Sometimes you attribute world success to you, and sometimes you attribute world success to your lucky stars.

World success is not always fortunate, beloveds. It may increase your dependence upon ego.

I am going to tell you something that you don’t like to hear. You didn’t like hearing it before. Or maybe you will hear it for the first time. Here it is:

Regardless of what goes on in the world, when you are agog at yourself, your prowess, your success, when you are taken with it, no matter how justified, ego is doing its number on you. By the same token, when you are peeved, upset, envious or disgruntled in any of its forms, ego is doing its number on you. When you have overblown feelings about yourself, or negative feels about another, your ego is having its day with you. It is not fun, yet you keep listening to ego as it whispers in your ear.

Without ego, there is no occasion for you to dispute life. Fear too often comes from ego. There is an awful lot that comes from ego. Much of life has been confined to ego.

You think you are justified. As an example, when your true love decides she doesn’t love you any longer, suddenly you don’t love her so much either. You find grievous fault. From your emotions, she has no right to stop loving you. From your view, she is wrong to leave you. Maybe she is, yet how do you know? What you know is that you don’t like it. Yet, no matter how much she loved you once, she has every right to live her life as she lives it at any given time no matter what you think of it and whatever she thinks of it. Ego punctures your heart and tells you she has no right and that you are an injured party. Where did your love go? It flew the coop. Your long proclaimed love in your heart did not stay either. The love in your heart may have turned, and, so, duplicitous ego has a wonderful time tearing you apart from your true self.

Did your love become your possession? Love was never meant to be owned. Ownership is like imprisonment. What would imprison another but ego?

It’s possible that the love you thought you had in your heart was ego more than love in the first place. The thing with love, even misplaced love, gives you an inkling of what love can be.

No matter how ego-driven you have been when it comes to love, even those samples of love are leading you to greater love and to surer knowledge of what love is. You may be learning what love is not.

When you felt unloved, you took your love away. You copied the one who left you. You were unable to go down a different road and keep your love. The love in your heart fell by the wayside.

By and large, who on Earth knows what love is, and knows what to make of it. Cupid may shoot his arrow without aiming, and hearts are in disarray wherever they fall.

No other person makes a fool of you. Ego makes a fool of you. The ego that you shelter and cooperate with brandishes its sword.

A word like jilted belongs to ego. Are you looking at your life with your own eyes or with the eyes of the world? Are you caring more about what the world will say more than you are caring about moving life forward harmoniously? I say you can be gracious. Life is not always about you. Look at life that way.