On Control

I want to share something about control. There's internal control, and there's external control. Control is binary. There is a one, and there is a zero. There's assent, and then there's no signal. The essence of control is to isolate information down to the point of it being binary. That is control, and there is an internal aspect and an external aspect. The internal aspect of control is called self-control. The external aspect goes by social control, propaganda, or perhaps occultism, psychiatry, science, and so forth. Then, there is the union of internal and external control. That is important.

Enlightenment is where external control meets internal control. It's like two electric circuits connected by a wire; really, when you connect them, they are one circuit. That's union. There is no enlightenment without control, both internal and external, because without control there would be no clarification of concepts, no transmission of purity, no essence of the divine. You need control to have enlightenment. With control, you are controlled by Buddhas, and you control yourself. Everywhere there is nothing but control. And with this control, both internal and external, comes the transmission of purity which purifies the mental continuum to the point where it can continue on its own without further guidance. That is the ultimate point: clarifying information, purifying data, ruling out the decay of existence that marks the ordinary, unenlightened state.

In the Internet, we have transmission of data, and we have streaming. Streaming is like transmission of data, except there's more control. The pathway of data becomes one circuit, to the point where the two computers are indistinguishable, and then you get music coming through the wire. You can't have live music over the Internet without streaming. Control is what makes it stream.

When we receive a teaching, it doesn't matter if the teaching is secular or religious or what-have-you, there is a great deal of control. Language itself is control. When someone says something, we can't help but experience that thing. In some ways, this can be traumatic; someone can say something which triggers something in us that makes us feel uncomfortable, and we don't like it because we feel we have no choice. But in other ways, it is quite useful. Mutual control through language is what makes us so powerful as human beings. It's what builds societies. The trick to avoiding the trauma is to be open-hearted. Sense the essence of the word entering your mind. Feel its emotion. Feel the totality of it, and all the energy and light and soul behind it. Feel what it means to be that word. It will still control you, but the control is open-sourced, and you get to contribute, too.

That's something that Westerners, traditionally, have had a hard time accepting. Control is always two-sided. If you seek to control, you will always be controlled. Control is control. Control of others is others' controlling you. Control begets control, from node to node, point to point, everywhere on the network. It is never one-sided, as much as we may want it to be.

Consider the United States of America. It is a very powerful country. What makes the United States so powerful? Because of all the control. But America is a democracy. The citizens of America control the government, and the government controls the citizens, who control the government, who control the citizens. All this control is what makes us so powerful.

Now you may be wondering if there is something beyond control. Of course there is. Once you've achieved control, you can simply allow the energy to radiate throughout the nodes of control, providing love, inspiration; inspiring dialectics of power; granting crowns and relieving others of the oppressive weight of the same crowns. Once union between the nodes of control, being two, (internal and external), has been achieved, you have a blossoming of creative energy which can spill into the universe and settle among the Earth. This is the meaning of control. It is its ultimate end. If you hang onto control, you get a headache. If you loosen up, once control has been achieved, you achieve grace.

A lot of people are against the concept of control. I am not. However, I do understand that an extreme of control causes headaches. Control is necessary and important, but best to let it arise naturally, as the product of open-hearted investigation, inner and outer, into the nature of the world. Perhaps it may even be better to let the whole world control you first, before seeking to control the world. But once the control has been achieved, being open-hearted and loose and letting go returns us to that state of nature from which the control arose in the first place.