Outside things come by your five physical senses.

Everything that you see: beauty, ugliness, perfection, imperfection,

all that you hear: harmony or discord,

everything you touch, taste or smell.

In short, all creation and fruit of this physical body.

 

Outside things

 

You can spend a lifetime on outside things, and often do.

Do I have the right amount of money? Do I deserve more?

How can I improve something, like how I look?

What do I need to be happy and fulfilled?

Why don’t I have more?

How can I get it?

What might be wrong with me? Whose fault is that?

How far back can I look?

 

On and on.

 

 

Who are you appeasing but the body?

 

Who but the body will benefit from more supply, more notoriety, more importance, more admiration, more superfluous comfort, and more diverting boondoggles?

Will you spend your life in service of this arrangement of cells?  Would you feed it and clothe it lovingly, slavishly, whispering all day long into its ear the siren song of its pride, successes, failures and fears?

Would you serve it completely?

Would you be its slave?

Would you be slave to the ego, which animates it?

 

 

If everything I see is shriveled and crumpled, so much less that its perfect potential, if I see faults and failings everywhere I look, maybe it is ME that is flawed? Something might be wrong with the apparatus, the mechanics, of what I see through. My instrument is flawed,

What if I am just a projector, through which a perfect light must be cast, but there is a big smudge in me, that prevents the light from being projected? How could I see the smudge?  How would I know?

 

 

Would you be the slave of ego?

 

This is the only question.