Control is an Illusion
On Leaving Expectations Behind (And Why Embracing Experience and Exploration is So Necessary for Fulfillment)
Introduction
For the past two years, on New Year’s Day, I’ve gotten on the bandwagon of waking up to see the sunrise. While I’m not crazy about New Years as a holiday, I was genuinely thinking of going to bed before midnight since I so deeply honor and prioritize my sleep, especially over some arbitrary calendar date. However, somewhere inside I liked the idea of waking up with the sun at each start of the New Year.
Two years ago was my first attempt, and I was utterly blown away by what happened. Living on the west coast, there aren’t many good spots to catch the sunrise—plenty to see the sunset, but really only a few good spots that are elevated and look east over the mountains. The one I chose was a beautiful lookout, and my experience at that spot two years ago really set the tone for that year. The reason for this, though, wasn’t in the glory of the sun stretching over the eastern mountains. It was in the journey that unraveled to get me there.
I had done some research on the spot, and I thought I knew where it was, but was only half right. My friend and I drove halfway up the gravelly road, ascending through thick fog and dense old growth trees. We arrived at the point that I had hiked previously. The road continued, but I was so anxious we were going to miss the sunrise that I insisted we had to start hiking here.
This fear is important. This fear that I would miss what I was expecting to see drove me to make a hasty decision that inevitably turned sour. We started hiking, and at this point there was dense fog all around. A part of me dreaded that we weren’t even going to get a good sunrise view at all. We hiked for about twenty minutes—well, more like ran up a steep switchback incline, gasping for breath in the frigid winter air. At a certain point we both realized that this trail was not going in the direction we thought, and that it didn’t matter how fast we ran; we weren’t going to get any good view of the sunrise.
We were exhausted, and felt like we had missed our chance. There’s not much more to lose now. We decided to head back and try to drive further up the road to see what would come of it. Still carrying some hope for the experience we wished to have, we full on sprinted down this steep temperate rainforest hillside.
Given that it was around seven in the morning, and that I was literally running off of 5 hours of sleep (and all on an empty stomach), it would be fair to assume that I was entering a state of consciousness that was far from my normal. My body was electric. I felt each pound of my feet on the ground and the rush of adrenaline as we cut through the trees, the surge of energy as my body shifted into hunter mode, turning on ancient energy systems within me. I kept having visions that my friend and I were actually living thousands of years ago, hunting some animal with our handmade weapons. It was quite a way to start the year.
But we still had yet to reach the grand reveal. We got to the car and immediately started further up the road. The fog was thick and even more dense as we traveled upward. I was wracked with so many different feelings that my brain had emptied and I was simply in it for the experience. I was very much not expecting what happened next.
We soon arrived at the top of the road—the real trailhead and location of the eastern overlook. As we did, the fog suddenly gave way and we were greeted not only with a clear sky and the dazzling spectacle of sun rays that crowned the eastern mountains, but a massive sea of pink fog that stretched for miles below us over the western islands and ocean. It was truly one of the most beautiful sights I have ever witnessed. We were both shouting with joy and wonder at what we had found ourselves immersed in.
This experience set the tone for a year that was rather magical and transformative. It very much reflected the nature of this hunt for the sunrise, a glorious emergence into a supportive world. I went on a wild road trip through the southwest, I started my Substack, I made new friends that were more aligned with who I was on a deeper level, and I met a mentor figure who has not only helped me tie up many of my loose ends internally, but who has also introduced me to the circle of coaches and other amazing people doing inner work in my town. It was a year of moving from within the sanctum of my room, where I had been going through some massive transformations the few years prior, to reintroducing this new version of myself to the world.
Of course, all of this would have probably happened even if I didn’t have this beautiful experience at the start of the year, but having that experience definitely shifted something within me. It filled me with hope and a surge of love for myself and the world I live in.
Above all it showed me the power of not trying to control the outcome, and to allow something deeper, something alive to guide me.
Forcing Outcomes
While the start of 2024 was beyond anything I could have imagined, the start of 2025 was much, much different.
I went to the same spot as the year before, but this time I knew exactly where to go. There was no sense of exploration. We solemnly drove up the gravely road to the top, groggily getting out of the car to walk to the overlook point. There was no fog, just a massive blanket of overcast gray stretching as far as one could see. The clouds covered the mountains, and most importantly, covered the sun.
I felt disappointed, dejected. Not as hopeful and alive as the year prior. I knew what to expect, and I wasn’t even met with the shimmering newly born sun that I was hoping to see.
