Thoughts on the Abyss

In the black, there is but silence or so they would have you think. But what of those voices you hear, when staring into the abyss? Is it the abyss from where these voices come? Or is it from ourselves? Someone once said the when you stare into the abyss it stares into you, but i wonder if it isn't ourselves staring back out of the abyss. Why would some external force conspire to do what our hearts do so well? A core tenant of Buddhism is that pain arises from desire, but why remove the desire to erase pain, when desire a core component of the human condition. Then too would pain and suffering not be essential to the maintenance of ones soul? Is not pain the fire in which we temper our soul? And what of joy? The quench in which we soothe the fire. But unlike the lucky steel, the soul must be reforged, again and again. Like a moth to the flame, we pursue joy only to be laid low by our sorrows. 

How many I wonder, have been beaten by their sorrow, consumed, destroyed by it. What then, of those lucky enough to never know the true depths to which it will drag you. Oh they think they might, they may offer a hand in ignorance of your plight. With such speed that hand is revoked when they glimpse a mere portion of the darkness, those who do this have not known the true heart of sorrow. There are those who will still try to help of course, ignoring the truth as if it were some falsehood, some creative construct by a weakened mind. Then those "helping" hands begin to do the only thing they truly can, and you are strangled by them.