![]() ![]() This pause gives the possibility of a new choice. Hopefully, you can bypass being knocked unconscious to discover this truth! What you can do is begin to notice whenever you have somehow become The Controller, and just pause, notice what’s happening, and ask yourself, “what is this like?” What does my body feel like? My heart? What is my mind like? Is there any space at all? Do I like myself when I’m identified as The Controller? As Wolfe wrote, “It’s the only solution that you had. In doing so, he had discovered the only life-saving response that was possible in this desperate situation: don’t do anything. Seven miles later, the plane re-entered the planet’s denser atmosphere, where standard navigation strategies could be implemented. Unconsciously, he plummeted toward Earth. When his plane began to tumble, Yeager was thrown violently around in the cockpit and knocked out. This tragic drama occurred several times until one of the pilots, Chuck Yeager, inadvertently struck upon a solution. Screaming helplessly to ground control, “What do I do next?!” the pilots would plunge to their deaths. The more furiously they manipulated the controls, the wilder the rides became. They would apply correction after correction, yet, because they were way out of the earth’s atmosphere, the rules of thermodynamics no longer applied, so the planes just went crazy. The first pilots to face this challenge responded by frantically trying to stabilize their planes when they went out of control. In his book The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe describes how, in the 1950s, a few highly trained pilots were attempting to fly at altitudes higher than had ever been achieved. ![]() Yet even though wanting to control things is a natural part of our biology, the question is: are we doing it in a way that causes our identity to be completely wrapped up in it? Often, when we’re trying to manage everything, we tend to get locked into an experience of ourselves as a tight, egoist self, and lose sight of who we really are. We worry and obsess we think and we plan. ![]() It’s completely ineffective, but it’s what we do. One football coach talks about an exchange with a former player: “I told him, ‘What is it with you? Is it ignorance or apathy?’ The player said, ‘Coach, I don’t know, and I don’t care.’” For instance, we might find ourselves thinking, “Okay, if you’re going to treat me this way, then I’m going to pull back.”Īnother way we control is by withdrawing from ourselves, by shutting down. Sometimes we try to control by framing or presenting things in a certain way to elicit a certain response. We all have our different ways of becoming The Controller. You might notice that the more insecure you feel, the more The Controller will hop into action. For instance when you’re with another person and are feeling anxious, notice The Controller in you who’s trying to be experienced in a certain way. You might begin to notice this in your own life. Yet so many things are completely out of our control-aging, sickness, dying, other people dying, other people acting in ways we don’t like, our own moods and emotions…it’s all out of our hands.Įven so, when this automatic habit of controlling takes over, when our whole identity is in the persona of The Controller, we become removed from the qualities of presence, freshness, and spontaneity we lose the ability to respond from a wiser, more compassionate place. As living organisms anxious about our existence, we’re all naturally rigged to want to manage our lives with the goal of creating more pleasure and less pain for ourselves. ![]()
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