why bother if it hurts?

"Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." He screwed up his face in an expression of disgust.

"And yet," said Susila, "in a certain sense the advice is excellent. Eating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if ever they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference."

"And rises again from the dead?" he asked sarcastically.

"That's the one question the Buddha always refused to discuss. Believing in eternal life never helped anybody to live in eternity. Nor, of course, did dis-believing. So stop all your pro-ing and con-ing (that's the Buddha's advice) and get on with the job."

"Which job?"

"Everybody's job - enlightenment. Which means, here and now, the preliminary job of practicing all the yogas of increased awareness."

"But I don't want to be more aware," said Will. "I want to be less aware. Less aware of horrors...less aware of hideous sights and loathsome smells - even some of the delicious smells...less aware of my fat income and other people's sub-human poverty. Less aware of my own excellent health in an ocean of malaria and hookworm, of my own safely sterilized sex fun in the ocean of starving babies...And here you go, asking me to be even more aware than I am already."

"I'm not asking anything," she said. "I'm merely passing on the advice of a succession of shrewd old birds, beginning with Gautama and ending with the Old Raja. Start by being fully aware of what you think you are. It'll help you to become aware of what you are in fact."

- Aldous Huxley, English writer and philosopher, from his novel, "Island."