Two Quotes, to Quote

Life was not a valuable gift, but death was. Life was a fever-dream made up of joys embittered by sorrows, pleasure poisoned by pain; a dream that was a nightmare-confusion of spasmodic and fleeting delights, ecstasies, exultations, happinesses, interspersed with long-drawn miseries, griefs, perils, horrors, disappointments, defeats,humiliations, and despairs--the heaviest curse devisable by divine ingenuity; but death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man's best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.

- Letters from the Earth (Mark Twain)

It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory--and sometimes not even that. I suppose that at those solemn times when we wake in the deeps of the night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess that he is really only a soap-bubble, and as little worth the making.

- Mark Twain's Own Autobiography

A Loss which filled me with knowledge!

This year, my father left his body, his presence on my life left an permanent impression on my mind. This event opened a bundle of encyclopedias in front of my eyes as flowers bloom in spring, telling me 'what life is all about'.

What I see now is crystal clear water, earlier which used to be a misty dark scene. I am deep down in water - breathless.

Absolute changeless permanent reality, the unconditioned, itself alone is, all else has always been, is, and always will be just a state of make-believe fiction, a state of delusion worn like a costume with multiple fabricated viewpoints, with each self-sustaining itself in a self-perpetuated state of self-ignorance, until each decides to come to closure through self-enlightenment and self-awakening

things are created, they are inherently subject to decay, and then finally, they are dissolved again

(now... say to yourself the following)

all that is created is impermanent, subject to alteration and change, and being such, all impermanent things are inherently a state of ill-being.this being so, it is not fitting to say that which is ill that am I, that is mine, that is my self.

do I understand? every iota of everything is just make-believe fiction and none of it exists in truth and when this is seen as the way things truly are then that is the end of all anguish and the end of the continuation of what never existed in truth to begin with

-Essence Buddha's Teachings

MAN THE MACHINE

A Human: Yes. Man the machine--man the impersonal engine. Whatsoever a man is, is due to his MAKE, and to the INFLUENCES brought to bear upon it by his heredities, his habitat, his associations. He is moved, directed, COMMANDED, by EXTERIOR influences--SOLELY. He ORIGINATES nothing, not even a thought.

Readers : "Oh, come! Where did I get our opinion that this which you are talking is all foolishness?"

A Human: It is a quite natural opinion--indeed an inevitable opinion--but YOU did not create the materials out of which it is formed. They are odds and ends of thoughts, impressions, feelings, gathered unconsciously from a thousand books, a thousand conversations, and from streams of thought and feeling which have flowed down into your heart and brain out of the hearts and brains of centuries of ancestors. PERSONALLY you did not create even the smallest microscopic fragment of the materials out of which your opinion is made; and personally you cannot claim even the slender merit of PUTTING THE BORROWED MATERIALS TOGETHER. That was done AUTOMATICALLY--by your mental machinery, in strict accordance with the law of that machinery's construction. And you not only did not make that machinery yourself, but you have NOT EVEN ANY COMMAND OVER IT.