3. The pain-bearing obstructions are — ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion and clinging to life.

These are the five pains, the fivefold tie that binds us down, of which ignorance is the cause and the other four its effects. It is the only cause of all our misery. What else can make us miserable? The nature of the Soul is eternal bliss. What can make it sorrowful except ignorance, hallucination, delusion? All pain of the Soul is simply delusion.

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

Hermetic quote Patanjali Yoga Aphorisms pain bearing obstructions ignorance egoism attachment aversion clinging to life

Consider also:

  1. “‘evil’ for the Buddhist is that which brings suffering in its train; and how the world we live in, and the destiny we bear,-its meed of pleasure and of pain,-is made in the greater part of the mental Doing we inherit; just as the world a man inhabits in his dreaming is component in the main of the thoughts and actions of his daily life.”
  2. “For I must pass Desolate into the dusk of things again, Having risen so far to fall to the abyss, Deeper for exaltation; I must go Wailing and naked into the inane Cavernous shrineless place of misery, Forgetful, hateful, impotent, except The last initiation seize my soul, And fling me into Isis’ very self, The immortal, mortal.”
  3. “The truth was, I didn’t know if I could do it. I didn’t know if I was as strong as Aunt Lillian. I found myself remembering one of those stories of hers, the one about folks crossing over, how they came back either poets or crazy, and I sure couldn’t rhyme more than the odd verse or two of doggerel.”
  4. A Rendezvous in Averoigne
  5. “Evil, and mischief, and misery, and confusion, and vanity, and vexation of spirit, and death, and disease, and assassination, and war, and poverty, and pestilence, and famine, and avarice, and selfishness, and rancour, and jealousy, and spleen, and malevolence, and the disappointments of philanthropy, and the faithlessness of friendship, and the crosses of love—all prove the accuracy of your views, and the truth of your system; and it is not impossible that the infernal interruption of this fall downstairs may throw a colour of evil on the whole of my future existence.”