Please Stop Talking About Your Agency!
“There are no mistakes and no masterpieces.” Bala
Oh crap- where did that header come from? I was going to title this “Tie your Camel Before You Pray”, but somehow I ended up typing that. Should have used my agency here!
I want to weep for all the time I spent working on this mythical, magical agency.
The most irritating example which I see daily is “You can’t control circumstances, but you can control your actions.” Really, REALLY? Anybody saying this has clearly never run in to another car out of the blue, given birth nor yelled at anyone in anger. Was Jesus “controlling his actions” when he went after the moneylenders in the Temple?
This one idea has driven millions of people to believe they can do something that isn’t possible. A recipe for guilt, self-reproach, regret and shame.
I have come to see that my actions arise from my conditioning and my genetic makeup. I have looked into both areas of my life and have arrived at the conclusion that I definitely don’t have an agency over my genetic makeup nor my conditioning. I was created and conditioned and as conditions change so do my actions, through no agency of my own.
A teacher once asked me what the most important events of my life were. I said the birth of my children, meeting and marrying my husband, being introduced to Advaita teachings. None of these were generated by my agency. They all appear to me to be wonderful happenstances, but certainly not anything I engendered.
In fact, I find agency to be a special brand of torture. You can do it! You make it happen! How often had I heard this? A doubling down by our egos rooting at the side lines. At the very least a recipe for stress and crazy making.
Ramesh Balsekar invited his students to “Act as if you have control in your life, knowing that you don’t.” Proceed the way you are called in the moment and see what happens.
True agency would mean everything we wanted would happen, yet we all know that sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t and sometimes what happens is much worse or much better than we could have imagined, let alone created.
Agency gives hope, something I have come to dislike. Hope implies there is something better which may or may not happen at some different time. Hope breeds expectations and expectations often invariably set us up for disappointments and avoidance of the truth in the moment.
All of this leads me back to the Bhagavad Gita when Krishna tells Arjuna “Your commitment is to action alone, not to the fruits of action.”
If you haven’t already explored this, I invite you to really look at who or what is making things happen.
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I agree with what you've written beautifully. I would only add that according to me agency is needed but not in the context in which it is used most often and assumed. For me, there are healthy and unhealthy agencies. The unhealthy version is about a false sense of control, lot's of doing, pushing, pulling and power, and the consequent burnout. The healthy version is needed to step out of being a puppet, being pulled by invisible strings and triggers, being ignorant. And yes, once we step out of that and more, we learn that there is something bigger and it takes agency again to let go of all the outdated and inherrited narratives and step into a new understanding of the world alligned with what intuitively feels right in our heart. So for me, the healthy version is about letting go of the chains so that we can dance with the wind and swim with the ocean. The unhealthy version, which is also the prevailing one, is about trying to stop the wind and redirect the ocean. Good luck with that to those still trying....I am done with that. 🤣😂
Compare my agency with your disappointed dreams. Then, buy my book/course/program/vitamins. Support my patreon. Use your personal power to buy my special thought doodads from www.disappointingMentalOverstock.com.
You CAN get away from bad feelings forever! You know, the ones you're creating because you're too dumb to know the actual remedy I possess and ALL the ancients also had! TRY HARDER!!!