Buddhism and Hormones.

The Duke of Marlborough effect is the observed rapid increase in testosterone in successful males and the comparable decrease in failed males. One study was done on contestants in an tennis championship. Good nights for the partners of winners, and nothing for the partners of losers.

However success and failure do not really exist! because we can chose whether to enter the contest and therefore whether we will judge ourselves a winner or a loser!

If we win or lose it is because we chose to accept the rules!

Contrary to the vapid belief or libertarian democracies however choice is not something we have that much choice over! Does a man chose his own desires?

This is the process of Karma. It is karma that builds the world in which we exist and builds the propensity to enter certain contests.

Some are involved in the contest for money. Some for love. Some for power. Some for possessions. Some for learning. Some even for spiritual awareness!!

One person may consider themselves a winner because they have the car they wanted. While others who do not have that car feel no sense of loss because they never wanted it! It is because of the rules we have chosen to judge ourselves by, the desires that we have, the things we want.
So it is the most obvious thing about the latest struggle that I chose "my muse". It was the most important decision, indeed the only decision I have ever made. I threw myself into that game with total abandon. But once having entered I spent the rest of my time trying to escape the rules because I knew I was trapped and bound into her decisions and I didn't want to be anything but a free and loving creature for her. I was afraid to show her how powerless i was and how much I had lost my own sense of determination. With good reason I feel, because it is never an attractive sight to see someone without self determination.

So it is apparent that we form our own success and failure and our own joy and unhappiness simply through the decisions that we make, and the desires that we manifest.

Karma cannot be switched off. We have desires! life is the process of accepting these desires, chosing them and fulfilling them. However we must aim for that awareness whereby we understand that success and failure is entirely created through this personal view we have, and that there is no such real thing as success and failure.

Its an odd irony then to enbrace life, while at the same time understand on a different level that it isn't real!

So I begin again! adandoning the dead rules that have governed my life. My desire for her acceptance, the desire not to have thoughts of hatred, my desire to not be socially inadequate and realise that the failures which these things then constitute are not real. Go through these failures, not hide from them, not hide from anything, and seek new horizons and new appropraite temporary rules for new places.