ACTIONS, DESTINY AND CHANGE

Here’s our current operating model:

I, me, am the decision-maker, the controller, the experiencer.

I choose what words are said or written.

I am the doer.

I make the actions happen.

I am the command centre from which everything done in this body emanates. I am (or I should be - and I can take a lifetime trying to be) in control of all my behaviours, emotions, thoughts and experiences.

It is such a powerful model.

It is the basis on which our entire society is run.

To question it in anyway looks terrifying. It looks like it could take us into the frightening territory of no free will, of passivity and blind destiny. It looks like the denial of responsibility. With no self in control what is there?

But question it we must.

Because it is just not possible that the self is controlling anything.

The self of me has absolutely no clue how these hands are typing these words.

And the self idea of you has absolutely no clue of how reading is happening.

We can know the theory of it of course. The diagrams in an anatomy book. But how is it happening?

The self cannot make typing and reading happen. The self does not produce thought and send the energetic pulses around the brain and body to transform that thought into lines on a screen.

It does not translate the light on the retina into meaning.

Thought, beliefs, experiences, behaviours are happening. And they are happening because that is the intricate learning of the brain and body. That is the conditioned set up. It is the programme that the unit is running on.

“Oh great. So we’re just ‘bound upon a wheel of fire’ as King Lear might say. Destined to just repeat the same patterns, the same experience, the same emotions. No choice. No change…”

Well this is where it gets tremendously exciting because there is a different model…

And this model is the only place of genuine change.

What we really are is the space in which all words, thoughts, beliefs, experiences and actions arise. What we really are is the awareness in which the idea of self arises.

'Our' words, thoughts, beliefs, experiences and actions flow in and are witnessed. Without the witness they do not happen.

(Have you ever noticed how when we speak we are hearing those words for the first time? What I am writing now is the first time these sentences are observed.)

And what is witnessing them, therefore MUST be what we really are. We are not the concepts and ideas. How could we be? We are what is creating the possibility of their appearance.

So far so good.

And this is where it gets really intriguing. This is where change happens…

Because there is a filter over that witnessing space. And the filter is the (largely unconscious) belief in what we are. This is where what has learned has become so internalised, personal, dense and fixed that it looks to be the reality of self.

Through this filter, it absolutely looks like there is an objectively real self and an objectively real reality. A self that must be protected and a world that must be defended against away. A self that must be made secure and a world with the power to undermine and destabilise.

But the self and the apparently separate world are all made of the same conditioned learning. There is no objective truth in any of it and no separation. It is the same thing.

So life becomes an exhausting fight in a hall of mirrors. Punching and kicking our own reflection to the death.

It can’t be any other way though, remember, because this is what has been learned. This apparent self and this apparent other are what has been programmed in.

Until - a new model is understood…

A new model that points out….

the impossibility of a controlling, decision-making self

the impossibility of a separate, objective reality

the impossibility of change while the belief in the self and the other remains unexplored

And this model is a complete reversal of what has been understood before.

In this model all behaviour, emotion, thought and experience is seen for what it really is - the apparent manifestation of what is believed.

The entire world, as it appears, is simply there to reveal the filter.

All appearance is an indicator of the belief in self.

All relationships reveal what is being defended and protected.

All sense of limitation, separation, conflict and objectivity is hauling to the surface the confusion that has dictated all experience to date.

It is an ‘outside in’ model of reality and change. The only function of the behaviours and sensations of the body and the thoughts and experiences of the mind are to point the laser beam on what is being believed about who we are.

And because misunderstanding and confusion cannot survive in the gaze of pure, open, impersonal enquiry, the filter dissolves.

Our words are only for our benefit. Our actions are only for our benefit. Our conflicts are only for our benefit. Our disappointments and rejections are only for our benefit. Our failures and successes are only for our benefit. Our limitations are only for our benefit.

All of it there to reveal who we are.

Until it becomes clear, beyond all doubt, that there is no ‘our’. And there is no ‘other’.

And then,

while remaining exactly the same,

the whole world has changed.