Trying to Know the Unknowable, Trying to Control the Uncontrollable
I’ve come to realize that when I try to know what’s essentially unknowable, I’ll get myself tied in knots, with absolutely no benefit, and nothing useful learned.
The same is true when I try to control what is essentially uncontrollable. It gets me nowhere and tends to leave a mess of some sort in my wake.
I know I’m not the only person who tries to do these things. It’s tempting for humans to believe that with just a little more thinking, they’ll crack some code and manage to know the unknowable. The same is true with controlling the uncontrollable. It can seem that with just a little more work, they’ll crack that code, and be in control of something no one has ever been able to control.
I’ve come to see these are both exercises in futility, and I don’t spend much time trying to do either one anymore simply because neither makes any sense to me anymore.
To me, it’s a reminder how wonderfully humbling surrender can be. (Because there seems to be a lot of confusion between the words“humbling” and “humiliating,” for clarity’s sake, humiliation makes you feel like less than you are. Humility, on the other hand, restores a sense of proportion that may have gone missing.)
When I surrender the desire to control or understand, and my sense of proportion is restored, the humbling feeling is like rinsing off in a cool shower on a hot day. And I “come back to myself.”
Like every other human being who has ever lived, when I come back to myself, I experience the peace and well-being that are my nature, and that live underneath all my overwrought thinking.
I’ve learned that it’s impossible not to experience peace and well-being when my mind slows down and relaxes. That lovely feeling of peace and well-being isn’t a familiar sensation to most people. We’re all too busy thinking up problems for ourselves and then trying to think our way out of them.
This is how we constantly veil our true nature from ourselves.
It also explains why it’s commonly believed that peace and well-being exist outside of us, and that we have to do something or get something, or go somewhere to get them.
Whenever we use our minds in ways that are at odds with the way they work best (e.g., thinking up problems for ourselves, and then trying to think our way out of them) we cut ourselves off from the peace and well-being that are our essence, our nature. And we don’t even recognize we’re doing it to ourselves.
Wouldn’t it be amazing to see that restoring your built-in sense of peace and well-being involved doing less work, instead of doing more?
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