because a desire satisfied is but the seed from which springs the desire
to find like satisfaction again. The appetite comes in eating, as the
proverb says, and grows by what it feeds on. And the psychic self,
torn with conflicting desires, is ever the house divided against itself,
which must surely fall.

16. This pain is to be warded off, before it has come.

In other words, we cannot cure the pains of life by laying on them any
balm. We must cut the root, absorption in the psychical self. So it is
said, there is no cure for the misery of longing, but to fix the heart
upon the eternal.

17. The cause of what is to be warded off, is the absorption of the
Seer in things seen.

Here again we have the fundamental idea of the Sankhya, which is the
intellectual counterpart of the Yoga system. The cause of what is to
be warded off, the root of misery, is the absorption of consciousness
in the psychical man and the things which beguile the psychical man.
The cure is liberation.

18. Things seen have as their property manifestation, action, inertia.
They form the basis of the elements and the sense-powers. They make
for experience and for liberation.

Here is a whole philosophy of life. Things seen, the total of the
phenomena], possess as their property, manifestation, action, inertia:
the qualities of force and matter in combination. These, in their
grosser form, make the material world; in their finer, more subjective