5:30 PM. The Soccer Game
• Halfway through the game, my son’s team is losing and no one is happy. Meanwhile, I’m thinking about this whole concept of competitive sports and how it fits in with emotional self-mastery. Should I be sending the heart virtues to anyone right now? What if I send valor to my son’s team, but not the opposing team? How can a person send courage to one team and withhold it from another? Where is the compassion in that? I decide that I should be neutral in terms of the current soccer game…. So, I decide to send both teams valor.
Although this soccer game is not a critical issue, it brings up some deeper issues such as, personal attachments, vested interests, conflicts of interest, and prejudice, to name a few.
Our practitioner is faced with a dilemma—should he send valor to his son’s team, so they have the strength to win the game? Ordinarily, this is not a problem. We see this every day in sports all over the world. There is nothing inherently wrong about wanting our team to win a game, but how can we send heart virtues to one team and not the other? If everyone is playing by the same rules, either team has the right to winning. Excuse the pun, but there has to be a level playing field when working with the virtues of the heart. In fact, we have to raise the level of the playing field while keeping it level. In the case of this soccer game, sending valor to both teams appears to be the right choice. Either send it to no one or send it to everyone, but don’t choose sides.
This example is a form of neutrality in the practice of when-which-how. When we recognize when to send the virtues, we cannot withhold the energy transfer because we judge the recipient to be unworthy. If this happens it means that we have slipped back into the sleep of the ego-personality and we are judging the situation, person, or group in terms of the duality of good and evil. The bottom line is that in our encounters with our fellow human beings it is best to be neutral in our distribution of the virtues.
