Without Cease

 

A few sharp-minded people can sense that the drama of their life is looping endlessly. They grow weary of it and long to pull away. Yet however long they search, they never find the button that stops it.

Most people are trapped without ever knowing it.

This infinite cage that imprisons a person actually arises from the knots within — from all the ways daily life fails to go as expected.

If you want to cut those knots away completely, you must first see through the nature of fate.

When you meet an experience that cuts to the bone — one you desperately want to escape, or desperately want to relive — your choices take on a clear and irreversible slant. These slants accumulate day by day, wearing and eroding your soul like wind and rain that never rest. Outwardly they shape the pattern of your life; inwardly they define how you see yourself. The rise and fall, gain and loss of your whole life — what people call fate — was settled the moment that knot took form.

Most of the knots that steer a life take root before the age of twenty. Back then we were too green, too easily grown into fixation, and whatever happened went straight to the heart. Once a fixation seeps into the depths of consciousness, it grows along with accumulated experience, feeding wildly on emotion.

The swing of feeling that arises when you meet a knot is the knot's favourite food. If, in the midst of anger or fear, you do not choose to put the emotion down but grip it tightly and let it drag you forward, you are unmistakably feeding the knot in your heart, and it binds tighter and tighter. The more effort you pour into watering your own knot, the harder it becomes to pull away — until you even grow used to a life of constant torment. It is like sinking everything you own into a collapsing stock: even with the money gone, you would rather sit trapped than cry loss and sell out.

Fixation spreads like a virus, swiftly infecting every facet of life and warping perception without your noticing. If you hate your father's lectures, then gradually people with similar voices, people of a similar age, and eventually every symbol with even a faint overlap will become objects of your disgust. If you fear that your true self falls far short of the glorious ideal, you will unconsciously avoid every situation that requires standing on your own; only in the shadow behind someone else do you feel briefly safe. If deep down you do not accept your own goodness, then sincere praise and tenderness, arriving at your ear, turn into cutting sarcasm and mockery. If you crave others' approval intensely, you will grow used to burning your life force to the utmost in everything you take on, terrified that a single moment of rest will bring the hard-won image of perfection crashing down.

You grow used to confining life to an extremely narrow field, moving back and forth along fixed routes, interacting only with people you know, and doing everything you can to avoid ever being alone with a stranger. You don't mind that the days are dry and dull; you ask only for a peace of mind free from stimulation. For you, eliminating every unknown variable has become the single overriding goal of life. What you are fighting is no longer any real object, but a phantom woven out of resentment and fear and built out of thin air. Like a vine, this phantom draws on emotion and expands without limit, until at last it occupies all of you. The effort you spend defending against your fears far exceeds anything you invest in building a life. You turn a blind eye to your own barrenness, spending every day handling groundless conjecture, too exhausted to carry out any meaningful thought.

In the terminal stage of this illness, you have no friends and no passion. All that remains is that tight knot you will not release, and a life that loops without end.

One day you take it into your head to break the loop by sheer force of will — and that is impossible. The very thought of breaking free is the beginning of a brand-new loop; whatever method you use to carry it out, it will end in a new loop all the same. Even if you resolve to move away from the city you live in and start life afresh in some distant country, if the knot in your heart is not undone the same encounters will simply play out again, with a different cast, on a different set.

When the day-after-day loop has worn away the last of your clarity, you lose the awareness that lets you think independently and become causation made flesh. Your every move is like the turning of the seasons or the waxing and waning of the moon — the natural operation of something with no self-nature, rigid and obstructed, with no possibility of change left.

For someone sunk this deep, fate is flat and singular. Never mind a sage who cultivates emptiness seeing straight through it — even an ordinary person who cannot glimpse fate at all can guess the ending.

The Hell of Ceaseless Suffering is called ceaseless because it never rests day or night, its punishments are countless, its subjects come in every form, and dying and being reborn never stop.

To open the knot in your own heart and end the cycle of suffering, there is only relaxation.