Controlling Personalities

There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so. ~ Wm. Shakespeare

When you understand that life is one of the most luscious learning experiences, that all you experience comes from how you think, that you can improve the level of what you think about and improve this experience, at this point you become relaxed, in a harmonious state, peaceful about your life and happy with everything because of your conscious recognition about what is really happening. This is something controlling personalities need to learn.

Without this understanding, you live a life with much fear, hard work, and the struggle to gain security, harmony, and well-being through living in the box of control. You will work hard to maintain this control. You will exercise this control over the money you earn, the relationships in your life, the status you find acceptable, or, you may find this understanding through your inner world using mental practice and discipline.

Some people are control freaks, and rigidly control "things external" to themselves because they don't understand their thought governs all they experience. Control freaks might appear wealthy and healthy and happy, but I know they live in constant fear of losing control.

Real understanders (described in the first paragraph) isn't obsessed with control because they know that through persistence, they'll get whatever they think about to the point of the absolute conviction they already have it. They exercise "control" over themselves and they have no fear of losing control.

Controlling personalities expend tremendous time, energy and peace of mind striving hard to stay invested in keeping control over all their stuff - to keep all those plates spinning and not crashing to the ground because they think their peace, freedom and success stem from these controllable things.

There is a new world of possibility outside this box of control, if we could train ourselves to see it. Krishnamurti wrote about the box of control:

Let us for a moment, imaginatively at least, look over the world from a point of view which will reveal the inner workings and the outer workings of man, his creations and his battles; and if you can do that imaginatively for a moment, what do you see spread before you?

You see man imprisoned by innumerable walls, walls of religion, of social, political and national limitations, walls created by his own ambitions, aspirations, fears, hopes, security, prejudices, hate and love. Within these barriers and prisons he is held, limited by the coloured maps of national boundaries, racial antagonisms, class struggles and cultural group distinctions. You see man throughout the world imprisoned, enclosed by the limitations, the walls of his own creation. Through these walls and through these enclosures he is trying to express what he feels and what he thinks, and within these he functions with joy and with sorrow.

So you see man throughout the world as a prisoner, imprisoned within the walls of his own creation, within the walls of his own making; and through these enclosures, through these walls of environment, through the limitation of his ideas, ambitions and aspirations - through these he is trying to function, sometimes successfully, and sometimes with hideous struggle.

And the man who succeeds in making himself comfortable in the prison we call successful, whereas the man who succumbs in the prison we call a failure. But both success and failure are within the walls of the prison.

To someone thinking inside of the control box, actual freedom looks a lot like being out of control and it scares them. When you begin to explore the freedom of the understander instead of this being-in-control stance, you learn to adhere to life's rules and the fear dissolves.

Letting go of our old way is frightening. Richard Bach wrote about letting go in his wonderful book "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah." Just read Chapter One, and you'll see what I mean.

My wish for you is that you become an understander; that you discover life's laws so that you can escape what other controlling personalities cannot, and enter into greater health, wealth, success and harmony. Christmas is a time that exemplifies this bettered condition, and one of the Great Teachers around whom Christmas is celebrated has left us plenty of proverbs, parables and examples of how to enjoy life as it was intended.

'I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.' ~ Terry Pratchett