The Sovereign Mind: The Illusion of Control
The ego’s primary goal is to maintain mindlessness.
You may be touched, as I was, by Jennifer Arndt’s wise reflections inspired by last Saturday’s Session 1.
You may recall when we studied Epictetus, right out of the box, he shared these timeless words:
Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing; not within our power are our body, our property, reputation, office, and, in a word, whatever is not of our own doing.
The things that are within our power are by nature free, and immune to hindrance and obstruction, while those that are not within our power are weak, slavish, subject to hindrance, and not our own.
Russ Harris writes about the “illusion of control.” First, we notice that,
The human mind is a wonderful thing. It enables us to make plans, invent new things, coordinate actions, analyze problems, share knowledge, learn from our experiences, and imagine new futures. The clothes on your body, the chair beneath you, the roof over your head, the book in your hands—none of these things would exist but for the ingenuity of the human mind. The mind enables us to shape the world around us and conform it to our wishes, to provide ourselves with warmth, shelter, food, water, protection, sanitation, and medicine. Not surprisingly, this amazing ability to control our external environment gives us high expectations of control in other arenas as well.
We may disagree on just how much control we have in the material world, but we get his point:
Now, in the material world, control strategies generally work well. If we don’t like something, we figure out how to avoid it or get rid of it, and then we do so. A wolf outside your door? Get rid of it! Throw rocks at it, or spears, or shoot it. Snow, rain, or hail? Well, you can’t get rid of those things, but you can avoid them by hiding in a cave or building a shelter. Dry, arid soil? You can get rid of it by irrigation and fertilization, or you can avoid it by moving to fertile ground.
Then Harris asks the big question: “But how much control do we have over our inner world: over our thoughts, memories, emotions, urges, and sensations? Can we simply avoid or get rid of the ones we don’t like?