We keep coming back for more. The mind is looking for happiness, but it’s looking in the wrong place. It’s doing precisely the things that are going to cause more suffering.

"As the Buddha said, you would have a hard time meeting up with someone who hadn’t been your mother in some previous lifetime, or your father, or your sister, or your brother, or your son, or your daughter. You’ve had so many different relationships, and they’ve scattered out. You can come across a complete stranger and tell yourself, “Hey. This person was my mother sometime, but now you look how strange we are to one another.” You begin to decide that maybe these relationships are meaningless, aside from what good we can develop, and what good we can help one another develop. But even then, we have to part ways.

When we part ways, there’s a lot of sorrow. The tears you’ve shed over the loss of a mother, the Buddha said, are more than the water in the oceans. The tears you’ve shed over the loss of a father are more than the water of the oceans, and so on down with all those different relationships. Yet we keep coming back for more. The mind is looking for happiness, but it’s looking in the wrong place. It’s doing precisely the things that are going to cause more suffering."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Meaning & Becoming"

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