Overcoming Suffering and Changing the Future of Our Karma

Many people believe that there is some kind of inexorable law of reward and punishment being doled out by God or some other all-powerful, all-observant being. In the West children are taught this lesson through the myth of Santa Claus, when they are encouraged to be “good” because Santa Claus is always watching and will only deliver desired gifts or rewards to good children. They grow up believing that some divine being is watching over every action of every individual all the time and thus, they are encouraged to follow the rules of the society and the moral code in order to be rewarded, or else, suffer the consequences of being subject to various types of suffering.

The normal operation of cause and effect explains much of what we experience in our lives. The Buddhist concept of ‘dependent origination’ describes this cause and effect, also called in the Sanatana Dharma, the ‘law of karma’. Everything that happens today was caused by some past concatenation of causes that came together to create the current situation. Choices we made in the past are part of that causal function, and we thus experience the joy or sorrow based on how our ego-personality reacts to what has come to us. Some of the events that create current actions are ‘personal’, some are related to our own past lives of development, the individual stream of consciousness that progressively manifests over time and across births, and some is related to the situation of the physical, vital, mental world into which we are born and live, the civilisation, the goals and aspirations, the training and habits of humanity and of our social lives.

Since we cannot go back and alter those past actions, we are faced with the decision as to how to respond to the current situation and make the best of it, and thereby alter the trajectory of that karmic energy going forward. As long as we remain immersed in the ego-personality we experience the suffering (and the joy that alte
ates with the suffering). As we awaken to the independence of our conscious awareness from the exte
al ego-personality that we have assumed in this lifetime, as we identify ourselves with the Self, the Atman, or the Psychic Being which is the divine spark that resides within, we recognise that we can overcome the psychological weight of the suffering through non-attachment and observation, and we can even modify the trajectory of the karmic consequences going forward by simply not accepting, and changing what appeared to be an inevitable step-by-step progression. This is where the concepts of determinism and free-will find their co-existence in harmony with each other. Free will is the exercise of the conscious soul to transform the causal chain and redirect it. Until we have separated from the attachment to the exte
al being, we are subject to the determination of past events, and the habitual patterns we have developed in dealing with events and circumstances.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “Suffering is not inflicted as a punishment for sin or for hostility — that is a wrong idea. Suffering comes like pleasure and good fortune as an inevitable part of life in the ignorance. The dualities of pleasure and pain, joy and grief, good fortune and ill-fortune are the inevitable results of the ignorance whch separates us from our true consciousness and from the Divine. Only by coming back to it can we get rid of suffering. Karma from the past lives exists, much of what happens is due to it, but not all. For we can mend our karma by our own consciousness and efforts. But the suffering is simply a natural consequence of past errors, not a punishment, just as a burn is the natural consequence of playing with fire. It is part of the experience by which the soul through its instruments learns and grows until it is ready to turn to the Divine.”

“The attitude you express in your letter is quite the right one — whatever sufferings come on the path, are not too high a price for the victory that has to be won and if they are taken in the right spirit, they become even a means towards the victory.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 4, Ordeals and Difficulties, pp..109-110