Tests. The manner in which he will approach trying, painful, or hostile situations will also betray the true measure of his spirituality, his devotion to higher values, and his comprehension of what he has undertaken. He has to show, by the way he meets these events and faces such conditions, what he really is and wants to be. He will adjust himself to such problems only according to the degree of maturity attained.
At certain times, during his exterior life, a crisis may occur which, though it may cause agony, will also provide opportunity. The challenge of opposition and adversity, of difficulty and suffering, provides opportunities to make progress through the struggle of overcoming them. But the art of rightly using these opportunities, instead of bungling them, is not easy to acquire.
The calamity, the bitterness, the despair, and the fatigue, which he may have to endure during these probationary years can all be turned to spiritual account, can all be made profitable in terms of better self-control, ennobled character, and truer values. Experience can be turned into a source of strength, wisdom, and growth; or it can remain a source of weakness, foolishness, and degeneration. It all depends upon the attitude he adopts toward it and the way he thinks and feels about it. Men have their faults in temperament and their defects in intelligence. Mistakes in action and errors in judgement, although never acceptable, are originally excusable. But continuance of the same mistakes and the same errors, despite repeated warnings in the shape of their results, is always inexcusable.
It is a painful process, this disentanglement from the lower human and merely animal natures, but it is a necessary one if inner peace is ever to be attained. Observation of other students' lives will be helpful in lessening its painfulness. The lessons he learns from the analytic contemplation of his own errors are excellent but costly, whereas those he learns from the contemplation of other men's errors are excellent and free. The chance to overcome difficulties and fight temptations is the chance both to test character and promote growth. The hours of trouble or distress shake up his psyche and, by enabling him to detect his weaknesses, by drawing attention to his faults, by forcing him to practise a stark self-examination, afford him the chance to get rid of them. All through this quest, but especially at certain critical periods, events will so happen and situations will so arrange themselves that the aspirant's weaknesses of character will be brought out into the open. The experience may be painful and its results may be saddening, but only by thus learning to know and discriminate against his bad qualities can he set out to submit them to the formative discipline of philosophy. Only so can he realize vividly what are the weak places in his character and strengthen them. If these incidents make him aware how pitifully slender are his own resources, if they bring him to realize how weak and faulty his character really is, then there is compensation for their painfulness. It is easy for him to believe he is virtuous or perceptive, but it is for life itself to reveal how far he is above temptation or error. Therefore, those experiences and events, contacts and persons, who afford the opportunity for this to be done, are indispensable. He may be strong in moral sincerity, but weak in critical judgement. It is his business now to become aware of this deficiency, to set about remedying it by attending to a co-equal cultivation of the different sides of personality.
If he succeeds in passing this probation, he will emerge stronger in the particular quality at stake than before. For it will have found fuller expression--it will have affected his practical will, his emotional feelings, his logical thinking, and even his capacity to receive and respond to intuitional guidance. Thus, to the extent that he is successful, to that extent will he bring the quality to a higher pitch of development. He may even learn to be grateful to time which brings healing, to afflictions which bring wisdom, and to opposition which elicits strength. If he is properly oriented, every external experience and every emotional and intellectual adventure will then help him towards a fuller and truer attitude towards life. If he obeys the injunctions of philosophy, in spirit as well as in letter, those very situations which before aroused his lower nature will now awaken his higher one. Each trouble can become a challenge to provoke the response of that serene detachment which can handle it more wisely. Each temptation can sound a call to be active in that penetrative analysis which can master it more effectually. If this inner life can sufficiently possess him, he will gain an independence of external things and events which can carry him unaffected and undisturbed through the severest ordeals. But this inward detachment will not be the correct kind if it weakens his sense of responsibility or causes failure in the carrying out of duties.
If a man cannot be wise, let him not therefore be foolish. No statement in the foregoing pages should be misconstrued as an injunction to go seeking either temptations on the one hand or tribulations on the other. No one is called upon to become either an experimental hedonist or a sentimental martyr. It is enough to ask anyone who thinks otherwise: What guarantee is there that he will be able to stop at the point where he proposes to stop?
He who has once embarked on this quest, may be diverted from it for a while, but he can never be driven from it forever. His eventual return is certain. Every fresh manifestation of human wrong-doing and human wickedness of which he is the sufferer, every new reverse of fortune and loss of possession, should only strengthen his determination to follow this quest and cultivate its calm detachment because it should strengthen his realization of the futility of basing his happiness on earthly things alone. He needs always to remember that the ordeal is transient but its prize is permanent, that if he succeeds in emerging from its tests still loyal to the ideal, he will also emerge with ennobled character, greater power, and increased faculty. When he wins through, in the end, then the long sufferings of past failures will bloom into pity for others and into strength for himself.
Hitherto, he has always been liable to miss his steps or fall by the wayside. But when he is established in the final stage, he is established in security. The roots of evil have been totally destroyed within him. Never again will they have the chance to grow and yield bitter fruit. When memories of his past life recur, he will find it hard to believe that they did not happen to someone else rather than to himself. He will look back with astonishment at the man he formerly was, at the ignorance and weakness which held him in bonds.
Reaching this final paragraph and casting about in mind for a valedictory thought, it is a fact, and a most extraordinary one, that after this beautiful entry into the higher level of his being, the past loses its capacity to hurt him, memory can no longer depress him, and the host of old blunders, sins, or tragedies are blotted out as though they had never been. Thus, at long last, those trying years of toilsome exercises and studies, hard sacrifices and disappointments, show their pleasant, satisfying result. By his success in passing these recurring tests, he has thereby shown that he fully deserves the higher and holier consciousness which now follows them.
-- Notebooks Category 2: Overview of Practices Involved > Chapter 3 : Uncertainties of Progress > # 74
