Student: How do we explain the suffering that people undergo through no fault of their own — like the Holocaust, for example?

Sri Chinmoy: We human beings do not know the present, past or future. We have no idea of what an individual or a collective group did in previous incarnations. We do not know the karma they have accrued. The law of karma says that each person reaps what he sows, but we do not know when the particular seed was sowed. So when it is time to reap the fruit, sometimes people have very unfortunate experiences in life which they cannot explain or understand.

Apart from that, ignorance-forces are all around; ignorance itself, let us say, is a force. You may be a saint, but these forces are all around, and you may not have mastery over them. So although you may have done nothing wrong, these forces may still attack you. Many innocent people are affected by these forces. So if someone is suffering, we can usually attribute it to the karma he got from some previous incarnation, but it is also possible that his suffering is caused by undivine forces.

Each of us has a soul, a heart, a mind, a vital and a physical consciousness. Our soul is entirely divine; it is God's representative within us. Our heart at times wants to identify itself with others and feel its oneness with the world, but at times it also suffers from insecurity. Our mind, on the one hand, wants to know the truth and to have peace in itself and in the world; but, on the other hand, it immediately becomes suspicious when it sees peace, and it constantly tries to separate and divide things. Our vital can be dynamic, but it can also be aggressive. Our body allows itself to be guided by the stronger tendencies of the other parts of our being; but its own tendency is just to be inert.

So each part of our being has a good part and a discouraging part. This moment one part of our being will act divinely and the next moment it will act undivinely. The divine in us is trying all the time to make us perfect and thus to make the world perfect. It is constantly praying for God-realisation, God-revelation and God-manifestation. But we also have another reality inside us, which only wants to lord it over others and destroy others.

The divine in us feels miserable if some catastrophe takes place in the world. But the human in us or the animal in us may get malicious pleasure, because the catastrophe is happening in some other part of the world, and we are unaffected. Not only do these undivine forces inside us get pleasure when bad things happen, but they can actually cause bad things to happen. The undivine forces that we have or that we embody can create countless problems in the world.