The problem of suffering and evil

... and what can be done about it

How can an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God permit a world replete with pain, falsehood, and downright evil? If He would remove these afflictions from the world but could not, He cannot be omnipotent, and if He could remove them but would not, He cannot be benevolent. That question, along with all the excuses made on His behalf, is grounded in an assumption that renders the question meaningless and the excuses gratuitous and otiose. This assumption is the theistic presupposition of an extra-cosmic personal God.

All comes from dust and to dust it returns, the Bible tells us (Ecclesiastes 3:20). “From Delight all these beings are born, by Delight they exist and grow, to Delight they return,” the Taittiriya Upanishad retorts. The primary and ultimate reality, Sri Aurobindo¹ affirms in unison with the Upanishad, “is a conscious existence the very term of whose being, the very term of whose consciousness is bliss” [LD 98].

[T]hat which has thrown itself out into forms is a triune Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, Sachchidananda.... Just as we find all things to be mutable forms of one immutable being, finite results of one infinite force, so we shall find that all things are variable self-expression of one invariable and all-embracing delight of self-existence. [LD 99]

All being Sachchidananda, how can suffering, falsehood, and evil exist? This is the problem. On no theory of an extra-cosmic God (answerable to human moral standards) can the existence of evil and suffering be justified.

But such a God is not the Vedantic Sachchidananda. Sachchidananda of the Vedanta is one existence without a second; all that is, is He. If then evil and suffering exist, it is He that bears the evil and suffering in the creature in whom He has embodied Himself. The problem then changes entirely. The question is no longer how came God to create for His creatures a suffering and evil of which He is Himself incapable and therefore immune, but how came the sole and infinite Existence-Consciousness-Bliss to admit into itself that which is not bliss, that which seems to be its positive negation. [LD 102]

This does not entirely dispose of the ethical problem. All-Delight must necessarily be all-good and all-love, so how, one may ask, can evil and suffering exist? But this too is a false issue, for the ideas of good and love spring from a dualistic and separative outlook. Based on relations that exist between separate creatures, it cannot be applied to That which contains, is contained in, and is one with all creatures.

Ethics is a stage in evolution. Evolution starts out non-ethical in inanimate matter and becomes infra-ethical in (sub-human) life. In the intelligent animal it can even be anti-ethical, inasmuch as “it permits us to approve hurt done to others which we disapprove when done to ourselves. In this respect man even now is only half-ethical.” [LD 104] And just as that which preceded us is infra-ethical, so that which will come after us is supra-ethical — it has no need of ethics.

The ethical impulse and attitude, so all-important to humanity, is a means by which it struggles out of the lower harmony and universality based upon inconscience and broken up by Life into individual discords towards a higher harmony and universality based upon conscient oneness with all existences. Arriving at that goal, this means will no longer be necessary or even possible, since the qualities and oppositions on which it depends will naturally dissolve and disappear in the final reconciliation. [LD 104]

Because the ethical standpoint is confined to the evolutionary passage from one universality to another, it is too narrow for a comprehensive solution of the riddles of existence. Besides, there are other deficiencies: knowledge is beset by error, truth by falsehood, beauty by ugliness, power by incapacity and weakness, unity by division and separation. It is not possible then to limit our and the world’s imperfections solely to moral evil and sensational suffering. It is the general principle of imperfection that needs to be accounted for. This task is complicated by two factors. First:

There is too, always, somewhere hidden in our selves, nursed in our recesses, even when not overtly felt in the conscious nature, even when rejected by the parts of us which these things torture, an attachment to this experience of division, a clinging to the divided way of being which prevents the excision of these unhappinesses or their rejection and removal. For since the principle of Consciousness-Force and Ananda is at the root of all manifestation, nothing can endure if it has not a will in our nature, a sanction of the Purusha, a sustained pleasure in some part of the being, even though it be a secret or a perverse pleasure, to keep it in continuance. [LD 406–7]

The second factor is this: there are supraphysical worlds (which, like our physical world, are but frames of possible experience), and in these worlds there exist “powers and forms of vital mind and life that seem to be the prephysical foundation of the discordant, defective or perverse forms and powers of life-mind and life-force which we find in the terrestrial existence.” These forces are embodied by supraphysical beings, which “are attached in their root-nature to ignorance, to darkness of consciousness, to misuse of force, to perversity of delight, to all the causes and consequences of the things that we call evil.” [LD 624]

