I can feel craving and clinging rising with a staggering rapidity and intimidating persistence. Every moment my personal self is born anew as desire and attachment generate images and sensations based on a seemingly endless array of imagined and only quasi-real objects. And though the objective options seem infinite, this self has its favorites, habituated over time and effort until the patterns become so deeply etched that escape seems a futility. But if I, that is this little self, is truly born with every mind-moment, then so each birth by its nature offers a new chance to begin the slow but certain climb out of perdition through the practice of choice and responsibility, through awareness and candor, through truth and consequence. The truth is that quality trumps quantity every time. The truth is that even a moment of peace can ease a soul nearly drowned in chaos, a single taste of beauty can redeem one from a lifetime of pain and despair, just as a single candle's flame can dispel a field of viscous darkness. But whether light or darkness, beauty or pain, peace or conflict; all and everything is destined to pass; nothing escapes the truth of transience. And for a self depending on something out there that holds permanence and security, that is too painful a truth to bear. So it formulates lies as its foundation, or stories of you like, and when they threaten to fail it creates more, like a man plugging ever-increasing holes in the wall of a dam with his fingers. This is how the spinning begins- as a way to run from a truth intolerable by an illusion that insists it is real.