Winning or Losing

Netherlands had a football philosopher: Johan Cruijff, in my opinion, the world’s most innovative football player of all time with incredible technique. I grew up just a few hundred meters from Cruijff’s house. Sometimes, he said things that few people could follow, but in which others, including myself, heard deeper football wisdom. I have never been able to catch Cruijff saying something nonsensical. Some of his statements have become legendary, and everyone now uses them.

A strong statement (about the Italian football system) from him is: “They cannot beat you, but you can lose to them.” This seemed like a nonsensical statement to many, but once understood, it becomes crystal clear. Because, as Cruijff sees it, it’s about the fact that as a team, in the heat of the battle, you abandon your own superior setup, tactics, and strategy of total football by letting yourself be ‘tricked’ by the opponent, who plays purely (in tough defense) ‘catenaccio’.
Intimidation, for example through rough play, or quickly falling behind (resulting in team confusion), can lead to losing when it is entirely unnecessary if the pre-agreed tactical/strategic and technical skills are adhered to.

Cruijff’s statement “they cannot beat you, but you can lose to them” now takes on a spiritual approach. We can ‘lose’ in situations we find ourselves in because we do not keep the agreements we made with ourselves, and because we are ‘tricked.’ And because we do not keep those agreements with ourselves, this can jeopardize the preservation of our integrity. Loss of integrity, and from here, loss of steadfastness and ‘inner power,’ means that we are effectively losing to ourselves in those situations and do not realize it, and so it seems like we are losing to the other, exactly as Cruijff meant in football.

Think what you Know, say what you think, do what you say, and know what you do

In short, as a spiritually oriented person focused on truth and self-realization, you cannot be ‘overcome’ by people who do not engage in this process (who are not interested or even think you are not entirely sane). You may have already noticed that in some cases, people start to look at you a little dazed or even sideways when you talk about the process of self-realization that you have embarked on. They may even turn away from you.

For living in truth, it is important to uncover and leave behind every lie within yourself, lovingly. A process of realizing yourself by never again not doing what you Know and forever letting go of what holds you back and to which you were sentenced by various conditionings. This arises from this new rule that we must keep in mind in our further life: “Think what you Know, say what you think, do what you say, and know what you do.”

• If we have gained true wisdom from experience, it is important to direct our thoughts toward that wisdom, so ‘think according to what you Know’. Often enough, we still think something else, thoughts stemming from previously acquired conditionings or from overwhelming emotions or from a low or superior self-image. Those things can persistently come up. The only thing we can ‘do’ in such a moment is to return to what we truly know with as quiet a mind as possible. And then we can ‘let go’ of automatically emerging emotional-mental (ego) turmoil.
• From here, we speak. We say what we think, based on what we truly Know. From acquired wisdom. So, we no longer speak from a conditioned and automatically arising thought pattern because our speech is now guided by what we truly Know.
• Then, it naturally follows that we do what we say and nothing else. We tend to do things automatically because we always did them that way. We are full of automatic actions and reactions. We should ask ourselves: is what I do in line with what I think and say? Am I really doing what I say, or am I deceiving (without realizing it) others? Words and actions that do not align can often be observed in other people. We can see when someone does something different from what they say, when they do not practice what they preach. However, it is more important to notice this in ourselves. When we do what we say, based on pure thinking, our action is in line with what we truly Know.
• If we do what we say, we will also have to know what we do. This means that we reflectively observe our actions because this observation is done by our Observer, who has a view of what we have truly learned to Knowthrough Buddhi (our highest discernment).

This is the integrity line that keeps you true to yourself, integrity, now, fearless, in whatever situation you find yourself in. You could say that in a way you are no longer ‘overcome,’ because you are no longer influenced by assumptions, projections, framing, and other psychological tools and tendencies that keep the human mind (psyche) unclear and divided. Tools that our ego itself uses, and that are used by others on you.

Opposition

At every step in this integrity line, we can expect opposition because we live in a dual world full of competition.