This reflected in a year where I felt like I didn’t do much. At least on the surface. Looking back, I didn’t have as many ‘adventures’ as I would have liked. I felt like I had stayed within the confines of my comfort zone. This wasn’t necessarily the case, I did have some wild experiences, but they weren’t ones of joyful exploration. They were heavier, more emotionally deep and weighted with a purging of ancient baggage. If anything, I experienced dramatic perspective shifts, and reoriented my entire philosophy towards life. I believe the heaviness and the deep shifting were related.
While it was necessary to experience what I did, I still couldn’t help but feel like I missed out on some of what the year could have offered me. I pushed a lot back, and I pushed a lot away. I was driven to change my routines and philosophy towards life because I was becoming viscerally aware that I was stagnating more than I would have liked. I had grand ideas, but was failing to actualize them, and falling further and further into a feeling of boredom and staleness, like I was stuck in an endless lolling wave—almost escaping, almost drowning.
This year however, I once again tried to see the sunrise. I wasn’t expecting much. I knew how the year before had gone. Secretly I was hoping for an experience like what I had two years ago, but I knew that was a once in a lifetime occurrence.
We started up the gravel road, once again caked in thick fog. As we got to the halfway point we were unexpectedly thwarted—The road was blocked off. Our plans had ended.
I felt oddly ok with this though. I was prepared to just go back home and skip the whole thing altogether. Thankfully, my friend was not in the same mood as I. Heading back down the road, he instead took a turn towards a trailhead that led down to the beach. Shrugging, I thought “what the hell let’s go.” We walked down the steep forested switchback to the bottom and finally up to the small sandy beach.
I genuinely gasped at the sight. As we walked up to the water, a great blue heron flew right in front of us, perching on a tall rocky outcropping. Together, the three of us (including the bird) looked out over the crystalline water. The hazy, watercolor islands peaked out in the distance, and the beautiful pastel palette of blues and grays stretched out before us. We had descended below the fog line, and were greeted with shockingly clear ocean water and a serene winter painting.
Thinking back to the past two years, I was struck by how much letting go of my expectations opened the door to having a marvelous, novel experience. It wasn’t the sunrise I was expecting, but it was so much more. A reminder that ascension towards radiant sunlight is beautiful but only half the picture. That cozying up to the earth is just as ephemeral and transcendent.
If I had resigned to my mood of apathy and retreat, I never would have gotten to have a magical new years day morning. My plans thwarted, I would have let go of any sight towards something else, that there could even be anything else that was possibly better than what my small imagination could conceive. I am so glad my friend was driving, and that I got to let the forces of the universe take me to something far beyond myself.
This is the power of releasing expectations, of allowing yourself to be swept away by the natural wonder and amazement of this world we live in.
Inner Systems and Self Observation
When it comes to releasing expectations and allowing life to move without restriction, it becomes important to not only look at the world around us, but at the world within us as well. I would even go so far as to say that this inner world takes priority to the outer world, and sets the stage for what’s able to be experienced outside of us (but I’m a heavily leaning introvert by nature so of course I would think this). Ultimately, learning to treat both with an equal openness and allowance of flow opens the door to deeper states of consciousness.
I plan to go much deeper into this topic in other articles, but for now I’d like to simply introduce the idea of parts. At the core of many transpersonal and depth psychologies lies the fact that the self is composed of many individual selves, or parts, that make up a continuous experience of being. Jung attempted to portray these parts as archetypes, universally understood figures such as the “inner warrior, magician, etc.” The list is endless, and any inner experience of self takes on an archetypal component in his framework.
Later on, Richard Schwartz developed a model of how these parts interact (coining the term “parts”). This became Internal Family Systems, and rested on the idea that we are comprised of a matrix of inner parts that take on specific “roles,” namely a triad with a controlling “manager,” a reactive “firefighter,” and the core experience of pain that underlies this triad as a wounded “exile.” This basic pattern shows up everywhere in our inner world and creates many of the inner struggles we experience.
This past year I got the privilege of meeting, conversing, and working with someone in my town who has developed his own model of these inner selves, and has taken it to a level that completely blows many of these pioneer psychologists away. I plan to write more about his model in this coming year, but for now go check out his Substack!—Frontiers of Psychotopology.
For the purposes of this article, I am going to focus on this basic triad.
This triad is important because it is responsible not only for our inner struggles, but for our outer ones as well. In the case of my new years day story, you can see how my inner managers—the parts of me that want control and have expectations—were very content with not having a fun novel experience. They wanted to avoid the unknown, because they were secretly protecting another part of me that felt some type of deep pain and is still identified with the pattern of that pain.
If the controlling manager were to not succeed at its job, that pain would explode into my consciousness, derailing me, causing me to experience it all over again. This belief is, however, unconscious to my conscious self, my ego, and at that moment I’m only able to see within the confines of the manager due to the specific level of overall awareness I’m able to hold at that moment. I wasn’t able to see the full picture because I was in an unconscious reactionary holding pattern.
