“Your world does not understand the function of pain and suffering and difficulty and hardship. But all these play an important part in the evolution of the human spirit. Every experience is part of the pattern of your life. Difficulties, obstacles, handicaps — these are the trials of the soul. And when it conquers them all, it rises stronger, more purified, deepened in intensity and more highly evolved.
The darkness and the light, the shadow and the sunshine, are all but reflections of one whole. Without shadow there could be no light and without light there could be no shadow. The difficulties of life are steps which enable the soul to rise.
Look back in your own life and see that often the greatest crises, the most difficult problems, the darkest hours were the stepping stones that led to greater understanding. You would not evolve if forever you dwelt in the sunshine, lived
free from care, anxiety and worry, where every approaching difficulty was automatically smoothed out so that it never touched you, where there were no rough stones in your pathway, and where there was nothing for you to conquer. It is in the facing of, and rising supreme over, trouble that you grow.
The joy and the laughter can only be enjoyed to the full when once you have drained the cup of sorrow to the dregs, for as low as you can fall in the scale of life so correspondingly you can rise. The more you have tasted and experienced that which seems the shadow of earthly life, the more you will appreciate, because of it, the greater joys of the sunshine.
Your experiences are all part of your evolution. One day, freed from the trammels of flesh, with eyes not clouded by matter, you will look back in retrospect and view the life you have lived on earth. And out of the jigsaw of all the events, you will see how every piece fits into its allotted place, how every experience was a lesson to quicken the soul and to enable it to have greater understanding of its possibilities.
There is no experience that comes to the human soul, which, rightly understood and rightly faced, does not leave you better for it.”
Silver Birch Anthology – Wisdom From The World Beyond, Edited by William Naylor, p. 24-26.
