Who Is In Charge?

“When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A depth returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness.” Eckhart Tolle (Guardians of Being, 2009)

What does it mean to be possessed by thought? It is so much a part of who we are and what we value that we don’t recognize that we are ruled by our thoughts. In other words, our mind/brain determines our experience of life. We identify so much with our superior ability to think that we consider ourselves superior to all other animals. An organ whose function is to make sure our bodies are doing what they are supposed to be doing, keep us safe by evaluating our surroundings and comparing and contrasting to past events is now the CEO of us. If you compare it to an organization, it is like having the safety department in charge of the whole organization. In this scenario, the organization will be very safe, but will it grow? Will it take any risks? Will it develop any new products? Will it be creative? It may, but those are not its primary focus. In fact, its top goal is to grow the function and capabilities of the safety department. So now, you have safety people everywhere, they are telling everyone else what to do. The more the company hires safety people, the more the people think about how they might need even more safety measures, this is all they think about. They start worrying about all kinds of things, because their job is to come up with scenarios to protect the organization from. Soon all the other departments start getting intimidated by the safety people. They stop thinking for themselves, their job becomes satisfying the goals of the safety people. The organization is run by fear and intimidation and a constant fear of not being safe enough. As crazy as this may sound, it is no different from how most of us live as humans.

We have given full control of our experience of life to our heads or our thinking and yet the function of our brain is not to take control of us. Then who or what is in charge?

Shaun Ellis, a British naturalist spent two years of his life living in the wild with a pack of wolves without any human contact. This is what he wrote after his experience: The hardest thing was adjusting to the human world. The one I had just left, and felt I belonged to, was so simple and balanced. There was no deception, no malice and no gratuitous cruelty. Keeping the family safe and fed was all that mattered: wolves killed to eat; never for fun and never more than they needed.

When have you ever described your life as simple and balanced? Do you remember when it was so? Is there something you could strike off of your list for things to do or add, that could bring some simplicity and balance in your day? Who is the CEO of you? My wish for all of us is to remember who is in charge and demote those who are not in compliance of the true mission and vision of our being.