“The Magical Thinking That Is ‘Figuring Things Out’”
“Well, I’ve done it again. Yup — caught myself any number of times in the past week trying to figure something out again. Thought I was past that. I certainly know it doesn’t work, which is why I worked so hard to drop this particular strategy from my repertoire over the last eight years.
What happened eight years ago, you may well ask? Here’s what happened: I decided to participate in the “Whole Life Expo” in Cleveland by purchasing booth space. I was at the time calling my work “The Heartlogic System” and this seemed an excellent way to promote it. This turned out to have been a naïve move on my part, but it was fun. Across the aisle from me was a man named Gary Bonnell, whose booth seemed to promote books he had written; he also seemed to be giving brief readings of some sort.
I paid little attention to him until the third and last day of the Expo, when I had a little free time and spent some of it looking over his books. I was fascinated; here was all sorts of information about such topics as reincarnation, various esoteric wisdom teachings, and the Akashic Records, about which I knew next to nothing at the time. I sought Gary out, and, to make a long story short, he sat me down for a free five-minute reading.
I only recall one thing from that reading, but it’s a doozy. He said, “Stop trying to figure things out!” I said something like, “Yeah — you’re so right.” Then I spent the next few days driving around in my car trying to figure out what he meant by that. I finally got it, but it seems to have taken a long time for me to really implement this in my life. After all, I spent the whole of my life up until then doing just that most of the time — trying to figure things out in my head, mostly so that I could experience some sense of control over life. Some degree of safety.
Isn’t that what we do? If I can just figure out ahead of time exactly what it is that my boss wants, I’ll have it made. If I can just figure out how to make this relationship work — etc., etc. and so it goes. In this analytical, left brain-worshiping society we can’t leave anything to “chance.” The problem with this approach is that it ignores at least half of the information that is available to us.
That information is contained within what you could call “intuitive knowing.” We don’t know where we got that great idea that just came to us, but we know it didn’t come from analysis of the situation. It just appeared. In fact, it is just this process by which almost all of the world’s greatest ideas, inventions, and art have manifested: you do all the practical information-gathering, and then you let your intuition guide you.
I know this is so from my own experience, because I have now tried it again and again over the last few years, and it always works so beautifully — really beyond any initial expectation –that I am always shocked that I spent so much time “up in my head” going around in circles trying to force my brain to do work it was not cut out to do. Once in awhile I still have to remind myself that this is so, and that happened this week.
I always catch myself at some point in the “chasing the answer around like a rat in a maze” mode; I notice that I am starting to feel a fuzziness in my thinking process as I continue to try to force an answer to come but keep hitting my head against a brick wall. How does this work for you? If you’re still trying to “figure things out”, why not step back and give life a chance to lead you? I’ve found myself led to magnificent vistas that I never “figured” I’d experience.