Lama Zopa Rinpoche

This is all karma. What the Buddha said about ignorance is exactly true. Every problem is
due to ignorance. Whatever suffering the animals must endure, being killed or whatever,
primarily it can all be traced back to ignorance.
Humans have to experience the suffering of rebirth, old age, sickness, death, being separated
from desirable objects and meeting undesirable objects. Even when we find desirable objects
we are still unable to find any satisfaction at all. And then there is the suffering of having the
five aggregates. These are the sufferings experienced by human beings.
Desire realm gods are completely distracted by pleasure and through their attachment to it
they continuously create negative karma. Then, when they are about to die, they hear a voice
telling them they will die in seven days—their days are fifty human years long—and they
start to experience the very heavy sufferings of the signs of death. There are five ways they
suffer. For the first time ever, dirt remains on their body. Their boyfriends and girlfriends
refuse to come near them because of the signs of death but pass them flowers on the end of
a stick in order to stay far away. And as they recall the blissful life they are about to leave,
they can see where they are going to be reborn, which is a huge change from where they are
now. Seeing this is said to be much heavier suffering than actually experiencing the hell
realm. Kyabje Chöden Rinpoche said that hell beings have more physical suffering but gods
have much greater mental suffering, in the same way that rich people have much more
mental suffering than poor people.
Wherever we look in samsara there is so much suffering. The root of it all is this incorrect
concept that believes that the I is real from its own side. It is formless, colorless and
shapeless but the result of this wrong concept is the unbelievable sufferings of the six
realms. The suffering we humans must endure is bad enough but that is nothing compared
to the suffering of the other realms. All of this comes from something that is formless,
colorless and shapeless.
Now you can see why meditating on emptiness is so important. Even though you don’t have
a realization of emptiness, just meditating on it is the most important thing to do in order to
overcome karma and delusion, the cause of the oceans of samsaric suffering.
While we are circling in samsara, because of ignorance we start so many sets of twelve links.
We start so many sets of twelve links each hour, so many each minute. If we create so many
sets of twelve links even within a minute, think how many we must create in one day, always
creating more and more samsara.
Then, even if we can free ourselves from the prison of one set of twelve links, there is
another prison outside that we are caught in. And even if we can free ourselves from that,
there is yet another one outside of that one. The prisons are numberless. Due to ignorance we
have been creating samsara from beginningless rebirths and even in one hour, even in one
minute we create so many sets of twelve links. It’s endless and this will continue until we can
actualize the direct perception of emptiness and remove the seed of delusion that causes
rebirth.
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