You Want to Live Here, Trust Me

There is a place you can go. It is like no other.

You have the ability to go there regardless of your wealth, status, or availability of time.

In those rare, rare moments of serenity, you may have been shown a glimpse of what this place is. The place of control.

A human being, effectively, spends their life reacting to things. Everything is a reaction to some sort of stimulus.

The unfriendly stare of a stranger is a stimulus. You see these unfamiliar, piercing eyes darted toward you, and you feel something.

Perhaps you feel self-conscious. Perhaps you feel nervous. Perhaps you feel annoyed.

Whatever you feel (and potentially do), that is your reaction.

But there is a place that exists between the stimulus and the reaction. Though, it flashes by you so quickly, you’d be forgiven for doubting its existence.

It is useful to think about every experience in your life as shifting between two rooms.

First, there is the stimulus room. This is the world you reside in: All its people, objects, and everything else. You may only leave this room once you are dead.

The second room is the crucial one. This is the control room. After facing some sort of stimulus in the first room, you seamlessly glide into the control room.

There are endless buttons to press and gears to shift. However, for the most part, things do not appear to be this way. Your conditioning is so entrenched — your life is so habitual — that your time in this room goes by instantly. You don’t even register when you enter and exit it. Moving on auto-pilot, you press some buttons and fly straight back into the first room.

You fly straight back into reality having felt some feelings and potentially deciding on some course of action.

However, in truth, little was done by way of deciding. Do you decide to feel bad about being fired? Do you decide to feel bad about the death of a loved one? Do you decide to feel good about a compliment?

It may as well be said that you don’t decide. Certain things just trigger certain feelings and actions, and you’re simply left to face the music.

We may as well stop here. Because you will struggle to believe what I will tell you next.

You can decide. On all things.

But to do so, you must be a master observer. You must observe every stimulus, feeling, and action with surgical precision. You must familiarise yourself with the control room.

Once you do, your eyes will start to open. You will stop sleepwalking through your life. Time slows down. You stop viewing things as the experiencer: Now, you observe things from a bird’s eye. It feels as though you’re watching someone else—rather than the thing you call yourself.

You start to see the absurdity of it all. You start to recognise your conditioning. You watch yourself in the control room, pressing buttons in a state of sleep.

You become horrified. This prison — all this suffering…

It was you? All along, it was you?

It is from this shock that you are jolted from your slumber.

Now, with your eyes open, you can see all the buttons and gears. Spend time in the control room. Live in the control room.

It is here that you reclaim freedom. It is here where you can decide how you react to anything.

You may live here if you wish. But make no mistake: Only you can find the way to get here.