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It hit me suddenly as I was listening to a friend tell how someone else was trying to control his life. I said, “If you don’t live your life, someone else will.” Let that idea shock you for a moment. See how possible it is that you could live your three score and ten and never live your life. You can be occupying your body day-by-day while someone else occupies your head. You are in the caboose and they are in the engine room. It is almost like you are just an observer of your own life while someone lives it. The most likely scenario is that you will only give up living your own life for periods of time when someone catches you asleep at the wheel. It is most likely to happen when you are in a time of vulnerability. Maybe you are physically ill. Or mentally ill. Yes, I doubt anyone has ever lived his or her entire life without times of mental illness, even if nothing but a situation-triggered neurosis. We do not remember a lot about it but parents pretty well live the lives of their children until their teens. Then the withdrawal from parental control is the main story of the teen years. During this time, other people vie for some degree of control over us: teachers, girlfriends, boyfriends, and religious figures. One book that really helped me to take control of my life was Harry Browne’s How I Found Freedom in An Unfree World.” It was one of those “eureka” experiences for me. It forced me to look at how much control I had turned over to other people in my life. The main thing this book did for me was to make me aware of how old shibboleths and brainwashing had conditioned me through guilt to turn loose of my decision-making powers. One way to locate some of these inner hypnotists is to write 10 statements that begin with, “Something I strongly believe is…” Take them one by one and ask, “Who placed this belief in my mind?” Follow this with, “How much proof of this belief do I have?” Strange as it may seem, when I read Browne’s book I had questioned very few shibboleths people had stuck on my brain like cockleburs on Velcro. It did not hurt me at all to question this way. My happy discovery was that any unexamined belief is not really of any value to us. One of my favorite teachers has been Vernon Howard. In one of his lectures he said he sometimes sets aside a week to believe nothing -- to just remain completely quiet when such questions arose and in each situation where he needed to make a decision, to start back at point zero and think it through as if he had never considered the question before. If such a proposal sounds radical to you, it might mean you really need to take a look at who is running your life. It indicates insecurity about the question. If your insecurity freezes you that completely, you can just become aware of the sadness of any person being alive all their life without really living their life. Don’t let these thoughts make you feel stupid. Bear in mind that no one has ever lived his or her whole life in complete control. All of us give up the reins to one or more persons or groups at points in our lives. Just be aware. It is your life. If you don’t live it, someone else will.
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