Excerpts from The Way of Failure: Winning Through Losing by Mariana Caplan

Mariana Caplan convincingly stresses investing in loss, eschewing the lies of fame and dismantling our projections. In this excerpt, she reveals that loss and failure can be great spiritual teachers.

"To invest in loss sounds like a very strange thing. To intentionally place valuable inner and outer resources on the table of failure with a promise of losing them, seems all but absurd. But it's not. When we appreciate the value of loss — that it can provide us with something that nothing else can — then we find ourselves doing strange things that yield equally surprising outcomes.

"The crucial point to understand is that loss and failure are already ours. We all are experiencing them a lot of the time and will continue to do so in greater and lesser degrees throughout our lifetimes. The only difference is whether we 'play' our losses or forfeit the game. If we forfeit, we have already lost; if we play, something else may happen.

"Paradoxically, we stand to 'gain' far more through our investments in loss than through our investments in winning. We stand to gain by the conscious placing of our intention upon the experience of the many losses, failures, lies and expectations that comprise the dream world of ego, thus allowing the falseness in our egoic lives to fall away, and reality itself to be revealed. Only our failure to understand the role of loss in our lives keeps us insistent upon trying to win!"

"The monks in the following teaching story have learned that happiness is not based on winning.

"A community of monks was meeting with a reporter who was interviewing them for a popular magazine. The reporter asked each of the monks, 'Are you happy with what you are doing?' The monks in turn answered in the style of, 'Sure I'm happy.' Or, 'It can be difficult, but it's rewarding.' Or, 'Sometimes.' Finally one of the monks told the reporter, 'What we are doing here has nothing to do with happiness. We are fulfilling the calling of our souls, and you could call that happiness or call it sorrow and it wouldn't make a difference in the world. The question is irrelevant.' "