I Asked This Question at the Worst Possible Time
It was three in the morning. Someone I loved was in the hospital, and I was sitting in one of those plastic waiting room chairs that seem designed to prevent any form of comfort. I’d been praying, or something like praying, for hours. And in the silence between the wall clock’s ticks, the question surfaced like something rising from deep water: Why does God allow this?
I’d read enough spiritual books to have stock answers. Karma. Growth. Divine plan. But in that moment, sitting under fluorescent lights with my hands trembling, none of those answers meant anything. They were words. I needed something that could hold the weight of real suffering.
Months later, when the crisis had passed and I had enough distance to think clearly, I returned to Paramahansa Yogananda’s writings on suffering. And I found something different from what I expected. Not a neat answer, but an honest framework that took the question seriously.
Yogananda Didn’t Dismiss the Question
What I appreciate most about Yogananda’s approach to suffering is that he never minimized it. He didn’t offer the glib spiritual bypass of “everything happens for a reason” and leave it at that. He’d experienced suffering himself, poverty in his early years, the deaths of loved ones, the hardship of building a spiritual mission in a foreign country. He spoke about suffering the way someone speaks about a terrain they’ve actually walked.
“Suffering is a good teacher to those who are quick and willing to learn from it. But it becomes a tyrant to those who resist.”
– Paramahansa Yogananda
That distinction, between suffering as teacher and suffering as tyrant, struck me as remarkably precise. It doesn’t say suffering is good. It doesn’t say you should welcome it. It says there’s something in suffering that can teach, but only if you approach it with a particular quality of attention. And if you don’t, it just crushes you. Yogananda acknowledged both possibilities.
The Cosmic Drama, Yogananda’s Foundational Framework
To understand Yogananda’s view of suffering, you have to understand his view of creation itself. He taught that the entire universe is, essentially, a play of consciousness, what the Hindu tradition calls lila, divine play. God, who is infinite bliss, created the world as a kind of dramatic experience, complete with contrasts: light and dark, pleasure and pain, birth and death.
This isn’t callousness. Yogananda compared it to going to see a movie. You know the movie isn’t real, but you choose to become absorbed in it, to feel the tension, the sorrow, the triumph, because the experience of contrast has its own kind of richness. The difference is that in this cosmic movie, we’ve forgotten we’re watching. We think we’re the characters, and so the suffering feels absolute.
“God created this cosmic motion picture, and He did not wish us to know it is a motion picture until we have played our parts well and graduated from the school of human experience.”
– Paramahansa Yogananda
I’ll admit this framework was hard for me to accept when I was in the middle of pain. “It’s all a cosmic movie” is cold comfort when you’re watching someone you love suffer. But Yogananda wasn’t offering it as comfort in the moment. He was offering it as a philosophical structure that could hold the question without collapsing into either nihilism or blind faith.
Karma, Not Punishment, but Consequence
Yogananda’s answer to “why suffering?” also involves karma, but not in the punitive way many Westerners understand it. He didn’t teach that suffering is God punishing you for past sins. He taught that suffering is the natural result of actions and consciousness, cause and effect operating across lifetimes.
If you touch a hot stove, you get burned. The stove isn’t punishing you. The burn is a natural consequence of contact with heat. Karma, in Yogananda’s teaching, works the same way but on a much larger scale. Actions rooted in ignorance, selfishness, or violence create corresponding consequences, not as divine retribution but as the automatic functioning of cosmic law.
This was a crucial distinction for me. The idea of a God who deliberately sends suffering as punishment felt monstrous. But the idea of a universe that operates by impersonal law, where every action has consequences that must eventually be experienced and resolved, felt more like physics than theology. Not comfortable, but coherent.
The Purpose Isn’t the Pain, It’s What the Pain Reveals
Here’s where Yogananda’s teaching deepened beyond karma into something more nuanced. He didn’t just say “you suffer because of past actions.” He said suffering serves an evolutionary purpose: it turns the mind inward.
When everything is going well, most of us have no reason to question the nature of reality. We’re happy, we’re comfortable, and spiritual inquiry seems academic. But when suffering comes, when loss, illness, or heartbreak strips away our sources of security, we’re forced to look deeper. We’re forced to ask: What is real? What endures? Who am I beyond my circumstances?
Yogananda saw this turning inward as the whole point of the cosmic drama. Not that God creates suffering to teach us. Rather, that within the structure of a universe built on contrasts, suffering naturally arises, and when it does, it has the capacity to wake us up. The pain isn’t the lesson. The lesson is what the pain drives us to find.
I’ve seen this in my own life. My most significant periods of spiritual growth didn’t come during times of ease. They came during times when the ground fell away and I had nothing to hold onto but something invisible and inner. I wouldn’t have chosen those periods. But I can’t deny what they produced.
What About Innocent Suffering?
The question that still haunts me, and that I think haunts anyone who takes Yogananda’s teaching seriously, is the suffering of innocents. Children who are born into famine. Animals who experience cruelty. People who suffer through no discernible fault of their own.
Yogananda addressed this primarily through the lens of reincarnation and group karma. He taught that the soul carries experiences across many lifetimes, and that some suffering in this life has roots in previous ones. He also spoke of collective karma, the idea that nations, families, and groups accumulate shared consequences that individuals within those groups experience.
I’m not going to pretend this fully satisfies me. The suffering of a child doesn’t become painless just because there might be a karmic explanation. Yogananda, to his credit, seemed to feel this tension too. He didn’t respond to suffering with detachment. He wept when he saw suffering. He worked to alleviate it. He started schools, fed the poor, and counseled the grieving with genuine compassion.
His teaching wasn’t “suffering is fine because karma.” It was closer to “suffering is real, karma provides a framework for understanding it, and your response to suffering, both your own and others’, is the measure of your spiritual growth.”
A Contemplation Practice for Times of Difficulty
When you’re in a period of suffering. Not acute crisis, but that sustained ache that sometimes settles in for weeks or months, try this practice, adapted from Yogananda’s approach.
Sit quietly. Don’t try to meditate formally. Just sit. Breathe naturally. And instead of asking “why is this happening to me?”, which tends to produce either self-pity or rage, ask a different question: “What is this revealing to me?”
Not demanding an answer. Not analyzing. Just sitting with the question and letting it work on you. What is this pain pointing me toward? What false security is it stripping away? What deeper strength is it asking me to find?
Yogananda taught that God’s voice is heard most clearly in silence, and sometimes suffering is the only thing loud enough to make us stop and listen. This isn’t about finding a silver lining. It’s about discovering that even in the darkest passage, something within you remains untouched, a witness, a presence, a dimension of yourself that the suffering can’t reach.
Sit with that. Even for five minutes. Not trying to transcend the pain, but letting the pain lead you inward to the part of you that doesn’t suffer. Yogananda called that part the soul. You can call it whatever feels true.
No Final Answer, And Maybe That’s the Point
I don’t think Yogananda offered a final answer to why God allows suffering. I think he offered something more useful, a way to hold the question without being destroyed by it. A framework that takes suffering seriously while also pointing to something beyond it.
The suffering is real. The tears are real. The loss is real. And somewhere beneath all of it, there’s a consciousness that chose to experience this drama. Not as punishment, but as the long, strange path back to itself. That doesn’t make the pain less painful. But it does, sometimes, in the quiet hours when the worst has passed, make it bearable.
I still don’t have a neat answer. I suspect I never will. But I’ve stopped needing one. The question itself, held honestly, has become a kind of prayer.
