16. The misery which is not yet come is to be avoided.

Some Karma we have worked out already, some we are working out now in the present, and some are waiting to bear fruit in the future. The first kind is past and gone. The second we will have to work out, and it is only that which is waiting to bear fruit in the future that we can conquer and control, towards which end all our forces should be directed. This is what Patanjali means when he says that Samskaras are to be controlled by resolving them into their causal state

Patanjali’s Yoga Aphorisms, Chapter II – Concentration: Its Practice (in Swami Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga)

Hermetic quote Patanjali's Yoga Aphorisms misery not yet come to be avoided

Consider also:

  1. “I don’t want to be high any more or again, and this sends me into a spiral of misery, life seems completely empty if this magic world is too painful for me. I want to die and I have infinite terror of the pain of every form of death. I see emptiness and hopelessness everywhere.”
  2. “Grendel circled sounds of the harp prowled the marshes moors and ice-streams forests and fens. He found his home with misshapen monsters in misery and greed.”
  3. “This neither-neither I, shall transvalue ennui, fear, and all diseases to my wish. Dead is my misery in suffering! How could it exist in my Zodiac, unwilled?”
  4. “The pain-bearing obstructions are — ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion and clinging to life.”
  5. “Listen, you! We expect nothing from you…we have burnt our hope as far as you are concerned…we want to speak to the ones who are prepared to stop eating their food. Misery is your food… scum-filth party politics is your food…when will you look down and see what is on the end of your fork – the naked lunch? We give up, you little people, your tenacity, your insistence on little wretched miseries amazes us. Stop reading this now. Because it is highly unlikely that you are one of those able to understand us.”