When people suffer physically or mentally, individually or collectively, they want immediate relief from that suffering. All over the world, man’s strife is subject to the opposites of pain and pleasure. Man does all he can to avoid the former, and he does all he can to have the latter. But he cannot always avoid pain or always have pleasure. Pain and pleasure are inseparable twins, born of a multitude of cravings and desires. Where the one is, the other also invariably is as a constant companion. Consequently, man is interminably caught up in the quick interplay of these two opposites, unless and until he goes to the very root of both of them and frees himself from the self-perpetuating ignorance, which gives rise to a million cravings.
The scars left by the nonfulfillment of desires, or by the assailment of unwanted happenings, are difficult to erase so long as the mind continues to be swayed by the winds of multifarious cravings.
… people should look upon physical and mental sufferings as gifts from God. They bring their own lessons of the futility of the passing, and the intrinsic worth of the Eternal. When accepted with grace and understood in their very root-cause, they chasten the soul and introduce it to the abiding happiness of Truth.
-www.lordmeher.org, p3196
November, 1952; Hamirpur