Ken, take a bit of advice from Deepak Chopra. Read it slowly and try not to be so quick to dismiss it, maybe, just maybe it will make a difference (and that goes for everyone out there). This will probably get deleted pretty fast but it might help somebody...
"If you take a moment to think about it, you can easily see the pattern of gain and loss that runs throughout your own life. While they are occurring, losses seem painful, and the ego inevitably reacts to loss by wanting to hold on. Yet moving from childhood to an adolescence is a loss from one perspective and a gain from another; getting married represents the loss of single life and the gain of a partner. Gain and loss are two faces of the same thing. The only thing in life that brings absolute gain is the gain of awareness, which is what the quest is all about. Does it ever occur to you that you can't lose anything, Because you never had it in the first place? The only thing you've ever really had is yourself. This self may spend some time in a house or a job, but in time all that will change. Then all you have is a memory, an image, a concept. These aren't real; they are figments of the mind. Thoughts are like guests; they check in and out, while you are still there. Regard objects and possessions the same way. They come and they go. What remains is yourself. Life is full of adversity, small or large. The ego has taken on the burden of guarding your life. It defends you from loss and disaster and fends off the concept of death for as long as it can. But the wizard welcomes any adversity, any loss, for the following reasons, which you can apply to your own life: everything in creation is made of energy. AFter it is created, any given energy form must maintain itself for a certain time. AFter a period of stability, the life force wants to bring something new onto the stage. In order to do that, old, outworn patterns must be dissolved. This dissolution takes place in the name of life, for there is nothing but life all around us. However, the ego gets attached to certain energy forms that it doesn't want to see dissolved. A lump of money, a house, a relationship -- in their own way all of these energy forms that we try to protect against the flow of time. In truth, such struggles are not necessary. You can't struggle to make an embryo evolve into a baby -- it just happens, following its own rhythms. You can't fight to make a rose bloom. Your ego easily accepts these facts, but not about money, houses, jobs, and other things it gets attached to. The ego's struggle is a form of opposition to life, because it seeks to impose artificial life. Nature takes things away for its own good reasons at its own good time. Likewise, whenever you sense the need to control and struggle to keep people, money, or things attached to you when they move away, you are opposing the universal force that keeps everything in balance. You will have to acquire trust before you surrender your control. When you can begin to see the seeds of opportunity in the ashes of disaster, then trust is beginning to grow. This trust comes in stages. First, start to see that the ego's judgments about loss are false. Second, look for the other face of disaster or loss, the tiny seed of the new that wants to be born. Third, replace blame and complaining with a calm, sure knowledge that you are protected in nature's plan-- whatever you have lost is temporary and unreal. It was bound to go, not because nature is cruel and indifferent but because every step you take toward the real is precious. In this light you will begin to see that loss and gain are just a mask. Underneath is the steady light of the eternal, which shines through everything, weaving unity out of chaos..."
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