Who's the Boss?

Grace doesn't surprise me anymore. I see it all the time, in a thousand moments a day. What does surprise and fascinate me is how we as human being are able to make ourselves blind to it. Despite the riot of wonder and amazement that is everyday reality, so many of us manage to get from sunup to sleep without ever leaving our self created world of suffering and fear. It's exhausting, requiring a constant state of fixation on thoughts of problems and paucity.

From what I've observed, the mechanism of this fixation goes something like this. We imagine a big bad world full of struggles, enemies and difficulty which is set in opposition to poor little us with our limited powers and inadequate abilities (also an imagining). Then we go about trying to figure out how to overcome them and meet our needs, despite the fact that we've already decided we probably won't succeed. Holy shit, no wonder half the population is on Zoloft.

So, a little reality check can be helpful. I'm told that the conscious mind, which seems to be the part of us that is doing all this imagining, can process up to seven plus or minus two (7 +/- 2) pieces of information per second. Not bad really, faster than your average computer. However, they have recently built a computer that is capable of doing a pettiflop, which sounds like a bad experience from a high diving board, but is actually the ability to process one trillion pieces of information per second. Wow, this seems pretty impressive, until you realise that it is still an order of magnitude below what the human brain is doing. In other words, our noggins are doing ten trillion processes per second.

So, if our conscious mind is doing between five and nine processes per second, but our brains are doing ten trillion processes per second, what's going on in the unconscious? Well, heaps and heaps. In every second your brain is managing to keep you breathing, sweating, digesting, balancing, and assimilating gigabytes of visual, audial and sensory information. Just keeping you from falling flat on your face requires the monitoring of thousands of biofeedback signals and the movement of hundreds of muscles - a constant program of incredibly sophisticated adjustment. In every second you are literally doing thousands of actions, without having to pay attention to any of them.

It reminds me of the old joke about the Blonde (gender unspecified) who was always wearing earphones. Finally one of his/her coworkers got curious about what she/he was listening to and took them off his/her head. The blonde immediately dropped dead, and when the coworker put the earphones on they heard "breathe in, breathe out, breathe in.....". I'm allowed to tell this joke because I'm a blonde. Political correctness notwithstanding, its a good illustration of two things. One, it's a good thing we don't have to think about our basic body processes. Two, English really needs a gender neutral pronoun to deal with the modern age.

Jokes aside, if you think about what is really going on in your personal reality each second it becomes a little absurd when you conscious mind pops up and says "I'm in charge here". In the time it took you to read this your brain/body has performed millions of actions, and your conscious mind is still somewhere back there going "ooooooh ten trillion, that a really big number". The idea that we are in charge of anything at all is so ridiculous it's laughable. Yet this is the idea that most people go through their day with. "I have to take charge, to sort it all out, to solve this problem called life".

The bad new is that we really can't. We (our conscious mind/ego) can't even make ourselves breathe properly, let alone manage the untold trillions of actions we need to perform each day. If we can't even manage to keep ourselves running, how are we to handle the innumerable complexities of what's going on outside our skin. The truth is that life is simply beyond our control and our understanding. Seven plus or minus two just doesn't cut it.

The good new is that we don't have to. Life looks after itself the same way our body does. We exist within a field of infinite intelligence, and it's got it sorted. If we are smart we eventually learn to give up, to stop trying to take control of our life and let our life take control of us. Personal growth is not an action of becoming something greater that we currently are. It's an action of allowing our greatness to make itself known. If we are smart, we learn to stop fighting with ourselves and start cooperating with that which is trying to emerge. If we are smart, we learn that we aren't as smart as we may think we are.

The conscious mind has it's place, and is indeed intended to make choices and decisions, but if those choices are against the natural flow of our being it really doesn't work. It's useful to think of it like an iceberg, the visible emergence of a far greater weight of intelligence below the surface. The problems occurs when we think that our conscious mind is somehow separate and dominant, that it's in charge of things. The reality is that the iceberg will always go with the flow, following the deep currents of life. If we think that we should be going in another direction, then we simply create an experience of frustration and stress for ourselves. If we trust what is beneath the surface and concentrate on enjoying the journey, life becomes an adventure in curiosity and learning, not a pointless struggle for a control that is simply unachievable.

Well, that's how I see it these days. Grace doesn't surprise me anymore, but the things we do to fight it leave me amazed.

Peace be with you.