Inner Work

For the week of: November 18, 2002

Success and Failure

Our egoism and self-centeredness work in the subtlest fashion, employing an endlessly adaptable variety of approaches to maintain our illusion of separateness. One important source for this lies in our perceived failures and successes. When we fail, or feel that we have failed, egoism leads us to think of ourselves as failures, as incompetent, stupid, perhaps even as worthless. When we succeed, egoism leads us to inwardly preen, swell with pride, feel invincible, and consider ourselves to be better than others. In both scenarios we buy into allowing our self-worth and our own reality to be defined by events external to us, by the feedback we receive from the world.

Sorrow for and learning from our mistakes, as well as natural satisfaction in our accomplishments, need not strengthen our self-centeredness. But the great temptation of the poles of success and failure lies in ascribing them to our illusory self, to feel that it is I who have succeeded or failed, to praise or blame myself, and thereby perpetuate this false self.

Neither great success nor continuing failures can fundamentally change who I am. This is a hard lesson taught by experience. And since most of us never have the experience of what we define as great success, it remains an unattained goal, forever enticing us to look exclusively to externals for meaning and purpose.

In Sufism, the first stage of liberation occurs when one ceases to hope for or expect ultimate satisfaction through externals. We need not, however, shun the marketplace. On the contrary, like in the last of the Ten Oxherding pictures of Zen, we can enter life with vigor. But the results we do or do not achieve, do not define who we are.

For this week, notice your relationship to success and failure.

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