is pleasurable, because we have not understood what it implies and why it has come
to us. This is the ignorance aspect of the experience. The purpose of experience is not
to provide pleasure to us; the purpose is to teach us a lesson. This is what we cannot
understand, and this not understanding is called avidya.
The intention of nature is not to give us pleasure or pain. It is not at all concerned
with it, just as law does not operate for individual pleasure or individual pain. It is a
universal modus operandi for bringing about a new order of things. Likewise, the law
of nature works with an impartial attitude in respect of everyone and everything. If
someone is happy or unhappy at a particular time, that is due to another reason
altogether, quite far removed from the intention of nature. The intention of nature is
the liberation of the spirit—freedom ultimate. The association of pleasure and pain
with this experience is a mistake on the part of the subject, which has lost sight of the
goal or the intention of this experience, which comes as a lesson—just as a captive in
a jail may simply take his captivity as a kind of harassment that has been inflicted
upon him, not knowing the other legal or social aspects involved. Also, when we take
a bitter medicine, we may think only of the bitter aspect or the aspects which make us
dislike it, not considering at all the reasons behind the necessity for taking the
medicine.
There is no such thing as pleasure or pain in this world from the point of view of
nature itself, because these are reactions from the side of the individual due to
different reasons. The universal law of nature acts impartially for educative purposes
only—for the purpose of refinement of personality, for the purpose of improvement
in the quality of individuality—which is to become more and more comprehensive as
it advances in the process of evolution. It is wisdom and insight and experience of a
greater degree of reality that is the intention of nature—not the individual pleasure.
This is a very important thing to remember: we do not live here for the enjoyment of
anything. We live here for the purpose of progress into an experience of a larger
degree of truth. This is the intention of nature. This is the intention behind every
experience. This is the cause of the experience, and this is the insight that we gain by
experience. So, this is what is meant by the sutra: sva svāmi śaktyoḥ svarūpopalabdhi
hetuḥ saṁyogaḥ (II.23).
This contact, which is the cause of the experience, is mentioned as caused by avidya:
tasya hetuḥ avidyā (II.24). Vivekakhyātiḥ aviplavā hānopāyaḥ (II.26): The avoidance of
this ignorance, the obliteration of the causes of this contact, is possible by
discriminative understanding which is unceasingly operating. It should not operate
only for a moment, and then vanish. Aviplava viveka khyati means a continuously
flowing discrimination or understanding in regard to every experience through which
we pass. Thus, every experience becomes tolerable because it is educative. Any
educational method should be a necessary, inevitable, and pleasant aspect of
experience. Therefore, there is ultimately no experience which is useless or not
educative. Every action and every reaction is a correlated movement of the totality of
nature towards the ultimate goal of existence, which is the universality of
experience.
Thus, experiences are to be taken as stepping stones to greater and greater success. A
useless thing does not exist in nature. An absolutely unimportant thing does not exist
anywhere, because if it were absolutely useless, it would not exist. The very fact that
it exists shows that it has some meaning, some significance, and it plays a role in the