Interlude 2: A game with unknown rules

I was feeling incredibly lazy this morning, and as I lingered in bed, I convinced myself not to go to our first practice this morning. After feebly attempting to convince myself not to go to the second practice, I got up and went. I'm very glad I did, because I feel like I learned a lot, and while I could attempt an exhaustive enumeration of what I experienced, I think I'll just concentrate on a realization I had during one of the meditations. During the ceremony there is a section where we visualize the Buddha first removing our gross obstacles and obscurations, and then secondly our subtle negativities, obstacles and obscurations, and then finally pouring into us the noble qualities of a Buddha. It was at this last stage that I had a thought, which was not conceptualized so much into words, but which can roughly be explained as follows. Namely, life is like a game in which most people are unaware of the rules for success. Indeed most people think they know what the rules are, and there are many loud voices both literal and metaphorical which incorrrectly tell us what the rules are. However, what you actually must do to succeed in this life is right there under our nose but most of us simply can't see it.

This is tied into an idea that I heard from one of the "anonymous"s reading this site, where before birth spirits choose which bodies to be reborn into. They have a clear understanding of the nature of reality when they are spirits, but once they inhabit the human realm, their sight and understanding becomes distorted and obscured, to the point, I would add, that they lose sight of the goals they hoped to accomplish when they entered the human realm.