Our Real Home, excerpt

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As soon as we are born, we are dead.
Our birth and death are just one thing. 

It is like a tree: when there is a root there must be twigs. When there are twigs, there must be a root. You cannot have one without the other. 

It is a little funny to see how at a death people are so grief-stricken and distracted, tearful and sad, and at a birth how happy and delighted. It is delusion; nobody has ever looked at this clearly. 

I think if you really want to cry, then it would be better to do so when someone’s born. For actually birth is death, death is birth, the root is the twig, and the twig is the root. If you’ve got to cry, cry at the root, cry at the birth.

Look closely: if there were no birth there would be no death.
Can you understand this?

–Ajahn Chah

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