Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Desires - Endless Suffering

The circle of vision has become so narrow, so degraded, so beastly, so animal! None is desiring anything beyond this body. 
Oh, the terrible degradation, the terrible misery of it! 

What little flesh, the five senses, the stomach! What is the world but a combination of stomach and sex? Look at millions of men and women -- that is what they are living for. Take these away from them and they will find their life empty, meaningless, and intolerable. Such are we. And such is our mind; it is continually hankering for ways and means to satisfy the hunger of the stomach and sex. 
All the time this is going on. 

There is also endless suffering; these desires of the body bring only momentary satisfaction and endless suffering. 
It is like drinking a cup of which the surface layer is nectar, while underneath all is poison. 
But we still hanker for all these things.  

                        - Swami Vivekananda, 
                          ‘Discipleship’, Talk at San Francisco

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