Control Your Mind, Control Your Life, or not

When we first begin to become aware how powerful the mind is at creating our reality, we often will take the ego’s perspective. If I can control this mind, I will control my life, my reality.

The only problem is, the mind cannot control itself. More deeply, control is an illusion of the ego. Thus any control we might seem to create is just more illusion. We trade one illusion for another.

A good example is the quote I received in a newsletter today.

“Whatever your personal desires may be – as long as they do not hurt yourself or someone else – you have the right to attain them … and you can. The ability to attain your goals – to control your experience and have them result in happiness, prosperity and success – lies in your own mind and the way you use it. This means you control your own experience – you are really in charge of your affairs and the way they are to develop. Let us sum it up this way: My thought is in control of my experience, and I can direct my thinking.”
— Ernest Holmes

Ernest is the founder of Science of Mind, the basis for the Religious Science churches, one of the wings of the New Thought movement. Unity church and Divine Science are other branches. They developed from several lines of thinking including the transcendentalists and some books published in the late 19th century. One of the more famous recent examples of this thinking is the recent film The Secret.

This outlook can be revolutionary for many people. It is a major uplift of perspective from common victim thinking, the idea that life happens to me. It encourages self reflection and responsibility. I attend a New Thought church myself.

While the philosophy espouses spirit as the ultimate reality, it is often misunderstood how spirit plays a role in our immediate life. Spirit remains as a concept, placed as “other” in heaven or some such. Who “you” are and how you’re connected to source/spirit remains unexperienced. Unless spirit becomes known as more than an intellectual concept, control becomes an affirmation of resistance. We’re caught in the ego’s desire to control and thus remain in conflict with what is. This is the recipe for the human struggle.

Using the mind to achieve can indeed bring us happiness, prosperity, and success. But unless it is grounded in spirit, all of that will be subject to change and will end. Only spirit always remains.

Instead of a message of ‘Control Your Mind, Control Your Life‘, a better one would be ‘Transcend your Mind, See Yourself, See Your Life‘.

When we see our life from outside of it, we can really clear the stuff thats been getting in the way of expressing our purpose, happiness, and love. We find success is a process of allowing rather than control. That control was what got us into trouble in the first place.

As this process completes, who we are and how we express come together again, but now from a much higher place. A place that is part of the whole, where all is one with spirit itself.
Davidya