Levels of Control

Written on January 13, 2010 by Tom Stine

credit: extremeezine

Previously I’ve written about the lack of real control that we have in our lives (see No Control, No Control, No Control and Who Is in Control? and many others). To properly discuss control, however, requires a bit more to be said on the subject than I’ve said in the past. In this article I’m going to attempt to provide some clarity on a somewhat confusing topic.

I think control is confusing and also quite problematic for most people because of the essential issue confronting everyone (and by everyone I mean everyone, not just spiritual seekers). That essential issue is the answer to the question, “What are you?” That’s the key to the whole control question. If you are convinced that you are the little human body with a little human brain, then I think I can safely say that you have virtually no control over your life.

I say virtually no control because there is no doubt that the human mind has some sort of influence on how the body functions and moves through life, so there is a semblance of control. But even then, this influence is nothing more than that: influence. But control? Forget about it! The amount of control that the human mind has over the events, actions, decisions and details of a human life is laughable at best.

I know that many of you have watched The Secret. For that matter, you’ve grown up in a either a western or a westernized culture with it’s emphasis on self-determination, hard work, and “going for broke.” You’ve been taught over and over again that if you simple dig in and try harder, exercise your will, your inner strength, etc., you can make anything happen. But I’m sorry to tell you that every bit of that is a farce, a deception, a belief system that has no resemblance to actual experience.

First of all, you have no control over your thoughts. You can’t decide what you are going to think. If you will sit for even a moment and watch, your thoughts simply arise and then fade of their own accord. They are based upon your experience, your conditioning, the sum total of your life. Even better, notice how irrelevant they are 99% of the time to what you are experiencing right now.

At this moment, you are reading this article on control. If you pause, close your eyes, and watch your thoughts for a few minutes, notice what will come: the guy you met last weekend at a party, the bill that is due next week, the dog you saw running on the beach, the fact that it is 0 degrees outside (although it is toasty warm inside). But none of that is what is happening right here and right now. Thoughts arise, thoughts fade, and there really is no controlling what you are going to be thinking from moment to moment.

Secondly, let’s get real for a moment: even if you could control your thoughts, do you honestly think that your mind can manipulate external reality and cause new cars, new houses, new jobs and new women (and/or men) to enter your life? Just because you “held a thought” in your awareness for a few minutes each day? Now don’t misunderstand, I’m talking about “your mind”, that little hunk of energy that contains the thoughts specific to the body called Tom or Bob or Sue or Helen, the thoughts that are tied to the brain and nervous system of that body. Does that have control over new houses, new cars, etc.? Influence, sure, but control? Control? Real honest to God control? Okay, didn’t think so.

As an aside: I know that I’m not going to make a lot of spiritual and new-age people happy with the above. Oh, well. Someday I’ll write more about the effect of mind on experience. There certainly is some sort of process going on, something that sort of looks like the mind giving rise to our experience, something that seems like a “Law of Attraction” or something similar. But the key point above is this: that little bit of energy you call “my mind” isn’t the force driving your life and experience. My advice: give up trying to manipulate Life and to attract goodies into your experience. It isn’t going to work the way the Secret folks would have you believe.

Okay, so at the level of the seeming separate human being, governed by his thoughts and residing in a body with a brain and nervous system, there is no control over life. It is a fantasy at best. But, thank God for you and me, that little human body and brain has nothing to do with what you really are. What you are is none of that. The human body and brain are contained within what you are. That human body and brain are simply part of your experience in the manifest world.

So, what are you? You are Life itself. We use many fancy words in spirituality to attempt to describe what you are, words like Consciousness, Life, God, Awareness, Awakeness, The Now, Presence, Brahman, you name it. All just words attempting to get a grip on what it is that you are. But they point to something far larger, far more immense, and most assuredly more powerful than the mere human being you have come to think you are.

Let me bring back a diagram I used in a previous post:

What’s looking out of your eyes, what you really, truly are is the Void at the top of the diagram. You are the very source of awareness and consciousness, and as these you experience a Universe or maybe even many universes. All that you see, all that you hear, all that you taste and touch and smell, all this arises out of what you truly are. Everything in the manifest world, everything around you, is you!

