What's the Score?

One of the rule dogmas of Buddhism is the philosophy of non-attachment. What this states us is that it is not wise to go too deeply involved with something, or attached to it so that you experience that you can't dwell without it. Whether it is a thing, or a individual or a instruction or whatever. To go so attached impedes our advancement along the way. If you see this instruction carefully, the truth of it soon goes obvious. What is not so obvious however is that it is possible to be negatively attached to something as well. This agency to detest something with the same effectiveness that you love something else. Although this looks to be opposite to attachment, it's disadvantageous consequence on our preparation is the same. Both states of head impede our progress.

I personally have got to acknowledge that I endure from this state of negative fond respect with regard to nearly all sorts of sport. The 1 I loathe most of all is English Language football. As a practicing Buddhist, I cognize that it is not good for my ain development to experience so strongly about something. It intends that my head is not in balance, not in harmoniousness if you like, and I have got spent a great trade of clip thought about why I experience this way. The decision that I have got reached is that it is because all sort of athletics bring forths the spirit of competition. This is more than evident in football game than other athletics because it is obvious from the manner that the fans travel brainsick when their side tons a goal, that their sense of fight is very strong. It even slops over into the streets when the mindless game is finished and competing groupings of fans face each other, looking for a fighting and thereby costing the taxpayer money to keep a police force presence to command them. Though it isn't quite as obvious with other sports, in the sense that you don't usually acquire cricket or rugby football fans kicking Hell out of each other, the sense of competition is still there.

There is no uncertainty about it; being competitively minded is not good for Negro spiritual progress. To experience competitory agency that you experience that there is person or something to vie with. That you are different from me and you desire to asseverate that difference and show that you are better in some manner than I am. Your sense of egotism may experience threatened or in another manner subdued when it rans into my sense of ego, and it doesn't like that feeling, and so it offers a challenge, which may be in the word form of a competitory sport, or perhaps a simple argumentative confrontation. Whatever challenge is offered, it is just your sense of egotism that is doing the challenging. It is not you. You are not your ego; in fact there is no such as thing in world as ego. However, for something that doesn't exist, it certainly do a batch of problem in your life.

If you truly desire to come on along the Negro spiritual path, (and every sharp individual would desire to), then you must fling this false impression of a separate, individual self, lose your spirit of competition, and endeavor to assist other life beingnesses instead of competing with them. There is no demand to asseverate your high quality over another being, whether it is human or other animate being form, because you are not superior, nor is he superior to you. All are equal, all are one, and nil else exists. In order to do this a world for you, it is necessary to acquire quit of that spirit of competition that you have got prized so highly. The sense that your football game squad is better than another team. That mindless egotism that brands you shout and cheer when some grossly overpaid participant pulls off to impel that cockamamie bag of air made from some mediocre cows' hide, into a flight that consequences in it going in a way that tons a "goal." So what?

As long as the competitory spirit endures, the sense of individualised egotism will continue. There will thus be rich and poor, warfare dearth and pestilence. Until we realise that this was not the manner that the Eternal, (God if you prefer), intended us to live, we shall not have got peace of head or peace in the world.