www.ramaquotes.com
Suffering
The life of an unenlightened person is filled with suffering.
You are going to die. Your physical body will disintegrate. You cannot help that.
You have but a short time to live in this world. As you age, you will experience the pains of aging. If your hopes and joys rest upon the body, then you will suffer greatly.
If you are the body, you are in terrible trouble! One small microbe will destroy it one day, if not an accident. You have but a short time to live in this world.
If you live for a very long while, you will have to watch your friends and loved ones die, your body age and lose its beauty and vigor and your mental capacities fade.
At the end of your life you will probably end up in an old-age home, or in a back room in one of your children's houses, left only with a handful of fading memories and a body racked with great pain and suffering.
The world is futile when viewed through the persona of the body. The body is not simply the physical body but it's the body of knowledge of this world.
People don't really want to know the truth. The truth is that you are all dead in the future, everything that you do has no point, and all of the achievements of the human race are meaningless.
If you wake up for a moment and look around at life, you will observe that nothing here lasts, nothing works out. There are no happy endings. All accomplishments are washed away by death or by the next moment.
I see people driving cars, winding down the streets. I don't know where these people think they're going. They're going to the funeral home; that's about it.
No one cares about you. No one cares. You will die and be forgotten.
We see the most beautiful creations whither. The beautiful young maiden becomes the old woman and she hates her body because it isn't what it used to be. The young man becomes the old dotard who has trouble remembering.
There is nothing wrong with the world of physicality. There is nothing wrong with existence. It's perfect ... but it's terribly transient.
As I'm sure you know by now, most people aren't really very happy. Beyond their surface appearances, the smiles they wear for the rest of the world, most people are soul-sick.
There are billions of people out there walking around and they don't meditate. You can tell. They are not having a good time with their lives. People are not happy.
There is suffering and there is joy. Your life is very short, and then you're back again for another and another, forever, unless you step off the wheel.
We live in a world of wars and wars alarms, of famines, of oppression. While there are many wonderful people in this world, you'll notice one curious fact about them, they all suffer, they all die, and sometimes those who are the nicest seem to suffer the most.
Most people lead lives of frustration and disapointment. They enjoy temporary pleasures
and long-lasting suffering.
The wheel goes round and round and round forever. Pleasure, pain, birth and death, lifetime after lifetime, it is endless. All sentient beings experience this, the endless dance of life, the lila.
Your mind is filled with thoughts and desires. Your moods shift constantly. You are not sure what it is you want, it changes from moment to moment; there is little or no continuity in your life.
Who needs to go the horror movies? Just go outside or turn on the TV. Buddha called it the "nightmare of the day." Welcome to incarnate experience.
You cannot be born and you cannot die. You will exist in a universe that goes on forever. That is the ultimate horror from the Zen point of view. You could be unhappy forever.
Most people have no idea how unhappy they are because they don't know what happiness is. When they get a little break from their total pain, they feel a little better and they call it happiness.
It is much nicer to live in perfect mind, free from pain and agony. How painful it is to be unenlightened. Buddha called it "the nightmare of the day."
Everybody here is so caught up in the game of life they don't see death. They don't see beyond their deaths. They are on the wheel of birth and death.
Anything but enlightenment is pure pain; it is the lack of enlightenment.
Some people get tired of continual perception of the finite universe. They feel the perception of the universe over and over in variant forms is kind of an unhappy condition, because it doesn't last.
As long as you wish to separate yourself from the immortal consciousness, you will suffer. You will experience the pain of the separation, the abridgment of infinite mind in finite form.
We dream forever unless we awaken. We move from one dream to another, some beautiful, some we're the hero or the heroine, some horrible, some nonsensical, some boring.
Everyone has sunk on this plane to such a low state of consciousness it is the natural state. We have deviated so far from in this age of darkness.
This world is not a middle point in evolution. It's one step down from the middle point in evolution. This is the world of desire and fulfillment, frustration.
The dreams of human beings are dark, heavy and morbid and simplistic and boring. The dreams of immortality are endless and shining, they shimmer, they glow.
Dogs have fleas; people have each other. We are born to die. Life is a continuing tragic comedy. Everything and everyone we love suffers. Anybody who doesn't see that has not grown up and known life.
Nothing is here in this world that is of any interest at all.
Human beings affix themselves to things that are of little or no importance. They affix themselves to the transitory, to things that are impermanent, and in doing so, they get all upset
A human being is bound by emotion, enslaved by their desires. A person is never really at peace with themselves because they live in the spectrum of human consciousness.
Life for most people is a bad dream. They live in pain, grabbing at what they can for pleasure. As they grow old, they despair. Things don't work out the way you planned.
In this lifetime you can lose everything. Everything passes here.
Life is just masturbation in a sense, mentally. What people do is they just create a world out of their self-reflection.
The time we waste never comes again. The opportunities we miss never come again. The loves we lose never come again. Indeed, in this world of constant change we are fortunate that these things never come again.
You're in a world of diversity. You see things through a glass darkly. There is a separation everywhere.
We wait for the fulfillment of our desires. We wait with hope, apathy, resignation, belief. We become despondent, elated. We wait
Most people exist in very clouded states of mind. It's sort of like when you're underwater in a big swimming pool and you open your eyes, and you can't see very far and everything is distorted.
People are so tired. The world is set up to exhaust you and drain you. That's how humankind has devised their world. Life is not necessarily that way
Without enlightenment, everything in life is harsh. Sooner or later you see everyone you love die, unless you die first, of course. This causes you to suffer.
Happiness is not freedom. You may become happy tomorrow; but I assure you, your happiness will be smashed by the pains of your body as you age, by the all-encompassing death that swallows up everything and everyone in this world.
Hell is everything. Heaven is nothing.
Anything but enlightenment is pure pain; it is the lack of enlightenment. There are joys, of course, and they should be enjoyed. There are sorrows, and they should be passed over briefly.
You've got to make a person aware of how miserable they really are and show them how happy they can be. Otherwise, why should they seek this nebulous goal called self-discovery.
You don't know why, but you know you have to go home. It's an eternal longing. It's Marvell's drop of dew wanting to go back to the sky. We're drawn by a force we don't understand, through worlds, through experience.
