DISCOVERING THE INVISIBLE HAND GUIDING OUR LIVES . . .
The spark for this article occurred in a recent workshop with a business group (in 2022).
In vivid detail, Bob explained how one of his children’s less-attractive behaviours escalated out of control. In animated fashion, he told the group how his other child leapt into the fray. And finally, taking that situation to a new level of uproar, how their mum, in exasperation, threw her full-to-the-brim can of fuel on that emotional fire – and KA-BOOM!!! The shouting, recriminations and blaming exploded.
Why did Bob become upset?
I’ll give you a clue. It wasn’t the argy-bargy that caused Bob to become so emotionally distraught.
So, what am I talking about here?
THE BASICS FOR NEW READERS / A REMINDER TO REGULAR READERS
Thought* is the Life Force within, enabling us to think and function as human beings via our five senses – sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste.
The Life Force also provides us with a sixth sense: awareness. In many of us, this sense is dormant until our awakening moment.
Our awareness is the degree to which we are conscious or unconscious of ‘the invisible hand guiding our life’.
What determines whether we are at peace and contributing to the common good or lost in our conditioning and contributing nothing helpful is how aware we are that we think our experience into existence.
* Thought: When the visual representation of the Life Force flat-lines – i.e., the electrical activity in our brain appearing as waves on the screen of an encephalography machine – we are pronounced dead. The Life Force within – expressed as Thought – has left us.
HOW AWARE ARE WE OF THE INVISIBLE HAND GUIDING US?
My purpose is to contribute that:
1) We have a sixth sense – our awareness – and, when attuned to that sense, we understand how it informs our other five of our connection with or disconnection from the influence of Possibility.
2) When blinded to that sixth sense by our ego – our accumulation of beliefs, opinions, judgements and knowledge; our conditioned mind – we lose touch with Possibility and become lost in a state of impossibility.
3) Our degree of awareness (or blindness) is the degree to which we are:
- Aware: Seeing what is and influenced by Possibility.
- Unaware: Re-creating our reality in the moment from our past: our state of impossibility.
WHICH HAND WAS BOB HOLDING?
Are we aware of which hand guides us – awake to our sixth sense?
There are two forms the invisible hand of Thought takes:
- One state has defined limits – the limitations of our conditioned mind – our lifelong accumulation of beliefs, opinions, judgments and knowledge,
This reality is the illusion we live in till the moment we wake up and see we are creating our reality via our past conditioning – our unique, personal reality – the realm of impossibility. At its extreme, our accumulation can destroy us and our relationships.
- The other state is a reality of Possibility – freed of the limitations of our conditioning.
This reality exists beyond the limits of our conditioned minds. This state of mind is our innate connection to the Life Force – The Realm of Possibility. A state that has us, paradoxically, in service to ourselves by being in service to the common good.
SEEING: THE HAND OF IMPOSSIBILITY OR THE HAND OF POSSIBILITY
Summarised, the question raised by Bob and others was this: When I have lost sight of the invisible hand of Possibility, how do I regain my bearings?
The reason Bob lost connection with the hand of Possibility – is this:
At those times, it looks like the problem we face is coming at us. It seems like, sounds and feels like our experience at that time is caused by our circumstances. So, we blame and hold responsible – them, those, that or it – those situations in which we find ourselves.
We blame our experience – how we are thinking, feeling and behaving – on what’s happening out there with:
- our partner, child or others by their behaving in a highly challenging, unseemly or unloving way,
- our uncaring, ruthless boss, delinquent client, or non-responsive supplier,
- the right-wing or left-wing government we believe is ruining the country, or worse, the world,
- the inclement weather spoiling our celebration,
- that stupid bloody driver cutting us off,
- that neighbour refusing to turn down their blaring radio or cut down their mess-creating tree, no matter how many times we politely ask them,
- the circumstances we find ourselves in – health-wise, financially, the state of our relationship/s – they are responsible for how we feel: emotionally hurting or worse, experiencing desperation, even feeling suicidal,
- all those times, we want our life or circumstances to be different from how it is – or they are.
It appears to us in those times of turmoil, upset or worry that it’s not us creating our experience from how we think; instead, it’s coming at us from them, those, that or it.
In that state of mind, we have lost sight of the hand guiding us at that moment – the hand of impossibility.
LETTING GO OF THE HAND THAT LEADS US ASTRAY
The answer to our upset is as simple as it is profound.
What follows is one way of describing the experience of waking up and becoming aware of which hand is guiding us.
This experience of waking up differs from person to person, yet the result is the same: we wake up and see that we are the author of our moment-to-moment experiences and:
- See that, without the life-giving gift of Thought, there is no thinking – and simultaneously we see – that we think our reality into existence.
- In seeing the inside-out nature of how we create our human experience, we become aware that what we think determines the quality of our reality – whatever we experience as good or bad or in different other ways.
- We see that our quality of experience is determined by which of the invisible hands we hold – the hand of Possibility or the hand of impossibility.
- To the degree we wake up – is to the same degree – we become aware of our sixth sense – our realisation of which hand is guiding us as we experience our unfolding life, moment-to-moment.
- We have awakened to our sixth sense of seeing/hearing/feeling (in italics).
The above – described in other ways throughout human history – is life-transforming.
THE RESULT OF BECOMING AWARE OF WHICH HAND IS LEADING US
Our Seeing, hearing and feeling indicate a different quality to seeing only with our eyes, hearing only with our ears, and feeling only kinaesthetically.
The quality of seeing, hearing and feeling; is a reality that has us experiencing what is – not what our conditioning would have us seeing, hearing and feeling.
We are free from the unrecognised control exerted by our conditioned mind and the distortions our memory tells us we are seeing, hearing and feeling.
We have let go of the constraints of our lifelong accumulation, of what we remember someone, something or some circumstance to be – the conditioning that gets in the way of us seeing what is, hearing what is and feeling what is.
We recognise those memories as relics of our past representing a reality once lived – now barely recognisable in our newfound state of Possibility.
Our past is no longer the reality confining us – the veil through which we experience the world – to which we react like robots. Those times we demand that our life circumstances be other than how we think they should be – must be – for our peace of mind.
We see that the hand that led us was the hand of impossibility thinking – the hand of our conditioned mind – and we have escaped its grip.
And we soon discover that we can still lose our bearings, although now vaccinated to whatever degree by our awakening and having seen into The Realm of Possibility.
It’s a bit like being immunised against Covid but still catching it – but not being as sick or dying from it as we might have if unvaccinated.
This transformation to the reality we now see has us being kinder, more understanding, wiser and using a new level of common sense in our daily lives. As a dear friend quoted from the bible: We are experiencing our life as ‘the fruits of the spirit’.
Our relationships blossom.
Our transformation takes us from being a part of the problems facing humanity to being a part of the solution to what ails the world.
Our lived kindness, understanding, wisdom and common sense – our natural state of Possibility – impact the world.
MY INVITATION TO YOU
The Realm of Possibility is an impersonal, universal reality, a reality available to all who seek to see beyond the known – to see that which exists before the accumulation that blinds us.
I invite you to meet with me – metaphorically – in our inner world of kindness, understanding, wisdom and common sense.
Let us become the world we aspire to – or as another friend says: “To have and to share our gentleness of mind” – our world of Possibility.
Warmly … John