According to the Buddha's teaching the beginning of the life-stream of living beings is unthinkable. THe believer in the creation of life by God may be astonished at this reply. But if you were to ask him 'What is the beginning of God?' he would answer without hesitation 'God has no beginning', and he is not astonished at his own reply.
What we call life...is the combination of the Five Aggregates, a combination of physical and mental energies. These are constantly changing; they do not remain the same for two consecutive moments. Every moment they are born and they die. 'When the Aggregates arise, decay and die, O bhikkhu, every moment you are born, decay, and die.' This, even dow during this life time, every moment we are born and die, but we continue. If we can understand that in this life we can continue without a permanent, unchanging substance like Self or Soul, why can't we understand that those forces themselves can continue without a Self or a Soul behind them after the non-functioning of the body?
At birth and at dawn for each and every dayit triumphs over the eclipse.It is the very first thing that you see.Its power is blinding at first, anon it opens our eyes to the allure of the world.Each moment it breathes life into us,warms our souls and colors our skin.At gloaming it seems to wane,while it privily awaits a timeto give birth to a new circle of life.
Be kind. We never know what people are going through. Give grace and mercy because one day your circumstance could change and you may need it.
The reason as to why a human cannot give birth to himself is because he needs someone to help him. We are altricial, or helpless at birth, because we have to depend on others so that later in life when we are capable, we help those in need. And this is very much part of the circle of life.
Generally it appears the case that, when faced with all life's problems, the baby, he wants to cry about everything, the child wants to question everything, the teenager wants to rebel against everything, the young adult wants to solve everything, the middle-aged adult wants to protect everything, and the elder wants to accept everything.
One by one, they guessed aloud about what Lotto had meant by this sculpture: nautilus, fiddlehead, galaxy. Thread running off its spindle. Forces of nature, perfect in beauty, perfectly ephemeral, they guessed. He was too shy to say time. He’d woken with a dry tongue and the urge to make the abstract concrete, to build his new understanding: that this was the way that time was, a spiral.He loved the uselessness of all the effort, the ephemerality of the work. The ocean encroached, it licked their feet. It pushed around the outside wall of the spiral, fingering its way in. When the water had scooped the sand from the lifeguard's chair, revealing white like bone beneath, something broke, and the fragments spun into the future. This day would bend back and shine itself into everything.