Gain and Loss
Death is an ultimate event, but before it happens there are many minor losses along the way. If you take a moment to think about it, you can easily see the pattern of gain and loss that runs throughout your own life. While they are occurring, losses seem painful, and the ego inevitably reacts to loss by wanting to hold on.
Yet moving from childhood to adolescence is a loss from one perspective and a gain from another; getting married represents the loss of single life and the gain of a partner. Gain and loss are two faces of the same thing.
You canʼt lose anything, because you never had it in the first place. The only thing youʼve ever really had is yourself. Thoughts are like quests: They check in and out, while you are still there. Regard objects and possessions in the same way. They come and they go. What remains is yourself.
Life is full of adversity, small or large. It defends you from loss and disaster and fends off the concept of death for as long as it can. But everything in creation is made of energy. After it is created, any given energy form must maintain itself for a certain time. After a period of stability, the life force wants to bring something new onto the stage. In order to do that, old, outworn patterns must be dissolved.
Adapted from The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 1995). |
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