So, from the only level that really matters, the level of Consciousness, of Life, it is quite pointless to discuss control. In a certain sense, you could say that you have complete and total control over everything. But that isn’t really the right way to phrase it, because that implies that there even is such a thing as control. Control is just an idea, a concept, that minds create. But in the reality of what you are, there is nothing to control.

Look at the dictionary definition of the word control:

Control: to exercise restraint or direction over; dominate; command.

The very word control implies manipulation, an attempt to change things so that they will be “better” in some sense. But look at the reality of life: everything, everything, everything is Life, is coming out of the unmanifest, the state of pure potential, spirit. It is all arising not by accident, not by some grand cosmic mistake. It is arising from the very substance of what life is. How can there be a mistake anywhere? How can there be a single, solitary thing that Life wants to change right now within its creation? Or to ask it another way, what would God want to change in His creation at this particular moment?

All is as it is. Right now. Perfect. Whole. Complete. Part of awakening is the recognition of this unalterable fact. The very idea of awakening would indicate that this recognition is so. You are awakening to what you are. You are coming into a full, complete understanding of what you are and everything else is. You see everyone and everything as this whole, full and complete.

And finally, I think that many people get the notion that somehow there will be some sort of perfected, absolute, ultimate blissful state at the end of the spiritual path, a state where nothing changes. Well, it may or may not end up being blissful, but it will certainly not be unchanging. While everything may be perfect right now, that doesn’t mean it won’t change into yet another form of perfection. Change is what makes us believe there is time, for change is always occurring. Always change.

There is a much better way to live life. I will write more about this topic later, but suffice it to say it involves that interesting word flow. Spiritual people are always paying lip service to the notion of “going with the flow,” but wanting to control is the exact opposite. There is a movement to life, a flow, and if you relax into it, cooperate with it, this flow can flower and blossom in your experience. It’s called miraculous for a very good reason!

So drop trying to control what you never could and never will control. You’ll be infinitely happier for doing so.

Miracles and the Law of Attraction

Written on June 9, 2008 by Tom Stine

credit: sara~

Leo over at Zen Habits wrote a post yesterday on the Law of Attraction, basically giving it a big thumbs down. Leo took a very interesting position: a very rational, western scientific perspective on accomplishing things in life.

My first response was to smile and laugh. I mean, for a site called Zen Habits, you would think there would be a little, well, Zen in his response. But no matter. I left a longish comment for him, kind of an off-the-cuff assortment of thoughts and ideas. Here it is:

“Very cool post. Interesting, too, coming as it does on a site called ZEN Habits. No, Zen doesn’t really have much to do with the Law of Attraction, so let’s not get sidetracked there. But let’s do consider that the ultimate foundation of Zen is Buddhism, and the Buddha had some pretty wild things to say about the world, our experience of it, it’s reality, etc.

“I won’t get into the details, but suffice it to say that if you delve into any school of Eastern thought, you will find ideas that are completely at odds with our typical, rationalistic world view. The world we look upon, so convinced of its utter reality, maybe isn’t as real as we think. So much that we believe in ultimately becomes so much ‘mumbo-jumbo.’ ”

“Look at the history of science itself. It is littered with the train wrecks of once ‘unassailable’ givens, things that were so incredibly obvious that you had to be a fool to question them.

credit: Mariano Kamp

“So, can I really think something into existence? Why not. Sure, I can’t prove I can, but then again, we can’t ‘prove’ much of science. That’s why scientists are usually pretty honest by calling things ‘theories’ and ‘hypotheses.’ Very few laws in science, but even those only rest on the simple fact that they’ve always occurred every time they are repeated.

“I guess my bottom line for you, Leo, is a simple question: do you believe in magic? Do you believe in miracles? Do you think that we really have a reasonable handle on what is true and what isn’t? While I’m not fan of the LOA and its devotees, I am a fan of miracles. I’m a fan of being incredibly surprised by the mystery of life that works in some really remarkable ways.

