Be A Refuge Unto Yourselves

The most blissful sensations cause unhappiness in the end, when they change and disappear. No one can isolate pleasure, experience only pleasure in life without enduring the unhappiness that occurs when that pleasure dissolves.

A hungry person is happy when eating. But he is not able to retain that happiness forever. Again and again he will be hungry and he is to be fed. A person who keeps standing for along time finds it happy for him to sit down comfortably. But it is not possible for him to keep on sitting all the time. Soon he finds that it is comfortable for him to change the posture. This means that these feelings are transitory and superficial. There is the universal truth of suffering underlying all these feelings.

Whatever happiness we do experience is tainted by the prospect of its alteration and loss. Because of this instability, every sensation in the changing complex that we call "existence" is ultimately frustrating, unsatisfying, and unsatisfactory.