These powers, beings or forces are active to impose their adverse constructions upon terrestrial creatures; eager to maintain their reign in the manifestation, they oppose the increase of light and truth and good and, still more, are antagonistic to the progress of the soul towards a divine consciousness and divine existence. It is this feature of existence that we see figured in the tradition of the conflict between the Powers of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil, cosmic Harmony and cosmic Anarchy, a tradition universal in ancient myth and in religion and common to all systems of occult knowledge. The theory of this traditional knowledge is perfectly rational and verifiable by inner experience, and it imposes itself if we admit the supraphysical and do not cabin ourselves in the acceptation of material being as the only reality....

As there are Powers of Knowledge or Forces of the Light, so there are Powers of Ignorance and tenebrous Forces of the Darkness whose work is to prolong the reign of Ignorance and Inconscience. As there are Forces of Truth, so there are Forces that live by the Falsehood and support it and work for its victory. As there are powers whose life is intimately bound up with the existence, the idea and the impulse of Good, so there are Forces whose life is bound up with the existence and the idea and the impulse of Evil. It is this truth of the cosmic Invisible that was symbolised in the ancient belief of a struggle between the powers of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil for the possession of the world and the government of the life of man. [LD 624–625]

The Scream, 1893 by Edvard Munch (Public Domain)

It may be argued that imperfection is in the eye of the beholder: by seeing things separately, or by seeing them in relation to each other instead of in relation to the whole, we vitiate our valuation of things. Perfection is confined to the seeing of things as multiple aspects of the One. While this may be true as far as it goes, that argument fails to do justice to the psychic element in our nature, to its aspiration towards light and truth and spiritual conquest. It offers cold comfort to our acute sense of the reality of imperfection and evil.

[N]o light is turned on the disconcerting facts of pain, suffering and discord to which our human consciousness bears constant and troubling witness; at most there is a suggestion that in the divine reason of things there is a key to these things to which we have no access. [LD 410]

Yet we do have access:

[T]here is an essential factor in our human consciousness and its workings which, no less than the reason, distinguishes it entirely from the animal; there is not only a mental part in us which recognises the imperfection, there is a psychic part which rejects it. Our soul’s dissatisfaction with imperfection as a law of life upon earth, its aspiration towards the elimination of all imperfections from our nature, not only in a heaven beyond ... but here and now in a life where perfection has to be conquered by evolution and struggle, are as much a law of our being as that against which they revolt. [LD 411]

We cannot rest content with a Panglossian belief that ultimately all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds: “to search for and find the spiritual key of things is the law of our being.” [LD 411] The emphasis is on the word spiritual:

The sign of the finding is not a philosophic intellectual recognition and a resigned or sage acceptance of things as they are because of some divine sense and purpose in them which is beyond us; the real sign is an elevation towards the spiritual knowledge and power which will transform the law and phenomena and external forms of our life nearer to a true image of that divine sense and purpose....

It is a Power within us ... that has lit the flame of aspiration, pictures the image of the ideal, keeps alive our discontent and pushes us to throw off the disguise and to reveal ... the Godhead in the manifest spirit, mind, life and body of this terrestrial creature. Our present nature can only be transitional, our imperfect status a starting-point and opportunity for the achievement of another higher, wider and greater that shall be divine and perfect not only by the secret spirit within it but in its manifest and most outward form of existence. [LD 411–12]

Love and Pain, 1893 by Edvard Munch, now generally known as “Vampire” (Public Domain)

Ultimate reality, as described by the Upanishads, is sat-cit-ānanda. Regarding the world in relation to sat (pure Existence infinite, indivisible, and immutable),

we are entitled to regard it, describe it and realise it as Maya. Maya in its original sense meant a comprehending and containing consciousness capable of embracing, measuring and limiting and therefore formative; it is that which outlines, measures out, moulds forms in the formless, psychologises and seems to make knowable the Unknowable, geometrises and seems to make measurable the limitless. Later the word came from its original sense of knowledge, skill, intelligence to acquire a pejorative sense of cunning, fraud or illusion, and it is in the figure of an enchantment or illusion that it is used by the [Indian, post-Upanishadic] philosophical systems. [LD 109]

