Everyday Being

We are not in control... and so what?

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Key messages

  • We don’t control our experience
  • Understanding our lack of control is liberating as we tune into the flow of life
  • We are a manifestation of universal mind that is the flow of life. Its nature is to create so that is our nature as well. We live as a creative expression of that universal intelligence  

    • Territory for this session

    What do we control?

    • Two things we could say are very personal and important to us:
    • Our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and state of mind. This is what creates our experience. We don’t control these elements
  • Our most intimate or important relationship in our life. Neither party is in control. 
  • So we don't control two of the most important things in our life 

    • Michael Singer, in his brilliant book Living Untethered:

    • The moment in front of you has absolutely nothing to do with you. Look to the left and right there is another moment in front of you
  • We bring personal preferences into impersonal moments and make them personal
  • 99.99999% of the universe has nothing to do with us, but somehow the 0.00001% does?
  • We actually bother ourselves about the moment in front of us

    • A sense of perspective:

    • The earth has been here for 4.5 billion years
  • We are here for an eighty year ride
  • There are nearly 8 billion people on the planet – can we all be in control?
  • Life rarely unfolds as we want it to
  • Resistance creates tension and anxiety
  • Only by accepting reality can we be within the flow of life 

    • Is there free will?

    • This has been a question that has vexed scientists and philosophers down the ages
  • This is certainly above our pay grades… However, we do express a point of view:
    • If we are not a separate self – how can you be in control
  • I don’t control my thoughts
  • I don’t control the thinking that says should I do this or that
  • American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.
    • Have you noticed how often something that you didn't want to happen turns out for the best in the end?
  • And you never know how the other option might have worked out anyway

    • The extent to which we are in control

    • Our intention?
  • Our understanding of the nature of our experience
  • You cannot separate what we know from our knowing awareness or presence
  • You cannot have a thought without a thinking
  • You cannot have an experience without I am..
    • ...more
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    Everyday BeingBy Gareth & Steve