“Lastly, let me leave you with a fantastic statement by one of the most talented writers of the 20th century, Arthur C. Clarke:

“ ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’

“Think about it. Maybe we just haven’t worked out the technology of ‘magic.’ ”

And that was the end of my comment. Leo was really getting into the comments, so he responded quite quickly:

@Tom Stine, who wrote:

“I guess my bottom line for you, Leo, is a simple question: do you believe in magic? Do you believe in miracles? Do you think that we really have a reasonable handle on what is true and what isn’t?”‘

I certainly do believe in magic and miracles! It is almost impossible to be a parent, for example, and not believe in miracles. It’s hard to do a run at 5 a.m., and watch the sun turn a new day into a miracle, and not believe in magic. It’s hard to go through life, with your eyes and heart wide open, and not believe in magic and miracles.

However, I don’t think that means they are supernatural, meaning that they are outside the realm of science. I think science is just another way of looking at the same things. Is a child a miracle? Yes, I believe so … but a child can also be explained by science.

Is it a miracle when you overcome amazing odds, using the power of positive thinking, to achieve something incredible, as many people have? Absolutely! And yet, that doesn’t mean that science can’t explain it.

The problem comes, in my mind, when we take these miracles and come up with explanations for them that are totally unprovable, that have no real basis in reality, for no good reason, as is often done.

After reading Leo’s comments, I decided to post another comment in response. And I did. And guess what? Leo deleted it! I’ve never had the experience of being bounced before. How cool is that? I’m a radical fit for the delete key. I know the comment got left because a friend informed me that he read it via email (he was receiving follow-ups). Well, I saved the comment before I posted, so I have the comment in its entirety. You can judge how “evil” I was:

[Please note: after I posted this article, Leo wrote to say that he had not deleted my comment, but he couldn't find it, either. Obviously he had a technical snafu, not surprising, given the volume of comments he gets and inevitable glitches, etc. It was quite nice of him to leave a comment below. He's quite the stand-up guy, and I was a bit surprised that he would delete my comment in the first place. C'est la vie!]

“Leo, you made some good points. However, your reply left me thinking that you don’t really believe in miracles, the miraculous kind. You know, the person dying of cancer who does some spiritual ‘mumbo-jumbo’ for a few months and is completely healed, leaving her doctors stunned. The medical community calls it ’spontaneous remission’ but that’s a fancy word for ‘we have no idea what happened.’ That’s what the average person calls ‘a miracle.’

credit: Dom H UK

“As for me, give me water-into-wine, levitation (the Maharishi kind), spontaneous healing, blind men seeing, all the cool stuff you read about in Yogananda and other works. That’s my kind of miracle.

“Honestly, I don’t think that ’science’ is all it’s cracked up to be. Too many people have too much ‘faith’ in science. The scientific method has its limits. How do you study a phenomenon that might be beyond the mind, such as miracles? What do you use to study it? All science has at its disposal is the human mind. Miracles, the real kind, may be beyond the capabilities of science to explain.

“None of that means that they are supernatural or outside of reality in some way. I’m just questioning the capacity of the human mind to comprehend the totality of nature, the completeness of reality.

“Whether one wants to admit it or not, science is a belief system. The belief at the core goes something like ‘if we study something long enough using the ’scientific method’ then we will understand it.’ You can’t really prove that one wrong, can you? But it may in fact be wrong.

“And this is the type of thing that drives a decent number of physicists (you know, the quantum mechanics guys) to sound more Buddhist than a Buddhist.

“Again, the LOA may be right, may be wrong. But I suspect that most people, myself included, are more turned off by the salesmen for it and the Secret than anything else. They are a bit hard to swallow. And, for most people , the LOA just seems too hokie and simplistic to be believable. And it just might be wrong. And then again….

“Just some more thoughts for you Leo. Namaste.”

I invite you all to head over to Zen Habits and check out the post. It makes for fun reading. Well, actually, the best reading is in the comments. Some really good ones are there. A whole host of people showed-up to join in. Enjoy!