For the average person, pain is something to be shunned, an unpleasant experience that has to be cured or suppressed by any means which, for our day, are analogous to the pills and potions, drugs and tranquillizers of modern science. The medical man sees in pain a warning, a bell which incessantly rings the alarm and continues to do so till the necessity ceases. However, since he but scratches at the surface of the causal world, he is content to push back the pain for a period long or short; or worse still, he paralyses some one portion of his patient's mind or body, thus cutting off the sound of the alarm bell from his consciousness. In such case, the bell may continue to give its message of warning which, however, is prevented from penetrating to the person's waking consciousness. There is a similar warning bell for the inner malaise, and since there are hardly any doctors for the maladies of the soul, people are known to drown their pain by intoxicants, a surfeit of pleasures and an overindulgence in desires. They will go to any length to forget the mental torture of unsatisfied turbulent emotions.

The Occultist views pain differently.

The Voice of the Silence sees in pain and suffering steps towards a higher elevation. It says: "The ladder by which the candidate ascends is formed or rungs of suffering and pain; these can be silenced only by the voice of virtue." The truth of this statement has to burn itself deep into the consciousness of the candidate long before he can take the first steps to mount the ladder. He cannot ask for, nor expect, any help from his Guru or Master for the assuaging of his pain. He has to learn to do so unaided by applying to his wounds and sores the balm of virtue; and till he has developed in himself the strength to do so, he is in no fit condition to offer his services to the cause of Masters and to their altruistic plans. It is a well-established truism that in any field of human endeavour learning must precede practice and action.

Vice is the great enemy of one having aspirations. It has the power to glamour, tempt, subjugate and enslave his mind. It has to be eschewed, not because of the suffering which inevitably dogs its footsteps, but because it will always be an obstacle and an unsurmountable bar to progress upwards. It is characteristic of vice that it cannot stand in juxtaposition with virtue. It must vanish and be eclipsed, as is darkness at the approach of light. Vice, which has many a pleasing face, has to be recognized in all its forms. One thing must, however, be very clearly understood, namely, that vice invariably prevails where the person loosens his hold on the spirit and abandons himself gladly to the heady fumes that matter is wont to emanate. In such moments of intoxication, he displays selfishness in one or the other of its myriad forms and his acts become a negation of the laws of Brotherhood. It is a most degrading form of vice this, that man schemes against man and seeks possession by force or stealth of that which is not his own.

It is one of the properties of matter that it lends itself to separative forms. Because of this, the consciousness that inhabits any one form has the tendency to view itself as something separate from other forms, a unit that must fight other units for its ease and survival. When a human consciousness which is still allied to matter tries to understand spirit, it endows spirit with the very attributes it has found in matter and only multiplies them in degree. Being thus unable to find the omniscient and immortal spirit, the ordinary man comes to deny its existence.

So, too, with virtue. It cannot be translated in terms of material applications. It can be known and realized only when the hold of matter is loosened and its clogging, clinging, dragging pull neutralized. The feet will still have to walk the earth, but they have to be made immune to the soiling properties of matter by cleaning and bathing them in waters of renunciation. To shed vice, renunciation is the only, the surest panacea. It implies the giving up of all rewards, the surrender of all attachments to things, ideas, impressions and memories that arouse the thirst and craving for existence. It is from among those in whom self-interest prevails that vice and sin find their recruits to evil. The touch of matter not only defiles and makes one unclean; its harm reaches deeper, for it bewitches the senses, blinds the mind, and makes of the unwary an abandoned wreck.

So long as the person continues to live in and enjoy the sensations of the oscillations he calls life, he remains a prey to suffering and pain. This must be so because he lives and moves and has his being in matter. He inherits the divisive tendencies of matter and acquires the natural combativeness of the animal. Viewing himself as a thing apart by reason of caste, creed, nationality or organization, he cannot live in any one of such divisions without breaking the fundamental laws of Brotherhood. When violations are piled on violations, the consequences may be dire in the extreme. Those who call themselves Theosophists yet cling to their own sect or brand of philosophy and look down their noses upon others who are not of their own organization, are as violative of the law as anyone else and will in time find themselves accountable. Brotherhood is not only a fact in supernature. It is a law from which branch out all the other laws of harmony. The one who craves and thirsts, the one who seeks to fill his own special granary at the expense of and to the exclusion of others, is a cheat, a violator of nature's laws and an offender against humanity. His life becomes a series of infringements of the Law, and since the personal effort of himself or even of a group or nation is pitted against the vast onward movement of what the scriptures term the wheel of the Good Law, pain and suffering follow upon the divagations. It is the measure of his folly that he seeks to continue in his wrongdoing and tries to find out ways and means to avoid the suffering that must follow.

