We've been around taking birth, dying, and then coming back and taking birth — again, and again, and again. When you think about this, it’s hard to have a tragic view of things. There’s more a sense of a lot of the suffering accomplishing nothing.

"You get an idea of the difference between the perspective that’s provided by thinking about the many times we’ve been reborn and the belief that we have only one birth. When there’s only one birth, we can get very worked up about things. Things are tragic, things are horrible, great injustices have been done. But from the Buddha’s point of view, a lot of those ideas and feelings come from the fact that we don’t see the whole story.

Think about it. He says there hasn’t been just one universe. There’ve been many universes, one after another. Scientists tell us how many billions of years the stars in our universe have been around, and we haven’t even gone through the whole cycle of this particular universe. And there’ve been many before us. As the Buddha said, those who can remember past lives back forty eons — in other words, forty universes — have a short memory. His memory extended far beyond that, to the point where he said that trying to find a beginning point for all this, even the whole idea of a beginning point, is inconceivable. Not just unknowable, inconceivable. And we’ve been around that long, which means we’re way older than the stars, even all those galaxies that the new telescope is getting pictures of.

We’ve been around doing this — taking birth, eating this, eating that, finding pleasure here, finding pleasure there, and then dying, and then coming back and taking birth — again, and again, and again. When you think about this, it’s hard to have a tragic view of things. There’s more a sense of a lot of the suffering accomplishing nothing. So the proper response is not a tragic view of the world. It’s more samvega, followed by dispassion: in other words, realizing that you simply don’t want to keep on continuing with all these cycles. They go nowhere. They go up and come down, up and down, around and around. People work really hard to develop good qualities of mind, and then they get rewarded. As they enjoy the rewards, the good qualities of the mind get worn away until they fall back down again.

The proper response is the desire to get out, and not to get worked up about the individual stories in the meantime: the particulars of our stories, like the story of a tragedy. With the story of an injustice, there has to be a beginning point and a very strong sense of an end point, when the injustice is taken care of. You finally arrive at justice. That’s the end point. In a tragedy, someone has great potential, but then it’s nipped in the bud, and that’s it. End. But in the Buddha’s view of universe, there are no beginnings, and no end except nibbana. So in cases of injustice, you can’t say who did what first, or whose response was appropriate or inappropriate to what the other person had done. Things just go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. As for tragedies, there’s no end to the story. You come back and try again.

It’s good to adopt this perspective because it makes it a lot easier to live in the world without a lot of nostalgia, without a lot of attachment. Most of the issues that seem so big when you take the view of just one lifetime become very small when you think about eons and eons of lifetimes."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Deep Time"