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“The pain-bearing obstructions are — ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion and clinging to life.”
3. The pain-bearing obstructions are — ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion and clinging to life.
These are the five pains, the fivefold tie that binds us down, of which ignorance is the cause and the other four its effects. It is the only cause of all our misery. What else can make us miserable? The nature of the Soul is eternal bliss. What can make it sorrowful except ignorance, hallucination, delusion? All pain of the Soul is simply delusion.
Patanjali’s Yoga Aphorisms, Chapter II – Concentration: Its Practice (in Swami Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga)
Consider also:
- “The misery which is not yet come is to be avoided.”
- “Because you have so augmented the evil your nature, because you have increased its Hatred and its Self-delusion, you have damaged yourself far more than all the violence of pain or death could hurt your victim, for there is no greater suffering than Ignorance, and it is the Ignorance of byegone lives which is the chiefest cause of whatsoever suffering we now endure.”
- “Good and bad deeds are not the direct causes in the transformations of nature, but they act as breakers of obstacles to the evolutions of nature: as a farmer breaks the obstacles to the course of water, which then runs down by its own nature.”
Source: library.hrmtc.com