In the divine scales, vice and virtue are necessary experiences man goes through before attaining the supreme balance of Self-realization, which is beyond all opposites—good and bad.
“Good” is like a clean mirror that reflects the image of God. When true knowledge is gained you realize that the reflection is the image of your own Self, the God that is in all and in everything.
“Bad” is like the dusty particles that accumulate and hide the image of God, until the mirror presents only a distorted or blank surface. It cannot affect the object being reflected; it merely distorts your vision.
LOVE is the cleanser that wipes the mirror bright and enables you to behold with increasing clarity the indivisible Entity that permeates all life.
The negative experience of the “bad,” with its consequent suffering, ultimately disgusts man and leads him to the positive force of “good,” thus awakening divine love. Hence, the saints of the present are the sinners of the past. In the clarity of the understanding and knowledge they have gained they show true humility. They do not take pride in their achievements nor condemn the “sinner” whom they know to belong equally to God, but help him to remove the self-created veil of ignorance and perceive his true identity.
Man cannot escape his glorious destiny of Self-realization, and no amount of suffering that he passes through on the way to it can ever be too much. After the apex of suffering has been reached, the time will soon come for mankind to have a deeper spiritual understanding, bringing it closer together in universal love and brotherhood in the bond of divine knowledge—the only knowledge worth having.
-Life At Its Best, p48