Regarding the world in relation to cit (consciousness and its power to give itself content, tapas),

we may regard, describe and realise it as a movement of Force obeying some secret will or else some necessity imposed on it by the very existence of the Consciousness that possesses or regards it. It is then the play of Prakriti, the executive Force, to satisfy Purusha, the regarding and enjoying Conscious-Being or it is the play of Purusha reflected in the movements of Force and with them identifying himself. [LD 110–11]

And regarding the world in relation to ānanda (the self-delight of Conscious Being),

we may regard, describe and realise it as Lila, the play, the child’s joy, the poet’s joy, the actor’s joy, the mechanician’s joy of the Soul of things eternally young, perpetually inexhaustible, creating and re-creating Himself in Himself for the sheer bliss of that self-creation, of that self-representation,— Himself the play, Himself the player, Himself the playground. [LD 111]

Līlā is a term of Indian philosophy which describes the manifested world as the field for a joyful sporting game made possible by self-imposed limitations.

If it then be asked why the One Existence should take delight in such a movement, the answer lies in the fact that all possibilities are inherent in Its infinity and that the delight of existence ... lies precisely in the variable realisation of its possibilities. And the possibility worked out here in the universe of which we are a part, begins from the concealment of Sachchidananda in that which seems to be its own opposite and its self-finding even amid the terms of that opposite. [LD 118]

A manifestation of this kind, self-creation or Lila, would not seem justifiable if it were imposed on the unwilling creature; but it will be evident that the assent of the embodied spirit must be there already, for Prakriti cannot act without the assent of the Purusha. There must have been not only the will of the Divine Purusha to make the cosmic creation possible, but the assent of the individual Purusha to make the individual manifestation possible. [LD 426]

The emphasis here is on the word individual. There is no better, no more adequate way to describe the choice that led to the mess in which we find ourselves, than the language of poetry. Here goes²:

Once in the immortal boundlessness of Self,
In a vast of Truth and Consciousness and Light
The soul looked out from its felicity.
It felt the Spirit’s interminable bliss,
It knew itself deathless, timeless, spaceless, one,
It saw the Eternal, lived in the Infinite.
Then, curious of a shadow thrown by Truth,
It strained towards some otherness of self,
It was drawn to an unknown Face peering through night....
As one drawn by the grandeur of the Void
The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:
It longed for the adventure of Ignorance
And the marvel and surprise of the Unknown
And the endless possibility that lurked
In the womb of Chaos and in Nothing’s gulf
Or looked from the unfathomed eyes of Chance.
It tired of its unchanging happiness,
It turned away from immortality:
It was drawn to hazard’s call and danger’s charm,
It yearned to the pathos of grief, the drama of pain,
Perdition’s peril, the wounded bare escape,
The music of ruin and its glamour and crash,
The savour of pity and the gamble of love
And passion and the ambiguous face of Fate.
A world of hard endeavour and difficult toil,
And battle on extinction’s perilous verge,
A clash of forces, a vast incertitude,
The joy of creation out of Nothingness,
Strange meetings on the roads of Ignorance
And the companionship of half-known souls
Or the solitary greatness and lonely force
Of a separate being conquering its world,
Called it from its too safe eternity.
A huge descent began, a giant fall:
For what the spirit sees, creates a truth
And what the soul imagines is made a world.

Imagine that you are all-powerful and all-knowing. Could you then have the joy of winning a victory, the satisfaction of overcoming a difficulty or opposition, the elation at making a discovery? You could not. To make all of this possible, you impose limitations on your infinite power and knowledge.

[A] play of self-concealing and self-finding is one of the most strenuous joys that conscious being can give to itself, a play of extreme attractiveness. There is no greater pleasure for man himself than a victory which is in its very principle a conquest over difficulties, a victory in knowledge, a victory in power, a victory in creation over the impossibilities of creation, a delight in the conquest over an anguished toil and a hard ordeal of suffering. At the end of separation is the intense joy of union, the joy of a meeting with a self from which we were divided. There is an attraction in ignorance itself because it provides us with the joy of discovery, the surprise of new and unforeseen creation, a great adventure of the soul; there is a joy of the journey and the search and the finding, a joy of the battle and the crown, the labour and the reward of labour. If delight of existence be the secret of creation, this too is one delight of existence; it can be regarded as the reason or at least one reason of this apparently paradoxical and contrary Lila. [LD 426–27]

In 1969, Satprem — the disciple whose conversations with the Mother make up the bulk of the thirteen volumes of The Mother’s Agenda — wrote an essay that I reproduce here in slightly abridged form. It addresses the question of what we — you and me in the here an now — could possibly do about the sorry state of our world.

