience the fact to be understood as a symbol of essential reality. Whether vision or understanding is at stake, the first requirement is the capacity to be objective to the factor one is to evaluate. This means to sever oneself from this factor; to stand alone and unidentified; to break one by one, or in one great gesture, the myriads of threads which bind the consciousness to the thing that has been born of one's living, as a child of one's womb. To stand naked; and to know it. To stand deprived and to realize that one is father of the deprivation; yet to accept and to smile, as Buddha smiled when he understood the world, and was free.

Severance is not only of the consciousness; and still less only of the intellect. It must cut down to the roots of feelings, even to the deepest unconscious roots. It must reach indeed the feeling of feeling. It must still this strange throb of the inner life without which most men could not bear living, so great, so awesome the silence that follows the stilling. Christ told us He came not to bring peace, but a "sword" . And the sword cut deep into the consciousness of men and let escape many bleeding ghosts; for man became afraid.

It was too still on Golgotha after the Consummatum Est, when millenia of history reached their consummation in the ultimate acceptation of suffering by one who had learned how to suffer, on his way to the Resurrection. Men-not understanding, not able to "stand under" the Cross of suffering-emotionally, indeed wildly, sought to glorify suffering, to exalt pain and sing strident paeans to death. But suffering is not to be glorified; it is to be used. Death is not to be glorified; it is to be smiled through. Pain must be understood as a protective gesture of life; not only the body's life, but far more the psyche's life.

Pain is the custodian of our undiscovered treasures. It shows that we are going away from the fullness of our potential nature, we are losing our inner substance of being, we are inefficient managers of our human riches. There is nothing great of itself in tragedy, unless we give it the meaning of self-discovery; unless we use it. Suffering is a sign of human greatness not yet fully realized, or wantonly wasted. It is a summons to our self, to our most glorious victory. . . yet to be. And the sharing of suffering with other men and with the corporate wholeness of humanity makes little sense, unless it be on the path which leads from one's limited self to the greater reality of Man, in whom all individual selves are chorded into a vast resonance sounding out throughout the world the many names that, heard together, sum up into "God".

Suffering can never be a goal or have value in itself. It is a training in objective understanding and emotional severance; a test in endurance of our will and our faith. It is the shadow necessary to make the white form of our self known, the mounting required to frame and define clearly the color of the powers that are our jeweled inheritance. Suffering is a process of conscious realization of value: a transition. Man suffers because he is more than he knows himself to be. Suffering is the condition for breaking man's identification with the "less", as he climbs on his way to the "more". It is the pressure of his greater destiny upon his attachment to his lesser goals. Unless through suffering man learns utterly to sever his consciousness and his feelings from his past and the past of humanity, suffering has no meaning. Whoever looks exclusively forward does not suffer. Yet this lack of suffering means also the failure to evaluate objectively the past.

The past must be understood. From it, the essence of "meaning" must be extricated. Everything else must be forgotten, dismissed - with a blessing. The man who never looks back has yet to understand the significance of cyclic time. He grows like a tree; not like a man. But to look back with longing, with regret or remorse is not to grow at all. It is to fall back in spiritual exhaustion to the roots, under the weight of useless suffering.

The criterion of all spiritual living is the use we make of our experiences; and the experience of suffering is a magic key, if only it is truly used. It is the key to the right use of power. Power must be used, or we suffer. It must be used "right", according to its natural character; or else we experience pain. Because man is spirit and spirit means consciousness, power and the mechanisms for its release must be understood in clear objective consciousness. We "understand" power only as we are subject to the pressure of its possible effects. This is the great lesson of total war and atomic power.

The establishment of constant global interrelationships between all men generates an enormous amount of collective human power, which so far had only been latent in mankind. This power can be given adequate mechanisms for its release by the modern intellect - by scientists, technicians, specialized managers and administrators. We can learn to organize a Normandy Invasion and its incredibly complex and accurate patterning of group-activities spread over months of preparation and culminating in one great individual decision and one great mass-effort. We can also correlate the skill and inventiveness of men of all races, and through months of research and application learn to release atomic power - which, at first, seemed to be the foundation required for world-integration at the level of economic production and distribution. But this is not enough.

The scientist does not understand atomic power simply by means of his involved equations and his test-tubes. The Commander-inChief does not understand the collective power of a fully activated and interrelated humanity simply by reading news about China or hearing the sound of an exploding atom bomb. Really and significantly to understand these things man must be subjected to their weight in his personal or group experience. He must "bear" their pressure, the fears and doubts as well as the expectations they arouse, the sight of the horror their misuse produces. The ancient patterns of his life must be disrupted by the new powers. He must be temporarily stunned by the blinding light they release. He must accept full responsibility for this release. All of which means suffering and pain, disease and intemperate death.

Then only can man understand. If he is wise and mature enough to evoke the full essence and reality of the powers he released he may gain a symbolic and visionary kind of mental understanding; otherwise he has to understand through suffering and pain in concrete physical experience. Understanding, he can learn objectively and incontrovertibly the nature of the power, the character of its constructive application in the furthering of human evolution, the danger of its uncontrolled expression.

Then, comes the test of suffering. Will man, dismayed by the monstrous death he brought forth, shrink in adolescent anguish from sailing on the unfathomed sea of the new power, and seek irrationally to return to the charm, culture and peace of an era which the new release of power put violently to an end? Will he mourn the past and give himself up to its ghosts, so beautiful on its death-bed? Or will he, after a last look of supreme awareness, sever with a sword of courage the cable that makes firm the vessel of his soul and venture upon the vast expanse of an unknown world of energies - of which nuclear power presumably is only a threshold?

Here, the great and subtle lure which distracts many a soul is: self-pity. "Why has this to happen to me?" To this, there are varied metaphysical answers. The one practical reply, however, is: "Because you do not know yet what your full power and your essential goal are."

Not yet. Not yet. These two little words contain the essence of all human tragedy. All suffering, all pain are their progeny. Not yet. Men are not quite yet "Man". They are moving toward the Mastery - the right use of "human" power; whether in their own bodies, or in those projected fragments of consciousness which they are taught intellectually to externalize under the convenient name, "atom".

All power man can ever use is human. The whole world man lives in is human. Even rocks are fragments of our human perception. We see them rock-like because we need them rock-like to give support to our static sense of selfhood. We sunder now the rock's core and release the fire caged in the mysterious atom's den. And men die horrible deaths, and cities are burned alive. . . in our souls, witnesses to the law of lust, pleasure and greed of men.

Why? Because we fail to see that atomic fission and fusion make no sense except as they give power to the transition from narrowness of self to the greater selfhood of Man in whom all men live, chorded in response to the purpose of God for us all. Suffering, pain and death - because this is a transition. The substance of them all is pain; and in man, the conscious and the understander, suffering.

Suffering is the footstool of our divinity. We may stumble over it and fall back into the womb of time to renew once more our tragic attempt at metamorphosis. Or we may step upon it, raise our countenance by damming the very stream of our tears, and use suffering to reach the extended hands of Him Who is our resurrected Self. Suffering can only cease with the Resurrection, in any man who is truly human. For to be man is to be ceaselessly more what one is. Until humanity merges into divinity. Until the individual becomes Man. Until all victorious men, having learnt to use rightly in its fullness the power that is theirs in God, no longer need suffering.

In God, there dwells eonic peace. He who includes all things and uses all power adequately for the need of all men - in Him, there is perfect Harmony. He is risen; through suffering, unto victory; through fire, unto light.

An Astrological Tryptich