Are you seeking to be free
of the burden of sorrow?
Not just your sorrow,
but the sorrow of the world?

Or do you seek to languidly
laugh in eternal pleasure,
forsaking the polar regions,
because that which is bad is bad?

Do you seek originality?
Something that is beyond
the corrupting influence
of rust and moth and time?

Are you like the rest of the human
beings wandering on this world?
For what are you lusting, seeking,
hungering? In wanting experiences --

whether they are ******, intellectual,
of first and last things, within, without --
there can be no fulfillment, no completion.
Always in the background: "What next?"

Sit still, my friend, observe the horrors,
the joys, the pleasures, the pains, the wants,
the needs, and the absence of all these.
There is nothing that can be left out.

The world isn't pretty; it's messy.
Few straight lines exist in nature;
and yet you live in a box, you eat in a box,
you work in a box, you learn in a box,

and one day you will lie dead in a box.