Lesson Four: Ego's Game of Suffering

All conditioned things are impermanent-when one sees this with wisdom,one turns away from suffering.
The Buddha (Dhammapada 277)

A very, very sad and desperate thing occurred in my community yesterday.  My daughter came home in tears.  I held her in my arms and we both cried, knowing we were unable to do anything but experience the sadness, the fear and the intense sympathy for those who were suffering. 

The Game

Every now and again we are made aware of just how precious and fragile our physical lives are, how quickly and desperately the last breath can be taken or taken away. Even more fragile than our bodies are the perceptions and illusions we have about life and self. We get  attached to those illusions for whatever reason. Like the roll of the die they can bring us temporarily up or temporarily down, "elated by fortune or depressed by bad luck" but never to the true Source of peace. Too often they bring us suffering   generated by the fear of losing and we occasionally see the desperate consequence of it.

When that happens in a community, we are shaken to the core.  "Oh man"...we say, "What are we playing and why?" We then may realize we invested too much into playing something that is not real  at the expense of the player. Maybe as a whole we need to put down our chips, our markers, and our  our dice.  Maybe we need to examine  our need for the thrill of competing and bluffing our ways from one move to the next in hope that we will win while someone else loses. Maybe we need to see that it is just a game that we are playing, a game we do not have to play. Maybe we will someday see that the game will never bring what we truly need which is peace of mind.

Choosing Peace over suffering; Love over Ego

This peace is already in us but so many of us cannot see it because we and the rest of the world are "too busy" playing ego games. We are too busy listening to ego, guided by ego, "in love" with ego. We are too busy creating reasons about why we cannot be at peace at ego's direction. It is ego's intention that we play and lose. It will make promises; it will lure us in by allowing us to win a few hands but it will not sustain us. We will lose by the rules laid out on the board by ego.. So why are we playing?

Life is not a game.  Life is a precious and sacred experience divinely guided, and orchestrated by Love. We will only recognize that though if we stop playing a game we will never win and begin living something we cannot lose.

Going off on a tangent, aren't I?  This will be the first part of Lesson Four which is  about understanding what the ego is and what it does to keep us from peace. 

All is well in my world.