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Out of Control
Ego distorts our view of everything. The small-s self alternately views the world through the multi-faceted prism of desire and the many shaded dark glass of fear and repulsion. It wants certain things to be and others not to be. And it sets about to mold the world to its will. This appears to work to some extent. Here and there. Now and then. Enough so that it thinks: "If only I were better at this, then EVERYTHING would go my way." So it gets better at that--and sure enough, things on average do get better. (A little, at least.) Enough better, at any rate, to keep the body/mind locked into the illusion that it can be the master of its fate and the captain of its destiny--if only it were smarter and had more resources. And the illusion has its root in truth: if the body/mind had ALL the smarts, and ALL the resources, and could change the laws of nature on a local basis, it could make many more things go its way. But it doesn't have all the smarts, or the resources, and there seems to be little hope of changing the laws of nature. No, the problem is that there is enough APPEARANCE OF CONTROL to keep the illusion of control going. The sort of control we're considering here is existential control--the control exerted by a subsystem over its environment. (This is totally apart from the question of what controls the subsystem, the question of whether or not the subsystem has the freedom to choose its own INTENTIONS--whether or not it has free will.) Even if all the decisions were optimally made--either through total information and free will or total information and optimal programming--the person has little control. Each of us is on a toboggan going down a snowy mountainside. We've a tiny bit of steering control (as long as we can see), but most of the deciding on our trip down is being done by the shape of the mountain, and the condition of the snow, and the tracks left by other toboggans that have gone down the mountain before us. Much was also decided at the point we started. A foot this way or that, the toboggan pointing a few degrees left or right. The path of that toboggan is determined to a large extent by initial conditions, and by what it encounters along the way. Personal steering is a second-order effect. We humans are nearsighted. We don't see the hill or the tracks or the condition of the snow. We lock onto the fact that it is possible to steer a toboggan (somewhat) and from that get a false sense of being in control. We usually keep that sense until some disaster finally convinces us that we're not. Then the whole psychological house of cards comes tumbling down around us. Perhaps we turn bitter, feeling that life cheated us. Perhaps we go into a deep depression and commit suicide. Or perhaps we wake up to the fact that we were living an illusion. As long as things are going reasonably well it is almost impossible to break this illusion. Circumstances must establish some cracks in the prison wall which can then be enlarged to allow escape. Escape becomes possible when the image: "I am in control" falls apart. Ego becomes attenuated at these times. Its distortions stop dominating what is seen. It becomes possible to SEE aspects of "What Is" that were missed before. It's possible to go through the eye of the needle. The aged and the dead are the clearest sort of evidence that were not in control. No wonder our culture tries to keep them out of sight.
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PLEASE VISIT THE CONTRIBUTOR'S WEBSITE
The Wisdom Page
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