Page 74 - Complete Works of Dr. KCV Volume 1

speaking as fundamental, but truth speaking cannot even take place unless one devotes oneself to the highest goal or aim of life. Justice will not appear to one who is all the time engaged in doing the unjust, thinking that he is doing the just. Unspiritual life usually breeds these inversions of value and truth, so much so that the truth begins to appear as falsehood or lie. Indeed Plato in the 'Republic' very apologetically and ironically says that he will tell a lie or a false story in order to illustrate his point, and the great scholars in the West seriously have argued that he told a lie and wished to use lie in order to preach truth or make one accept his conception of truth. Nothing can be more absurd than this for inverted men hardly can see reality as it is and truth to them appears to be false. Similarly Sri Yamunacharya in his Gita-commentary speaks of the extraordinary psychological difficulty of Arjuna as not so much lying in his view that 'the false appears to be true' but that it lay in his taking the right view to be false, for he considered his dharma to be adharma; and the entire Gita is undertaken to dispel this most serious error. Similarly we find we take our present miseries as unmixed evil, humiliation as evil, and so on, and we think in the converse that the joys and pleasures and wealths as unmixed blessings of God. This is about as mistaken a view as any that can be taken, for we are obviously suffering from Vivarta or inversion (which is the best translation of that original term, and not illusion, though the illusion arises from and can arise from this inversion). Thus what are God's blessings could be mistaken as punishments and what is intended to purify man as injuring him. Many a man and woman, child and widow, have complained, about injustice of God, the poor and the lowly have always cried to heaven against the death and disease that overtaken them as well as the deep indignity of life itself to them. Death seems to be a good friend, alas! Suicide is seen to be the only way out of this disaster or loss of faith in the world and men and nature and finally in God Himself.
Such being the case it almost appears than men come to spiritual organization for knowing the meaning of their misery and suffering, and getting rid of them, but if we say that it is God's blessing the whole explanations, to say the least, is disappointing and disquieting. So hopeless, is man's condition that it is obviously difficult to convince himself of goodness of evil or rather of what is misery and humiliation. This being one of the greatest difficulties of spiritual life one cannot get over this by any