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

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..