If you walk into a sports stadium, no matter what sport they’re playing in the stadium, they all have one thing in common: they all have scoreboards. People keep score. Each game has certain rules and each game has certain ways to score, and the one who has the highest totals is usually the one who wins. And the nature of illusion is like that.
In the world of illusion people keep score, and not only do people look at other people and keep score as to them, we all have an inner score-keeper that keeps score as to us. We all have this internal system that sort of gauges, for ourselves, our score in the world of illusion. For instance: do we have enough titles? Do we have enough fame? What’s the level of our income? Are we judged as middle, or high, or upper-high or low?
We’re all in the process of judging and keeping score. What are the criteria for this score-keeping? Well, it depends on your culture. In some cultures the more pigs you have the higher your score is, in some cultures the more cows you have the higher your score is, in some cultures the more dollars you have the higher your score is. But then there are some people, who aren’t interested in possessions, they keep score in a different way: what are your academic credentials? How many titles do you have following your name? How many books have you written? How many discourses have you given? How many pamphlets have you published? And then, of course, there are those who consider certain things of no value and other things of great value, so they judge all the ones that they don’t consider valuable as less-than, and they consider what they consider valuable as more-than.
The great Hasidic sage, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov who wrote many stories and used to teach through stories, has this one amazing story about the different people in the world and how they classified each other. And it goes through classification, after classification, after classification – it’s comedic – and then there’s finally the classification of wealth. You were either a hill, or a mountain, or a moon, or a star depending on your level of wealth. Every year you were audited to make sure that you maintained that status in your existence.
How do we judge things? What are our criteria for judgment? Are we involved in judging? Do we pay obeisance to the world of praise and blame? When people tell us that we’re terrific are we happy, and when people tell us we’re not terrific are we sad? How is our emotional makeup controlled by how we’re judged by others? You know there are people who can’t go out in public because they’re afraid of being looked at and judged.
What are the rules for the game that we play? That’s a really important one: what are the rules for the game that we play and how do we keep score in the game that we play? If we don’t know the answer to that question then we have allowed ourselves to be subject to the whims of whatever is going on around us. We’ve allowed ourselves to be subject to…
