After contemplating death and impermanence, it’s then helpful to think about things from another point of view.

What will happen if we ignore our opportunity and carry on as we always have, by clinging to this small self as if it’s the only thing in the universe that matters?

To answer that question, we must examine our own mind and how it habitually suffers.

This is the third subject to contemplate when training in the preliminaries, “the defects of samsara.”

The Sanskrit word samsara refers to the perpetual cycle of suffering that we sentient beings go through as a result of our innocent but ignorant self-importance.

This cycle will never come to an end unless the rascal in our heart is recognized for what it is and. banished forever.

We human beings are very resilient.

However much we suffer, when the pain is over we tend to move on and forget.

In a way, that is admirable.

But if there’s something we can actually do about our suffering, if we can eliminate its causes and thus become free, if peace and happiness are realistic possibilities, then does it make sense just to keep suffering?

When we have some understanding of the causes of suffering but insist on bearing it over and over again, never learning our lesson, would you say that such resilience is intelligent?

— Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, The Intelligent Heart

• Sick Time, Only Sick
  This is the correct Zen sickness: sick time, only sick. No choice, no checking, not dependent, only sick. Then sick is not sick. This is high-class practice and a high-class education. — Zen Master Seung Sahn in Only Don’t Know
• It’s Time, She’ll Say
  It’s Time, she’ll say, False prophet, that seeks flesh and gnaws the bone. — Ekphrasis: Her Expression by Yiannis Doukas, translated by A. E. Stallings
• I Am Too Alone In The World, And Yet Not Alone Enough
  Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. — Rainer Maria Rilke I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that… Read more: I Am Too Alone In The World, And Yet Not Alone Enough
• When You Rise, Kiss The Tombstone Of Your Past
  When you rise, kiss the tombstone of your past and step barefoot into the garden of the future, the garden of infinitely forking paths — Maria Popova from poem How to Change Your Life
• But I Have My Life
  But I have my life, I’m living it. It’s twisted, exhausting, uncertain, and full of guilt, but nonetheless, there’s something there. — Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake I wish I could say I felt guilty for what I did.  I don’t. — Veronica Roth, Divergent My guilt is an ocean for me to drown in. —… Read more: But I Have My Life