Why is it that we so love ... - Dhamma by Ajahn Jayasāro
Why is it that we so love the feeling of gaining things and making a profit? Why do we so hate the feeling of losing things or making a loss? Why is it that we can feel so much pleasure at trivial gains and suffer so badly over unimportant losses?
It is not the things that we gain or lose that is so important to us as what gain and loss signify. Deep inside us we believe that gain means life and loss means death. We feel a gain to be a step away from death, a loss a step closer. And because we crave life and fear death, we suffer
Through meditation we see how arising is always followed by passing away. Life and death are revealed as inseparable. The less we perceive ourselves to be the one to whom life and death occur the more free of them we become, the less obsessed with gain and loss.
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