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All these things are very impermanent; even our own life doesn't belong to us. If our life were belonged to us, we could always keep it. But we can't. At any moment, it can be taken away from us without warning, without asking, without any permission from us at all, even without our knowledge, except for Quan Yin practitioners: We know before we die. We know three days, one week, sometimes a month or three months in advance, sometimes longer than that - to prepare everything before we leave this world. Other ordinary people don't know this; they don't know when life will be taken from them. They don't even know when their dearest wife, husband or children will be taken from them or sometimes even be taken together.
So that's the fate of the pitiful human beings in this world, as well as all other sentient beings; people don't know when they'll die. Even our life doesn't belong to us. Nonetheless, each of us clings to all these impermanent things, and we stop ourselves from many adventures. For example, sometimes we want to do this and that or go here or go there. But because we're so attached to our environment and surroundings we have no courage to start new things or do something more exciting with our life. Instead, we just go day in and day out onto the highway and off of the highway, into the car and out of the house, day in and day out, from the day we're born to the day we die.
Sometimes life is very boring for us, but we have no courage to change it or no initiative to alter the pattern of our existence. Just because we're too accustomed to living the way we are, to staying where we live and to having the people we're used to having around us, we can't leave them; we can't leave all these things behind. We feel like we're missing something if we don't stay with them, or if we don't stay there. That's the lot of most sentient beings, and that's the reason we keep reincarnating again and again and again. It's just that we always want something that we don't have, and later we just go back to what we had. That's all.~~Next Article
The Only Way to Develop Supreme Wisdom
