Life is mortal. Humanity is mortal. Buddhism is mortal. History is mortal. All compounds will end, not incidentally, but principally and by definition. Similarly, all compounds occur and recur again as patterns within Samsara, again, and again, and again. This isn't new, or lasting. There is nothing new under the sun.
The tears I have shed while transmigrating in Samsara weigh more heavily than all the water in the ocean.
The only hope I have is to accept the fact that I, you, humanity, all recorded history, are already dying and dead and to consider the nature of what I want to take along with me in my further wandering on. Animosity, fear, and delusion? Dispassion toward and understanding of reality? Or deeds in alignment with dhamma? It's my intent and my attention that will determine that, not anybody else's.
There are these five facts that everyone should reflect on often:
1. I am the property of aging.
2. I am the property of illness.
3. I am the property of death.
4. I am being carried away and will leave all that I love behind in my wake.
5. (Yet) I am the ruler of kamma, the heir of kamma, the fruit of kamma, the seed of kamma. With kamma will I be accused; with kamma will I be defended. Whatever I__ do, for ill or good will, to that will __I fall heir.
MI don't mean to trash up an otherwise really impressive and thoughtful thread- but can we examine #4 a little? I am sort of under the impression that in this lifetime I am my own psychic experience, and without getting into stuff about identity that I know nothing about, aren't we always everything we loved, and that love inseparable from the self and the fabric of this life? Not trying to get too religion/politics about love being eternal, just fast and loose, if not accurate and beautiful, too, if it's just so.
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I don't know. Does the hungry man have the same love of food that a satiated one does? In the record of memory (or history), I can see the contextual predicates, but how much does that matter in the living present? Am I what I am now, what I was then, both, or neither?
Although I guess that having a relation is in itself a kind of love. One can go against the tide, with the tide, but in either case acknowledges and accepts the existence of the tide.