This manager wanted to control the outcome because, even though the unknown could have brought an endless supply of goodness and gifts, it could have also brought more pain. Even worse, it could have activated that core pain living within me, making me relive a pain I had already experienced. This reliving is the very definition of hell.
Now why is this all important? Because none of these parts in question are fully “me.” Even if I take a step back and identify with the one who observes or witnesses this inner interaction, I’m still not fully entering a space that is completely me. I am, if anything, the experience of all of these selves as they shift and move through different levels of consciousness.
There is a whole inner matrix of relationships happening within each and every one of us, and these correspond to the myriad of relationships happening in the world around us as well. We don’t control any of it, and attempting to control it is just falling into the experience of a small part of your totality. One perspective within an ocean of perspectives.
Unfortunately, we live in a world that heavily promotes “self-control.” The main message is to buckle down on yourself, to be neat and tidy, to have a strong label for what you stand for. This message only further promotes a limited consciousness as all energies are given to one perspective. This reads of self-centeredness, and is the undercurrent responsible for not only the lack of empathy and acceptance towards each other, but towards the planet we are an intrinsic part of as well.
Letting Go
So what’s the solution to all of this? We can do the deep inner work and shift each of these maladaptive states towards something more fluid and life promoting, but underlying all of this is learning to let go of the need to control.
Self-observation will forever be the first step in doing any kind of work on yourself. Simply observe yourself and what comes up in any given situation. Allow it to play out, allow yourself to give in fully to the experience. Don’t try to stifle what’s there without first bringing full consciousness to it.
Life cannot be controlled, it can only be experienced. There is a profound beauty in letting yourself be and act and respond to situations the way you would naturally, without overthinking it. This may sound too chaotic, but when you allow yourself to respond naturally while simultaneously maintaining an enlarged perspective and attunement to the bigger picture, you’ll find that you’ll naturally flow with what’s happening around you. There’s a certain “water always fills the container it’s poured into” experience that arises naturally.
This allowance of yourself to be how you are naturally called to be is the essence of not only authenticity, but self acceptance as well. You stop seeing yourself from the perspective of a controlling manager that wants to control how others see you. You simply enjoy the natural beauty of being a living being and all that this entails. It becomes authentic because you are not forcing some image outwards, not trying to act as some archetype you’ve identified with. You simply just are.
When you operate from this place of self acceptance and authentic living you begin to see others in the same light. You don’t see them as being fundamentally evil, or wrong, or bad, or good, or any adjective you may reduce them to. You simply see how they are caught up in one of their parts and internal systems. Not only this, but you get to see how their parts activate other parts in you, how you’re engaged with an inner drama that they seem to be a part of, and most importantly, how this drama isn’t actually the essence of who either of you truly are.
In the Bhagavad Gita, while relaying to Arjuna the true nature of reality, Krishna mentions that what we perceive in this reality is really just “the guṇas acting on the guṇas.”
“When wise persons see that in all work there is no agent of action other than the three guṇas, they know Me to be transcendental to these guṇas, they attain My divine nature (BG 14.19).”
The guṇas are the three threads of life as we experience it. There’s one towards enlightenment and bettering the self, one towards death and apathy, and one towards passionate movement. Krishna explains that none of us are these guṇas, they are simply occurring and we are witnessing it. This is very similar to these inner parts, and how we are all reacting to each other’s parts, parts that actually already exist inside of us and carry their own autonomous nature.
When we understand this we can begin to have deep empathy and compassion for others. They may lie, and cheat, and steal, and fuck you over in so many different ways you lose count. But underneath it all they are just afraid, reacting to their fear, and stuck within the confines of their worldview.
The best thing we can do is forgive, over and over again, for even reflected in Christian Theology, the Bible says, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
“Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do’ (KJV, Luke 23:24).”
This forgiveness plants the seeds for not only acceptance of the other, but acceptance of the self as well, for the other is just a reflection of the self. There is no real separation.
Loving those who are afraid is what allows them to grow in awareness. Punishment does not work to help someone grow. Punishment only helps them become what you want them to become, not what the best version of themselves wants. Discipline is not foolproof in generating deep change. The only thing that genuinely helps someone grow is a deep and endless pool of love and compassion.
With this supply, we can develop courage—a courage that is prerequisite to doing inner work (for really the one who is able to go deep within themselves and look at these often painful feelings are the bravest of us all). A courage to face yourself and know you won’t be swept away by the existential waves of alienation.
Fear alone does not provide the necessary fuel, for it is not fear, but love that is the true generator of courage.
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