Could the individual but take an impersonal and detached view, he would realize that pain is a pointer and indication that he had violated some one or the other of nature's laws. Seen from this viewpoint, pain is necessary, is in fact a valuable teacher and a sure guide to progress. Light on the Path stresses this aspect in its own great language: "No man desires to see that light which illumines the spaceless soul until pain and sorrow and despair have driven him away from the life of ordinary humanity." Joy and pleasure and ease do not afford the opportunity that pain and suffering give. It is in this sense that the latter constitute rungs in the ladder as soon as they are surmounted. Pain and suffering can be stilled by one agency only, namely, the voice of virtue. But this voice which cures all and integrates all is not that of the so-called morality of the day. Virtue in its fullest sense is the over-spreading influence of the one law of Universal Brotherhood on all planes of thought and action. The diversifications of that law are many and wide and wherever it abides and becomes a living power in life, there virtue sits enthroned and peace and plenty bless the land. So potent is its presence that a thousand serpents are kept away from the candidate's path if only he acknowledges its omniscient and omnipresent sway.

Rarely can one who has tasted vice and acquired its taint and stigma abandon it at the initial resolve or even after a long visitation of pain. He delays his own advancement because he does not know how to use suffering as a step in the ladder by means of which he can raise himself. He has to learn through bitter experience that all his efforts at checking vice by fighting it must come to naught. Frustration and failure lie that way. There is one method and one method only by which he can achieve a turning away from vice, and that is by fixing his whole attention on the Inner Ruler whom he has not seen but whom he has felt during rare moments of introspection. Light on the Path has valuable instructions to offer on the subject in the essay on Karma:

It is useless for the disciple to strive to learn by means of checking himself. The soul must be unfettered, the desires free. But until they are fixed only on that state wherein there is neither reward nor punishment, good nor evil, it is in vain that he endeavours. He may seem to make great progress, but some day he will come face to face with his own soul, and will recognize that when he came to the tree of knowledge he chose the bitter fruit and not the sweet; and then the veil will fall utterly, and he will give up his freedom and become a slave of desire. Therefore be warned, you who are but turning towards the life of occultism. Learn now that there is no cure for desire, no cure for the love of reward, no cure for the misery of longing, save in the fixing of the sight and hearing upon that which is invisible and soundless.

But the invisible and soundless is impersonal, altruistic and of quite another nature than the perishable. It is the embodiment and exemplar of brotherhood. The laws of brotherhood have their greatest strength on the inner and hidden planes of being from where their projections descend the staircase of manifested existence. They have therefore to be understood, not in isolation but as the containers and roots of other laws. To realize Brotherhood in actu and as a corrective to vice and sin, its laws have to be studied in all aspects of the complex relationship that exists between man and nature and between man and man. If he does, suffering that may at times border upon agony may be his. Wars have proved this beyond doubt. The bad man is still a link in the chain of brotherhood and he who foolishly shrinks away from him may find that the mantle of the bad man is thrown across his shoulders by nature herself; and the more his abhorrence, the more prolonged will be its presence round his shoulders. In all aspects of life, it will be found that self-righteousness destroys itself. It is one of the many forms of unbrotherliness. It takes one away from virtue and throws him wide open for the entry of vice.

In its positive form, ahimsa means the largest love, greatest charity. If I am a follower of ahimsa, I must love my enemy. I must apply the same rules to the wrong-doer who is my enemy or a stranger to me, as I would to my wrong-doing father or son. This active ahimsa necessarily includes truth and fearlessness.

—M. K. Gandhi