What You Seek to Control Controls You

When we think about being able to control things, it is usually down to manipulation or manifestation.

To be able to manipulate something literally means to be able to control that thing, but most times when the word is used it is to control something unfairly or dishonestly. You exploit a weakness to get what you want.

And since everyone has a weakness, anyone can be exploited and manipulated.

Manifestation (or law of attraction) are somewhat controversial topics to psychologists. Some think it’s foolishness and a scam to get money from control freaks while others see its value because what you believe in really does change your experience of life.

There’s credence to both these opinions but what is clear to both the believers and non-believers is that law of attraction and manifestation are things people do to try to get a specific outcome they want.

Vision boards, affirmations, and visualisation are a few tools people use to manifest, but here’s my stance on why some people attribute their success to conscious manifestation while others never seem to get what they want.

If you are visualising and saying affirmations as a means to control your life but it’s coming from a place of insecurity, are you really going to get what you want? It’s unlikely. Why is that?

If you do anything from a place of insecurity, it is natural that you will want to control things. But if you were secure in life, or more importantly, if you accepted that you felt insecure, would you seek to control things? No, you wouldn’t.

If I’m trying to control things, that essentially means that life doesn’t work, and if life doesn’t work I have to go and make it work. I have to control life.

Some people try to manifest while others go with manipulation. The former can be done from positive belief or negative belief. The latter is almost always done out of fear, but either way, both can be forms of control.

People believe that they’re acting from a place of empowerment, when in reality they’re acting from fear. And if you act from fear, even if it is to create a positive outcome, you return to your starting position: fear. How you start is how you finish.

And when the fear you started with is the fear you’ve returned to, you naturally become frustrated and start to think you’re doing something wrong, or you think something is wrong with you, or you think that life simply does not work out for you.

And if you do this enough times, you might come to the realisation that with either manifestation or manipulation, you weren’t that good at controlling things. In fact, what you might realise is that what you seek to control controls you.

You wanted the success, relationship, money or whatever so badly that you’d do anything to get it, but you now realise that it was the hope of pleasure in getting these things that controlled you all along.

So what’s the solution? Let’s turn to another controversial topic for psychologists: religion.

In Buddhism, we have the four noble truths. The first is that suffering exists. Okay, no argument there. The second is that the root cause of suffering is thirst, desire or attachment.

If you are a student of Buddhism, naturally you would want the end of suffering. Then again, as a human being, you’d naturally want the end of suffering.

Fortunately for you, the third truth is that there is an end to suffering, which is outlined in the fourth truth: you must go on the eightfold path which involves right perspective, right intention and right action.

Most people miss the obvious problem, but here it is. If the cause of suffering is desire, your desire to end suffering is a desire! Therefore, any attempt to end suffering yields suffering.

This is such a crucial thing for people to understand because we need to realise that it is our attitude to life that is really our problem.

I don’t mean to minimise what people have gone through. Pain is as inevitable as pleasure. There is no way to avoid either one. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

If you don’t get your physical needs met like food or water, the body is in physical pain. If you don’t get emotional needs met, you experience emotional pain. But it is your attitude to that pain that determines if you suffer or not.

You want to know the real root of suffering? It is your resistance to what is. It is your resistance to pain. It is your resentment of your life.

So let’s bring it back to our central point that what you seek to control controls you.

When things are going our way, we never think to manifest or manipulate things to what we want them to be. Why would we? Things are good. Why mess with what works?

But when things aren’t going our way, it is natural for us to be in pain, annoyed, frustrated. We desire a solution. We want pleasure. But we think we must fight the pain in order for it to end.

I’ve never seen that work. All that happens is that you remain in a chronic state of anger, resentment, resistance or fear. The initial pain has transformed into suffering.

The anger turns to rage. The fear becomes paranoia.

You can use manifestation techniques, manipulation, aggression and self-sacrifice all you want. You might even be successful to some degree, but it won’t matter in the long run because you are the one being controlled.

And the worst part of it is you are totally unaware of it because you are controlled by negative emotions.

So having said all of that, did the Buddha really end suffering? Yeah, he probably did.

Instead of fighting against life, instead of resisting what is, choose to accept what is because there is nothing more pointless or dangerous than resisting reality and resenting the truth.

Yes, the truth might be painful. If the truth was always pleasant, people would be chasing it rather than foolishness and lies as we’ve seen today and throughout history.

But between the choices of resisting pain, which leads to suffering; and accepting pain, which ends suffering and leads to peace, which option do you choose?

Sometimes we think holding onto negative emotions will keep us safe. That is usually the case when we don’t know what to do, but again, that thing that you fear or hate clearly is in control because it is preventing you from choosing peace.

Unfortunately, some of us are so possessed with negativity that we defend our suffering, which just makes life so much worse for everyone else. It could be the guy waiting in line for food who yells at the staff or the woman abusing her kids or the guy waging wars.

The rest of us have to put up with the pain they create, but again, we have a choice. Do you want to be emotionally controlled by these people?

We’re already physically controlled at times because they slow down the workers making the food, they limit the child’s autonomy, and people get displaced from their homes.

How can we not be in pain? To deny that would be foolish and psychologically damaging. However, if we can honor our pain, at least we won’t be emotionally controlled. And sometimes reclaiming that power is exactly what we need to create or recreate the life of our dreams.

So ask yourself, what have I been trying to control? What in my life do I dislike so much that it is costing me my peace? You will probably find that it is controlling you.

You have a choice: you can continue to resist the problem, which causes it to persist, or you can accept how you feel about it, which then helps you to accept the situation itself and then frees you to know exactly what to do, if you need to take action.

That is when you might realise that your attempt to manifest stuff was just you trying to manipulate the universe into giving you what you wanted. And, of course, that’s delusional because it’ll never work.

When you go for the things you value simply because you value them and not because you fear a life without them, you will be free.

The more you can control yourself, the less you need to control others. The more you honor yourself and how you feel, the more you honor life itself.

There’s a video for this article here.