I always have fun with opposites when writing because it confirms the dualistic thinking of our mind. Our society is all about gain. We must gain a stable income, that new promotion, or the luxury item that’s popular today. Gain is so prominent in my job because I’ve only been asked for growth. If there’s a decrease in anything, I’m doing a bad job. It’s almost to the point that loss should exist. However, if it’s possible to gain something, it’s also possible to lose something. Any idea that this can’t be true formulates this vice we like to call greed. We don’t think we’re greedy, but we are when we believe that there’s no possibility of loss. If we think there’s no possibility of loss in a society that believes in gain, aren’t we all just delusional?

The Illusion of Ownership

I’ll do you one better. Why would we want to gain something that can easily be lost? If you had a relationship today and didn’t have one tomorrow, did you ever have a relationship? If you were rich today and lost it all in bankruptcy, were you ever rich? Sure, maybe in your memories, but what good do those memories do, though, when all they do is bring about grief of what used to be? So again I ask, why do we care so much about gaining something that can easily be lost? There seems to be this illusion of ownership. We think we have things, but do we truly if at some point we can no longer have them? Do you truly own your body if at some point you won’t have it, and you don’t know when that point will be?

No Yours, Mine, or Ours

Loss feels real because we believe we own something for a limited time. We feel grief because we feel like we’ve lost something that was never ours to begin with. We go to funerals because we lost our significant other, but the idea of “our” itself is an illusion. Our significant other was never placed in this world to be permanent. Ours was never ours, even if they were alive, and we decided to split. At some point, the relationship will end. The idea we have about marriage seems naive in this regard.

We feel loss because we believe we own time, outcomes, and even people. When they no longer align with our sense of ownership, we interpret it as deprivation. The idea that we possess permanence has always been an illusion, so the idea of losing it is an illusion as well. What appears as loss is only a reminder that we never owned anything to begin with.

Even in Loss, Perfection is Still There

Loss has nothing to do with perfection because anything that we can lose was never real. If anything, loss should be a reminder to focus on what is rather than the impermanent states that we live in. If wholeness includes all things, then the absence of things is also included. The things that subtract from us probably make us more perfect than the things we gain. Yet, that is not what we are taught. Perfection doesn’t magically go away because we lose someone or something. Its wholeness holds both gain and loss as equally important and equally unimportant. The issue is that we’ve decided that gain is more important than loss. This hierarchy only feeds our suffering.

The idea that perfection is gone through these moments only feeds the illusion. We’ve already discussed that negative situations don’t deny perfection, but only provide obstructions to seeing it. A cloudy day doesn’t mean that the sun isn’t shining. We can’t see it. It’s the same way that grief, depression, or disappointment blocks our view. Even though there are clouds that come into our lives, the underlying reality remains the same. The problem isn’t that we’ve lost something. It’s the belief that the thing we’ve lost was essential and something like our inherent perfection has disappeared with it. We’ve essentially come to a point where our value is placed on what we’ve gained, whether that is knowledge, status, money, or prestige. When we lose these things, we also believe that we’ve lost the perfection that comes with it. The good news is that our perfection is impossible to lose.

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