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LOVE IS A GAME YOU PLAY TO LOSE

by David Truman

Love is one game you don't play to win -- you play it to lose, with all your heart. You play it to lose your heart, your place, your pride, your center -- everything. You play to make sure the other person wins with every hand. That's the difference between love and everything else.

And you don't play the game of love to look good. God's Way is for the losers, not the winners. While almost everyone is fighting for survival, trying to save face, and trying to win, God's collecting all the losers.

"Winners" and would-be winners are lost. They want to look good and come out on top, so they fight to survive, and they live for themselves. That's the way most people go, religiously. They're doing what the ego has in mind, in direct opposition to the Way of Truth and Love. Don't do it! Following ego's way will only put you in a prison of smallness and guilt.

In God's Way, love and surrender make sense, nothing else. God's Way is the way in which weakness makes you strong. It is the way in which the last shall be first, he who loses himself shall find himself, and he who dies to himself is born again in the Spirit. Because, friends . . .

The only way to win is to lose

Only by humbling yourself can you be exalted

Only by being the lowliest servant can you be great

Only by losing your mind can you have peace of mind

The moment of losing face is the most dignified moment in a human life

Heartbreak makes you whole, and tears strengthen

Humility dignifies

Self-denial produces spiritual wealth

Nothing but love makes sense.

And of course, one mustn't make anything grand out of this. Do that, and you've lost the Way entirely. Instead, find infinite little ways to live rightly (ways in which the left hand doesn't know what the right hand does). Almost never has spiritual life had anything to do with obvious heroism. Heroism is for earthly winners; the Kingdom of Heaven is for earthly losers.

The only happy ending is the ending of your ego, the ending of false pride. The only real victory is victory over the desire to win.

Friends, you know what's good for you: your undoing! So seek your undoing, and celebrate it. As the American Indian warrior, Crazy Horse, used to say: "It's a good day to die!"