6.2 How does one experience karmic testing?

Throughout your life, you feel in turn joy and sorrow, and move up and down, endlessly up and down. In a vain effort to smooth out this process, some try to control others; some try to control themselves; and some try to endure the highs and lows. This constant experiencing of opposites, life’s highs and lows, is a natural process; enlightenment offers the only real escape from this endless play of opposites in your life.

When you are far removed from the psychological stage of enlightenment, the alternation of joys and sorrows occurs as a long-term pattern flowing throughout your life. As you get closer to the first enlightenment, this alternating of joy and sorrow becomes more and more rapid. A person close to this stage of enlightenment experiences a profound lack of stability in both inner and outer emotional conditions.

It is important to distinguish between such emotional transformations leading to the unfolding of awareness, and the constant transformation in conditions experienced by the emotionally immature. The difference lies in developing your capacity to endure and persevere through time. One who is moving towards enlightenment understands the instability of conditions as a learning process; one who is emotionally immature simply desires to experience positive rather than negative emotional conditions.

The degree to which your emotions alternate between the opposites of joy and sorrow is a function of karma. The specific circumstances and conditions of your life are formed and structured, by karma, to test your capacity to become free from attachments to joys and sorrows. Learn to become responsive to the direction of karma in your life; trust in your karma to guide you through the maze of joys and sorrows. The commonest response to the difficulties experienced during intense periods of karmic testing is: why me? The answer is: there is a lesson you have to learn before you can progress in your inner development, before you can progress along the path we each must travel, and your current situation is specifically configured, precisely drawn together, to enable you to understand and learn the lesson. Continue to meditate, Live and Act throughout your life, and the difficulties will be overcome.

Do not think, foolishly, that you can escape your karma. You cannot successfully swim against the flow of reality, because you are an integral component of the one reality. Remember, the implacable process that is reality will devour your personality and its products, at its own pace and in its own way – this is the root cause of your emotional suffering.

In the midst of your life conditions, blown here and there by karma, overwhelmed by difficulties and the illusion that they are permanent, your feelings may revolve around despair. Sustained despair can lead to the utterly false and illusory attempt to escape your problems through ending them by suicide. The only sure way out of the suffering experienced in all limiting emotional conditions is to cultivate detachment, yet to remain fully involved in your day-to-day life.