The office of experience is to frustrate and to cheat, yet not for a malicious purpose. Experience brings pain so that consciousness may be gradually awakened to self-realization, for if consciousness flowed freely toward the object and thereby found the fulfillment of its yearning, there would be none of the shock necessary for consciousness to become aware of its own true nature. Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Transformations of Consciousness, p. 191.
"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding." Kahlil Gibran
He ;
has seen but half of the universe who never has been shown the house
of Pain.
If you suffer more than many before coming into the light, it is because your character is deeper and your happy enlargement will be proportioned to it."
Life is a warfare, a struggle, and the diseases of the body answer to the troubles and defeats of the spirit. Man begins by quarreling with the animal in him, and the result is immediate dis-ease. In proportion as the spirit is the more ambitious and persevering, the more obstacles it will meet with.
All wisdom is the result of a discipline, conscious or unconscious.
Thunder and lightning are remarkable accompaniments to our life, as
if to remind us that there always is, or should be, a kind of battle waging.
The thunder is signal guns to us.
Rivers meander most not amid rugged mountains, but through soft level meadows.
Not only narrow but rough is the way to life everlasting!
Whatever your sex or position, life is a battle in which you are to
show your pluck, and woe be to the coward. Whether passed on a bed
of sickness or a tented field, it is ever the same fair play and admits
no foolish distinction. Despair and postponement are cowardice and
defeat. Men were born to succeed, not to fail.
Man is the artificer of his own happiness. Let him beware how
he complains of the disposition of circumstances, for it is his own disposition
he blames. If this is sour or that rough, or the other steep,
let him think if it be not his work. If his look curdles all hearts,
let him not complain of a sour reception; if he hobble in his gait,
let him not grumble at the roughness of the way; if he is weak in
the knees, let him not call the hill steep. This was the pith of
the inscription on the wall of the Swedish inn: "You will find at
Trolhate excellent bread, meat, and wine, provided you bring them with
you!"
'Tis healthy to be sick sometimes. Adversity breeds strength. The difficulties we experience always illuminate the lessons we most need to learn.
In good times we go forth perchance to forget, in hard times we look
within and remember.
If you aspire to anything better than politics, expect no cooperation from men. They will not further anything good. You must prevail of your own force, as a plant springs and grows by its own vitality.
The sportsman will paddle a boat now five or six miles, and wade in water up to his knees, being out all day without his dinner, and think himself amply compensated if he bags two or three ducks. The most persistent and sacrificing endeavors are necessary to succeed in any direction.
"To the persevering mortal," said Zoroaster, "the blessed Immortals are swift."
To taste the fruit of perseverance requires maturity and experience. We need to cultivate patience, planning and timing. We build our resources even when circumstances seem to be against us. If we nurse our plans through good times and bad, our plans will eventually succeed with the inevitability of fish caught in a net.
It is never enough that our life be an easy one. We must live on the stretch; not be satisfied with a tame and undisturbed round of weeks and days, but retire to our rest like soldiers on the eve of a battle, looking forward with ardor to the strenuous sortie of the morrow. "Sit not down in the popular seats and common levels of virtue, but endeavour to make them heroical."
To the brave soldier the rust and leisure of peace are harder than the fatigue of war. As our bodies court physical encounters, and languish in the mild and even climate of the tropics, so our souls thrive best on unrest and discontent. He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate.
How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can
possibly avoid it.
To offset the drag of temperament and race, which pulls down, learn this lesson, namely, that by the cunning co-presence of two elements, which is throughout nature, whatever lames or paralyzes you, draws in with it the divinity, in some form, to repay.
"Ah!" said a brave painter to me, thinking on these things, "if a man has failed, you will find he has dreamed instead of working. There is no way to success in our art, but to take off you coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day."
But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave. We must know our friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our friends.
He who aims high, must dread an easy home and popular manners.
Heaven sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium as the burr that protects the fruit. If there is any great good thing in store for you, it will not come at the first or second call, nor in the shape of fashion, ease, and city drawing-rooms. Popularity is for dolls. "Steep and craggy," said Porphyry, "is the path of the gods."
Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors. All sunshine makes a desert.
Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory. Wherever work is done, victory is obtained.
Bad times have a scientific value. 
These are occasions a good
learner would not miss. 
A man was born not for prosperity, but to suffer for the benefit of others, like the noble rock-maple which all around our villages bleeds for the service of man.
Adversity is a far greater teacher than prosperity. Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.
Dwell not upon thy weariness, thy strength shall be according to the measure of thy desire.
So it is in rugged crises, in unweariable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of question, that the angel is shown.
Fair
play and an open field and freshest laurels to all who have won
them! On, and forever onward!
The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims.
The elation depression syndrome: when elated, lower the ceiling; when depressed, raise the floor. Learn to keep an even keel at all times.
The world is his, who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance, -- by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.
Thus, when Heaven is going to give a great responsibility to someone,
it first makes his mind endure suffering. It makes his sinews
and bones experience toil, and his body to suffer hunger. It inflicts
him with poverty and knocks down everything he tries to build. "In
this way Heaven stimulates his mind, stabilizes his temper and develops
his weak points. 
People will always err, but it is only after making mistakes
that they can correct themselves. Only when you have been mentally
constricted can you become creative "From this we can know
that life is stimulated from adversity and anxiety, and death results from
relaxation and pleasure."
I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods.
Patience and again patience, we shall win at the last. We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time.
Every animal is driven to pasture by blows.
All our reasonings on adversity, must take account of previous living
as the source from which the present takes its rise.
A Philosopher's school is a Surgery: pain, not pleasure, you should have felt therein. For on entering none of you is whole. One has a shoulder out of joint, another an abscess: a third suffers from an issue, a fourth from pains in the head. And am I then to sit down and treat you to pretty sentiments and empty flourishes, so that you may applaud me and depart, with neither shoulder, nor head, nor issue, nor abscess a whit the better for your visit?
It is the critical moment that shows the man. So when the crisis is upon you, remember that God, like a trainer of wrestlers, has matched you with a rough and stalwart antagonist. "To what end?" you ask. That you may prove the victor at the Great Games, but without toil and sweat this may not be!
Every spirit makes its house; but afterwards the house confines
the spirit.
Thus can the faithful student reverse all the warnings of his early instinct, under the guidance of a deeper instinct. He learns to welcome misfortune, learns that adversity is the prosperity of the great.
It is fouler and uglier to have too much, than not to have enough.
The willow knows what the storm does not...... that the power to endure harm... outlives the power to inflict it: learn to bloom and grow even in difficult situations.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then.... you shall begin to climb. Khalil Gibran.
The soul that is without suffering
does not feel the need of knowing
the ultimate cause of the universe.
Sickness, grief and hardships
are all indespensable elements
in the spiritual ascent.
~ Anandamayi Ma
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