The Skill of Defeat - Relinquishment of Defensiveness

 

If you don’t accept defeat,

 you continue to defend yourself.

It’s a losing battle.

 

The skill refers to the defeat of selfishness. It requires relinquishing defensiveness. There can be no edge or speck of “me” on the spiritual path.

Selfishness is when you are self-involved, self-seeking and self-serving. You want what you want. But don’t take what you want personally. Selfishness is a common and universal human condition. It’s nothing special and quite harmful.

In simple terms selfishness is an inner wish for things to go your way. This wish for things to go your way is sensed as more important than anything else. Much of your effort is put towards trying to get what you want.

It is believed to be the sole way to happiness, such a belief is a deception. It often arises as a thought and develops into a plan to go after whatever you think you want with little regard for anything else. This wish often leads to more harm than happiness.

And it is something you repeat over and over again.

Selfishness may be useful in the material world. It may serve your basic instincts for survival but it does little for those seeking spiritual awakening. It is a specious characteristic and is superficially attractive. It may serve you to attain things in the material world, but it covers what is really going on in that world. It also takes up a lot of your time.

It also fools many into a belief that the performance and the role are important and thus similar to the mistake between a snake and a rope. You mistake a deadly snake for a rope and you are harmed by it. If you live to see the mistake for what it is, consider yourself lucky. You have a chance to accept the defeat and let go of your defensiveness. But it requires skill.

Selfishness in truth has two goals, namely, survival and material happiness. Both goals endorse false beliefs about reality. This endorsement overrides the reality that you will not survive and material happiness is unreliable.

Although your own experience shows you that selfishness leads to endless struggle, you often ignore it. The endorsement of selfishness is based on a pervasive set of beliefs and conventions that maintain and sustain the deception.

The basic argument is “you can have your cake and eat it too.” This argument does not hold up in a realm where impermanence, struggle, and non-self are the laws of nature. If you look closely, you see that there is nothing to get because everything changes. But when you are self-involved, self-serving, and selfish you do not pay much heed to these laws and carry on as if there is no tomorrow.  You forget to remember that you must die.

The skill of defeat, on the other hand, is beneficial, useful, and a necessary skill for liberation. You remember you must die and realize that survival and material happiness are part of a passing show.  You do not defend the illusion of thinking you are a “somebody” who deserves what you want as an inalienable right. You see the danger and endless struggle in such a foolish idea.

But it takes a skillful eye and heart to be able to see through the tricks of your own experience of when you do not get what you think will bring happiness.  One of the clues is when happiness remains an unreachable gold ring you begin to feel the pain of pride and anger. It is the nature of selfishness to get puffed up and angry when things do not go according to plan.

There are many points of opportunity to practice this skill when unfortunate and adverse situations arise. But often you may try to make lemonade out of the soured experience rather than learn this skill. If you do not begin to accept defeat you probably further the false notions and attempt to re-invent selfishness in another form. In other words, you try something new with the same dense view of getting what you want. The result is not surprising. It leads to more anger and pride and selfishness continues. Your friends may do you a disservice when they see your situation and attempt to console you to try again because they too believe you deserve to get what you want.

It is quite rare for someone to encourage you to surrender.

You listen to foolish advice because you continue to believe getting what you want is the path to happiness.

Ultimately, selfishness is based on two spiritually pernicious ideas: anything is possible and get-it-while-you-can. The first is to remember you must die which is an irrefutable truth that ends your idea that anything is possible. You are limited. Your body is limited, your senses are limited and your mind is limited.

Death, however, may be misused in the second false idea. The second idea is more dangerous since it rests on the concept that everything dissolves and disappears which is true but it may lead you to think you better get-whatever-you-can as quickly as possible. It is the “go for the gusto” path of happiness and appears just about everywhere-- on billboards, TV, radio, the internet, and even on the back of public bathroom doors.

Your sense of urgency is rooted in reality, because you are going to die. If you fail to take into account the truth of the nature of your experience of suffering and the sense of knowing the truth that you are not what you think you are, you may find yourself spinning in material attempts that deliver endless intermittent disappointment. After all you want what you want and you believe you have an undeniable right to try to get what you want. You believe in fairness, but you want your share.

Struggle is inevitable in life although often overcompensated, overlooked, palliated and remedied via various addictive behaviors. Selfishness tends to thrive on the attempts against struggle especially when addictive behaviors are part of the compensatory pattern to ameliorate the inevitable pain. As with most addiction, addiction triumphs and selfish behaviors escalate. The addict gives way to the addictive substance and selfishness increases. Look at your own experience.

The second true law of the non-material self is more difficult to see because of the human tendency to identify with the object of experience. When you identify as somebody you feel solid. As long as you attain a modicum of success as a “so and so” you ward off misery but as you may know the nature of everything is to change so this material success is short-lived.

It’s an odd tendency but quite strong. You see something in the world and believe it is who you are or it is who you become or wish to become. This seeing, believing and wish to become is part of the human condition and leads to attempts at making things happen and ends in more of the same. With a longer lifespan and better health the repetition of becoming somebody is more likely.

The direction of this pattern is towards material gain whether it is a person, place or thing. Unfortunately this pattern inevitably leads to suffering because when you identify with unreliable objects you are certain to be hurt. It is the old idiom “walking on thin ice” which is a reckless and foolish activity.

There are several unreliable objects that confuse you. The body is not reliable it grows sick, old and dies, the intellect fails and thoughts come and go and are not things to count on, energy ebbs and flows and it too cannot be relied upon, senses fall apart and desires rise and fall.

The skill of defeat is a beneficial spiritual option. Without this skill a selfish mistake is made over and over again and requires strong medicine to recover.

When you are able to see that selfishness is not the ticket to happiness that it is purported to be and that it never will be you begin to develop the skill of defeat.

You see self-centeredness in all its myriad forms as the path of torment. And you are able to use the skill of defeat to stop mistaking the snake for a rope. You let go of the notion that it is an unquestioned right to go after and get what you want even in the spiritual realm. Surrender is the door. You need to surrender the self-centered know it all or know a little and sit down in “don’t know.” It’s a requirement. There is no way to figure out liberation. It requires much, much more effort and commitment.