"It is painful to leave the world; it is painful to be in the world; and it is painful to be alone amongst the many."

"He who can be alone and rest alone and is never weary of his great work, he can live in joy, when master of himself, by the edge of the forest of desires."

Some bangers in this chapter on Wakefulness.

I'm understanding more and more why Christians are so desperate to convert people to their faith. This chapter is insane, no wonder my Aunts want me to come to church with them so badly. The fear of God is real asf, the wrath in this chapter is unmatched.

So far I have two lines that I really enjoyed. Just figured I'd share <3

"An enemy can hurt an enemy, and a man who hates can harm another man; but a man's own mind, if wrongly directed, can do him a far greater harm." -Pg 41

" 'These are my sons. This is my wealth.' In this way the fool troubles himself. He is not even the owner of himself: how much less of his sons and of his wealth ! " -Pg 44

"The mind is fickle and flighty, it flies after fancies wherever it likes: it is difficult indeed to restrain. But it is a great good to control the mind; a mind self-controlled is a source of great joy."

This verse really caught my eye, because it feels like an excellent example of the overlap and the distinction between the ideologies of these three major religions I've been reading about. They all seem to agree on the first sentence, but the second is where it diverges.

The Buddhist approach featured here asserts that a person should strive to self-govern their own mind and resist it's flights of fancy in order to reach Nirvana.

The Christian school of thought tends to suggest that you should let the Christian God handle it, and lay your worries or struggles at the altar, so to speak.

The Taoist way of doing things, as I understand it, is to simply let your mind wander, and to just enjoy the experience of wherever it takes you, believing that the Universe naturally guides itself, so any effort exerted to govern it is essentially swimming upstream and fighting against the natural way of things.

Very interesting to see these overlaps and divergences in these religions, and I can only imagine I'll come across many more in my reading.