Do you win for losing, or is there any winning or losing at all?

by Vic Shayne
author
Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience

There are perhaps three ways to look at this business of winning and losing, and learning a lesson, or snatching victory from defeat. First is from the vantage point of a player playing the game of life. Second is from the vantage point of consciousness in which the game is played. And third is from the perspective of the silent stillness that permeates everything and out of which everything springs into beingness.

I have to begin again with the egoic mind, or the sense of self, the one you call “me” or “I.” This is the person you take yourself to be, and it has been invented by the psychological conditioning of the mind to accept the idea that you are attached to and identified with the mind, body, losses and gains, achievements and failures, good and bad, memories, ideas, experiences, and so on. These became a part of the self by way of authority figures and secondhand information. This egoic self is how one sees him/herself, but prior to this there is only consciousness. And prior to consciousness is silent stillness that cannot be described or even experienced.

Consciousness is the totality of all that is — thoughts, memories, phenomena, ideas, beliefs, good and bad and all opposites and complements, movement, creation, destruction, and potentiality. The egoic mind fragments this totality into parts because it cannot apperceive life in any other way; it is divisive and conflicted.

From this egoic self comes perception, judgment, feelings, interests, desires, likes and dislikes, war and peace, harmony and chaos, and so on. It’s not that any of these are bad, but their existence is delusional, because the egoic self is self-important yet nonexistent, like a shadow or a thought. It changes, comes and goes, rises and falls, morphs, and flounders. It desires to be happy but does not know how to go about it. And it is never sated. As people living our lives we are in this play of life, with the egoic self in the lead role. Consciousness knows this, but we are too stuck in the character to pull out and see the whole show and what’s really going on.

Winning and losing is one movement
It is the egoic self that perceives winning and losing. Consciousness contains winning and losing as two possibilities within a vast and unfolding potentiality, but it is the mind that fragments winning from losing. And the mind makes judgments: winning is good and losing is bad. The judgments are made by a combination of biology and knowledge.

Winning and losing is the duality of the mind drawn from consciousness. It is the persistent example of pleasure and pain. The egoic self forever searches for pleasure and seeks to avoid pain. Winning is pleasurable, and losing is painful. On and on this goes, never ending, and always in a state of flux. Such is the belief of the self that makes these things seem real and important.

But if we look at this from the perspective of consciousness then we see one singular movement, like the rapids and stillness of a river — it’s just one river as a whole. It’s just an apparent movement of life, but if we were able to stay in the middle, between the banks of pain and pleasure, then we would want for nothing and find no desire for winning and no fear of losing.

Say ‘yes’ to it all
Joseph Campbell said, “What is good for one is evil for the other. And you play your part, not withdrawing from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but seeing that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder: a mysterium tremendum et fascinans… ‘All life is sorrowful’ is the first Buddhist saying, and so it is. It wouldn’t be life if there were not temporality involved, which is sorrow, loss, loss. You’ve got to say yes to life to see it as magnificent this way; for this is surely the way God intended it… I don’t believe there was anybody who intended it, but this is the way it is. James Joyce has a memorable line: ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’ And the way to awake from it is not to be afraid, and recognize that all of this, as it is, is a manifestation of the horrendous power that is of all creation. The ends of things are always painful. But pain is part of there being a world at all.”

The silent stillness ever remains
And lastly, there is the silent stillness that is within and behind everything. It is the stateless state from which consciousness issues forth. In this stillness it is apparent that nothing really ever happens. Life is like a movie projected onto a screen. When there is fire in the movie, the screen does not burn; and when there is a flood, the screen does not become wet. All is temporal and rises and falls in apparent existence. Winning and losing, as well as any other activity and action, merely appears to happen. But when it is gone, what remains is this silent stillness.