The next function of pain is the organisation of the vehicles.  Pain makes the man exert himself, and by that exertion the matter of his vehicles gradually becomes organised.  If you want to develop and organise your muscles, you make efforts, you exercise them, and thus more life flows into them and they become strong.  Pain is necessary that the Self may force his vehicles into making efforts which develop and organise them.  Thus pain not only awakens awareness, it also organises the vehicles.

It has a third function also.  Pain purifies.  We try to get rid of that which causes us pain.  It is contrary to our nature, and we endeavour to throw it away.  All that is against the blissful nature of the Self is shaken by pain out of the vehicles; slowly they become purified by suffering, and in that way become ready for the handling of the Self.

It has a fourth function.  Pain teaches.  All the best lessons of life come from pain rather than from joy.  When one is becoming old, as I am and I look on the long life behind me, a life of storm and stress, of difficulties and efforts, I see something of the great lessons pain can teach.  Out of my life story could efface without regret everything that it has had of joy and happiness, but not one pain would I let go, for pain is the teacher of wisdom.

It has a fifth function.  Pain gives power.  Edward Carpenter said, in his splendid poem of “Time and Satan,” after he had described the wrestlings and the overthrows:  ’Every pain that I suffered in one body became a power which I wielded in the next.”  Power is pain transmuted.

Hence the wise man, knowing these things, does not shrink from pain; it means purification, wisdom, power.

It is true that a man may suffer so much pain that for this incarnation he may be numbed by it, rendered wholly or partially useless.  Especially is this the case when the pain has deluged in childhood.  But even then, he shall reap his harvest of good later.  By his past, he may have rendered present pain inevitable, but none the less can he turn it into a golden opportunity by knowing and utilising its functions.

You may say:  “What use then of pleasure, if pain is so splendid a thing?” From pleasure comes illumination.  Pleasure enables the Self to manifest.  In pleasure all the vehicles of the Self are made harrnonious; they all vibrate together; the vibrations are rhythmical, not jangled as they are in pain, and those rhythmical vibrations permit that expansion of the Self of which I spoke, and thus lead up to illumination, the knowledge of the Self.  And if that be true, as it is true, you will see that pleasure plays an immense part in nature, being of the nature of the Self, belonging to him.  When it harmonises the vehicles of the Self from outside, it enables the Self more readily to manifest himself through the lower selves within us.  Hence happiness is a condition of illumination.  That is the explanation