Suffering is essential for the elimination of the ego, just as it was necessary for you to scrub and scrub in order to wash the stain from my coat.
Interpretation
Suffering plays a crucial role in overcoming one's ego, much like cleaning is necessary to remove a stain.
Meher Baba's quote suggests that suffering is a vital experience for personal growth and the dissolution of the ego. Just as one must scrub diligently to remove a persistent stain, one must endure and work through pain and challenges in life to achieve a true understanding of oneself and to foster humility.
In practice
During a motivational speech about resilience, one might reference this quote to emphasize the necessity of overcoming hardships.
The experiences are so innumerable and varied, that the journey appears to be interminable and the Destination is ever out of sight. But the wonder of it is, when at last you reach your Destination you find that you had never travelled at all! It was a journey from here to Here.
Love has to spring spontaneously from within And it is no way amenable to any form of inner or outer force. Love and coercion can never go together; But though love cannot be forced on anyone, It can be awakened in him through love itself. Love is essentially self communicative; Those who do not have it catch it from those who have it. True love is unconquerable and irresistible, And it goes on gathering power and spreading itself, Until eventually it transforms everyone whom it touches.
There is no greater romance in life than this adventure in realization.
What I want from my lovers is real, unadulterated love, and from my genuine workers I expect real work done.
Happiest is he who expects no happiness from others. Love delights and glorifies in giving, not receiving. So learn to love and give, and not to expect anything from others.
When the mind soars in pursuit of the things conceived in space...it pursues emptiness; but when man dives deep within himself, he experiences the fullness of existence.
I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!
There is no man who desires as passionately as a Russian. If we could imprison a Russian desire beneath a fortress, that fortress would explode.
So, is there an afterlife, and if so, what will it be like? I don't have a clue. But I am confident that the one who has buoyed us up in life will also buoy us up through death. We die into God. What more that means, I do not know. But that is all I need to know.
Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought.
The secret was such an old one now, had so grown into me and become a part of myself, that I could not tear it away.
As the least drop of wine tinges the whole goblet, so the least particle of truth colors our whole life.
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