At a meeting on September 19th, (1938) one of the Western women questioned, “Why do we suffer?” Baba dictated this reply:
Why should we be born? To take birth means to suffer. When suffering leads to real eternal happiness we should not attach importance to this suffering. It is to eliminate suffering that suffering has to be. Most of this suffering is unnecessary and self-inflicted. Ninety-nine percent of the world’s suffering is self-inflicted. Yet, they ask, “Why must we suffer?” Great suffering means great liberation.
What is ignorance if not suffering? War is no special suffering. Don’t people suffer all the time? It is universal suffering which leads to war. People suffer because they are not satisfied; they want more and more. Ignorance gives rise to greed and vanity. If you were to want nothing, would you then suffer? But you do want. If you did not want anything you would not suffer even in the jaws of a lion! Even without war everyone suffers physically.
Mental suffering is worse than physical suffering. What the people of the world with limited vision think of suffering is only physical. They draw pictures of a bomb-stricken person, nose off, arm off, leg off, et cetera. Sometimes physical suffering tends to ease mental suffering. The world’s idea of suffering and of happiness is entirely limited.
Happiness – you have no idea of that real happiness – is worth all the physical and mental suffering of the universe! Then all suffering becomes as if it were not; it was due to ignorance. Ignorance makes you flinch at the sight of a cockroach; real happiness does not make you feel the teeth of a tiger in your body!
Even those who are not God-Realized and have not absolute knowledge, they can control their minds to such an extent that nothing makes them feel pain and suffering – even being buried alive. One yogi, who had not even the smell of knowledge, had himself thrown into a tub of boiling oil. Through his yogic power, not only did he not feel the pain, but his skin was not even a little burned. This is not the mind’s control over matter, it is even lower – it is breath control.
When I talk of knowledge, it is not ordinary knowledge: it is experience of Godhood. Knowledge of God means becoming God – then all else is zero. When the Master comes down from Godhood to normal consciousness, the Master brings down God. He is not aloof from God for one second, but he has to be on the same level of all, so he eats, drinks and suffers. All this does not affect him personally but universally.
Lord Meher, Original Publication, Bhau Kalchuri, Vol, 7, p. 2317.