Sorrow

Sensation is but an echo -- a shadow cast by the Real. It belongs to life, yet it is not Life itself. Mistaking sensation for Life... is like mistaking a shadow for the sun whose light lends it form, and from which it has been cast.

One of our greatest, least understood sorrows in this life, the root cause of an uninspired life, is that -- given our present level of being -- we have no other place to explore besides the valley of thought: an unconscious realm where the shadows of things that were hide their emptiness by changing their shape to look like a time to come -- just ahead -- when, at long last, we will reach the time and place where our struggles with life are at last behind us!

There lives nothing real in our past -- regardless of how disappointing or painful it may have been -- that can grab us and make us its captive, any more than dark shadows have the power to keep us from walking into the sunlight.