• The opposition regarding your thinking what you Know primarily comes from our own mechanistic nature, which often acts as a hindrance because it is driven by identifications of our ego stemming from our self-created and conditioned ‘story’.
• The opposition regarding saying what you think comes from the outside world. People are often not accustomed to you simply stating what you think because conventions prohibit it. Even if you politely and correctly express what you think (based on what you Know), it is often perceived as opposition (or even an attack) by individuals living from their ego stories, so you can expect resistance.
• When you then do what you say, you may again encounter opposition and resistance if your actions are not understood or do not align with what someone else wants.
• Knowing what you are doing, in addition to reflecting on your actions, also means understanding that your actions always have an impact on others (sometimes favorable, but often unfavorable), so you can expect resistance. This is quite normal because we live in a duality-driven world where few people have spiritual awareness. Therefore, we deal with individual or societal reactions rooted in personal conditioning or collective identifications. Especially socially-oriented machinations strongly interfere with acting with integrity and truth in this era.

Unfortunately, we often notice that this beautiful line safeguarding our integrity is not ‘sustainable.’ We want it to be, but it simply doesn’t ‘work’ most of the time. This is because we still frequently think contrary to the wisdom we have gained. We think ‘other’ things, usually out of habit, emotions, frustration (or vanity and pride), which wisdom tells us should no longer be our guiding thoughts. But yes… those thoughts just pop up again! Indeed, thoughts do this automatically because Manas is lightning-fast at presenting thoughts. So, we speak from those thoughts, things that we later realize were not spoken wisely. It’s likely that the actions we took based on those thoughts were not very wise either, meaning we didn’t really know what we were doing. We lacked self-reflection because knowing what you are doing can only happen in our self-reflective Now. In self-remembering, to be precise. We fell back into ‘wakeful sleep’ and thus it ‘happened’ to us.

But beware: in such a situation, our ‘inner police officer’ can seize the opportunity: the ego-self that likes to correct us and takes the place of the Observer. In us, the tendency may arise to present ourselves as better than we are, making us deceitful. By pretending to be more awake in the world than we are, or by justifying ourselves, a new detrimental piece of ego is born: the spiritual ‘do-gooder’. We’d better unmask that quickly and return to our integrity line, as challenging as it may be at times. And then, dismiss that ‘inner police officer’ because being self-reflectively awake is more than enough to keep us on the right track.

Because we weren’t truly awake, we couldn’t remain integral in line with the wisest life principles we have learned and embraced. We couldn’t access our highest discernment (Buddhi), our Gateway to inner wisdom, because Buddhi only works well in the awake self-reflective Now. We were not in that beautiful state of self-remembering, in which we simultaneously feel our own inner being and the situation we are in, and in which our internal and external perception integrate. We followed our habits in response to automatically arising reflexes and thoughts. That’s logical (as Cruijff would say) because our fledgling way of being wise in the world is not yet ‘engraved’ like a new ‘game system,’ and therefore, it is vulnerable to external triggers. You can compare it to young, vital plant sprouts that are still influenced by automatically arising impulses on the one hand, and on the other hand, are being attacked by harsh weather conditions or careless stepping. This is temporary because our plant will grow, become stronger, and eventually withstand any weather. People will even seek shelter under it. This simply takes some time and depends on how seriously we nurture our plant.

Losing is Human

So, “The sleeping person cannot defeat you, but you can (repeatedly) lose” is my more spiritual interpretation of Johan Cruijff’s statement. This is followed by his other saying, “If you can’t win, make sure you don’t lose.” In situations we find ourselves in, we can easily ‘lose’ by no longer playing our intended system, essentially losing to ourselves without realizing it. When we lose ourselves in old mechanisms and forget the wisdom that keeps us morally and ethically invincible, we also lose in the ‘outside world.’ However, thinking what we Know, saying what we think, acting in line with our words, and knowing what we are doing make it impossible for others to ‘win’ against us, in the sense that nothing will truly harm us. We remember that the Self cannot be harmed. We remember that the world is fundamentally one and always striving for harmony and symphony, no matter how much opposition we face. We swim with integrity and fearlessness over the waves of all existence turmoil. In a way, we learn to ‘walk on water,’ which is the true meaning of this biblical analogy.

“But eh… can’t someone still beat me up?” you might think. Indeed, they can… and you might possibly die (as that temporary human manifestation of the Self), but hopefully, you will do so in inner unity, fearlessness, and truth, and not in the fear and despair of an illusory separation from the Self. In the Bhagavad Gita, Death says, “Only those who believe in me, I kill over and over again.” Only in ignorance of all this do we repeatedly lose and die a thousand deaths.

© Michiel Koperdraat