Questioner: Why is control so important to us?

Control is the symptom of delusion. Your ego suffers from this delusion of control. We ask, What do I want to do with my Life? How can I best look after my children? What do I want for my old age? Who do I want to live with and who do I not want to live with? You become a slave to your preferences, your views, your desires. It starts out with you deluding yourself into self-identity, then separation follows, then divisiveness, then alienation, then despair. All along the way you suffer from this delusion of control. You say to yourself, How do I want to live my life? But you can only be happy when you embrace the reality that life is living you.

Try this. Go into the garden or wherever there's some relative calm and sense of nature and peace and start to breathe. Now notice that you think to yourself, I am breathing. This is the scenario you imagine, that you initiate and perform this complex process of respiration, in and out breaths, raising and deflating the chest, sending oxygen to the far corners of the organism. Now instead of this, introduce a new thought that the world is breathing me. Imagine it as if the world were involved in an interchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide with your body, breathing you in and out.

Allow your consciousness to embrace this new thought, this fresh idea, and notice how you begin to expand. Now breathe deeper and allow yourself to extend beyond your personal space into the garden and beyond, and out and out to the far reaches of the horizon and beyond, beyond into outer space and keep going. Every time you feel contractions setting in, simply breathe a little deeper.

Now the universe is breathing you and a new thought, or reality dawns in you from direct experience that there really is no boundary between you and it. Everything out there you have held as separate from you, kept at a distance, seen as not-you, through this vital breath is all you! You are IT.

When you realize this in yourself control has no relevance at all. Control is merely a form of anger predicated on the idea of self-identity.

BLOG entry #37