It is the natural right of every human being to be happy to be free of any miseries of life. Happiness is the *normal* condition, as natural as the landscapes and the seasons. It’s unnatural to suffer and it is only due to our own ignorance that we do suffer. Happiness is the product of wisdom. To attain perfect wisdom, to comprehend fully the purpose of life, to realize completely the relationship of human beings to each other, is to put an end to all suffering, to escape every ill and negativity that we experience. Perfect wisdom is unshadowed joy.

Why do we suffer in life? Because in the scheme of nature we are being forced forward in evolution and we lack the spiritual illumination that alone can light the way and enable us to move safely through the obstacles that lie before us.

Often times we don’t even see or suspect the presence of trouble until it suddenly leaps upon us like a concealed tiger. One day our family circle is complete and happy. A week later death has come and gone and joy is replaced with agony. Today we have a friend. Tomorrow he will be an enemy and we do not know why. A little while ago we had wealth and all material luxuries. There was a sudden change and now we have only poverty and misery and yet we seek in vain for a reason why this should be. There was a time when we had health and strength; but they have both departed and no trace of a reason appears.

Aside from these greater tragedies of life innumerable things of lesser consequence continually bring to us little miseries and minor heartaches. We most earnestly desire to avoid them but we never see them until they strike us, until in the darkness of our ignorance we stumble upon them.

The thing we lack is the spiritual illumination that will enable us to look far and wide, finding the hidden causes of human suffering and revealing the method by which they can be avoided; and if we can but reach illumination the evolutionary journey can be made both comfortably and swiftly.

It is as though we must pass through a long, dark room filled with furniture randomly scattered about. In the darkness our progress would be slow and painful and our bruises many. But if we could press a button that would turn on the electric light we could then make the same journey quickly and with perfect safety and comfort.

The old method of education was to store the mind with as many facts, or supposed facts, as could be accumulated and to give a certain exterior polish to the personality.

The theory was that when a person was born they was a completed human being and that all that could be done for them was to load him up with information that would be used with more or less skill, according to the native ability they happened to be born with.

The theosophical idea is that the physical person, and all that constitutes this life in the physical world, is but a very partial expression of the self; that within the ego of each of us there is unlimited power and wisdom; that these may be brought through into expression in the physical world as the physical body and its invisible counterparts. Thus the light that leads to happiness is kindled from within and the evolutionary journey that we are all are making may be depleted of its suffering.

Sometimes it feels difficult to find spiritual meaning in life.

Why do we have enemies from whose words or acts we suffer? Because within our limited physical consciousness we don’t perceive the unity of all life and realize that our wrong thinking and doing must react upon us through other people a situation from which there is no possible escape except through stopping to think negatively and then patiently awaiting the time when the causes we have already generated are fully exhausted. When spiritual illumination comes, and we no longer stumble in the night of ignorance, the last enemy will disappear and we shall make no more forever.

And so it is with all forms of suffering that we experience. They are at once reactions from our ignorant bumbling and teachings that point out the better way. When we have comprehended the lessons they teach they are no longer necessary and disappear. It is not by the outward acquirement of facts that men become wise and great. It is by developing the soul from within until it illuminates the brain with that flood of light called genius.