This is the time of the Great Sense.

We look to the right or to the left, we build theories, reform our Churches, invent super-machines and go out in the streets to break the Machine that stifles us — we struggle in the small sense. When the terrestrial ship is sinking, does it matter whether the passengers drown to the right or to the left, under a flag black or red, or celestial blue? Our Churches have already sunk: they are reforming their own dust. Our patriotisms are crushing us, our machines are crushing us, our schools are crushing us, and we build more machines to break out of the Machine. We go to the moon, but we do not know our own heart nor our terrestrial destiny. And we want to improve what is — but the time for improvements is past: can one improve rot? This is the time for SOMETHING ELSE. “Something else” is not the same thing with improvements.

But how shall we proceed?

They preach violence to us, or nonviolence. But these are two faces of the same Falsehood, the yes and no of the same impotence: the little saints have gone bankrupt with the rest, and others want to seize power — what power? That of the political leaders? Are we going to fight over the prison keys? Or to build another prison? Or do we actually want to get out of it? ... For thirty million years now, we have been building on corpses, on wars, on revolutions. And the drama is enacted over and over again. Perhaps the time has come to build on something else and find the key to the true Power? So let us look at the Great Sense.

Here is what the Great Sense tells us:

It tells us that we were born so many million years ago – a molecule, a gene, a quivering bit of plasma — and we have produced a dinosaur, a crab, an ape. Had our eyes stopped halfway along the road, we could have said with good reason that the Baboon was the summit of the creation and nothing better could be done, except perhaps to improve our simian capacities and create a United Kingdom of Apes…. And we may be committing the same error today in our jungle of concrete. We have invented enormous means at the service of microscopic consciousnesses, splendid devices at the service of mediocrity, and still more devices to be cured of the Device....

The Great Sense tells us that man is not the end.... “Man is a transitional being,” Sri Aurobindo said.... And the Great Sense tells us that the only thing we can do is to set to work to prepare another being and collaborate in our own evolution instead of going round in circles and grabbing false powers to rule over a false life. But where is the lever of this Transmutation?

It is within.

There is a Consciousness within, there is a Power within, the very power that strained and strove in the dinosaur, in the crab, in the ape, in man — it strives still, presses farther on, clothes itself in a more and more perfected form as its instrument grows, and creates its own form. If we grasp the lever of that Power, it will itself create its new form.... Instead of letting evolution unfold through millennia of fruitless, painful attempts and useless deaths and fake revolutions, we can hasten the time, we can make a concentrated evolution — we can be the conscious creators of a New Being.

In truth, this is the time of the Great Adventure. The world is closed, there are no more adventures outside: only robots go to the moon and our borders are guarded everywhere — the same functionaries of the great Machine are watching us, punching our cards, checking our faces and searching our pockets — there is no more adventure outside!

The Adventure is within — Freedom is within, Space is within, so is the transformation of our world by the power of the Spirit. Because, in truth, that Power was always there, supreme, all-powerful, prodding evolution on: it was the hidden Spirit growing to become the Spirit manifest upon earth, and if we have trust, if we want that supreme Power, if we have the courage to descend into our hearts, everything is possible, for that Power is in us.

In 1957 the Mother, Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator and peer, extended a similar invitation³:

There are people who love adventure. It is these I call, and I tell them this: “I invite you to the great adventure.”

It is not a question of repeating spiritually what others have done before us, for our adventure begins beyond that. It is a question of a new creation, entirely new, with all the unforeseen events, the risks, the hazards it entails — a real adventure, whose goal is certain victory, but the road to which is unknown and must be traced out step by step in the unexplored. Something that has never been in this present universe and that will never be again in the same way. If that interests you... well, let us embark. What will happen to you tomorrow — I have no idea.

One must put aside all that has been foreseen, all that has been devised, all that has been constructed, and then ... set off walking into the unknown. And — come what may!

1. LD = Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 2005).

2. Sri Aurobindo, Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, pp. 454–56 (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 1997).

3. The Mother, Questions and Answers 1957–1958, p. 152 (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 2004).