I can’t control them. Because they’re alcoholic. Drunk, they can’t be controlled. Sober, they’re worse, because there is the pretence of compliance. They don’t listen because they can’t, and if you squeeze a word in through the prison bars it’s promptly throttled by the existing captives.
But I can’t control my material life, either. My life is a box of cats. They will never sit in a row, neatly, miaowing California Dreamin’. They wake you up at four in the morning and scratch you. They need constant feeding. And they don’t love you back. Your material life does not love you back.
I can’t depend on the world, either, to become neat and tidy and nice, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, or ever. It’s never going to be neat and tidy and nice. You turn on the news. They’re shouting. You turn it off. You breathe, lying on your back. You turn it on. They’re still shouting. They are shouting because they like it. Figure that out, and much is explained.
When I’m locating the problem outside myself, at least the conflict at times results in victory as well as defeat. When I get over ‘them’ and try to live my own life, I realise that the conflict with you, with them, with the world, was really a proxy for my own individual conflict, a projection to release the inner tension.
That individual conflict, in which the ego seeks to usurp God and exercise god-like powers, if kept internal, will drive you absolutely crazy, because every victory is a defeat, as if you are playing chess against yourself, with the enemy confounding every move, as it can see your every move.
The only possible solution is radical, total, 360-degree detachment.
I still perform tasks, but, on a good day, my mind is free. And nothing matters but remaining at the still point of the turning world. And from that stillness, I can do one thing, and then another, and then another, putting each task back down in its new place on the board. The board is not mine. I’m just the mover of pieces.