There’s a line we came back to in our room this week that lands deeper every time we discuss it. It isn’t that we should not make decisions that are best for all. It’s that we cannot.
The reasoning behind it is simple enough. To make a genuinely good decision for the benefit of all, we would need to know everything, everywhere, all the time, and how it influences everyone. We don’t know that. Nobody does. So what we call deciding is really the calculating part of the mind working with a small fraction of the information and presenting the result with great confidence. In science it’s called The User Illusion.
It’s worth considering, because it reframes intuition entirely. Intuition isn’t the soft option we fall back on when the analysis runs out. The word itself is in-tuition, inner tuition, inner teacher, inner guidance. It has access to more than the calculating or rationalising mind does, which makes it the more reliable advisor rather than the less reliable.
I’ve built my morning around this. Before anything else, I commit that I will not make any decisions by myself or without intuition. Then I set up the day, slowly, one word at a time. Perfect peace. “Presence. Purpose. Certainty. Happiness. Abundance. Freedom. In perfect Love. I have no needs”. It might sound like a small ritual, yet it does something quite significant, because it puts me in the day without the assumption that everything depends on my own working out. I noticed something this week that I hadn’t felt at this level before, which is that it has become more accessible. It’s not the words any more. It’s a commitment I can feel on a new level.
From there, something else follows that we spent a good while on. Any tension we feel is the difference between our plan and what’s actually unfolding. Any frustration or subtle annoyance is incongruence with the greater possibility available to us.
A Member gave us a live example. He’s waiting on trades to finish his home, and it’s been slower than hoped. He’s set a deadline, booked the removalists, and started dropping things off at the property to push everyone along. He described the frustration.
Another Member asked him what he might do differently if he was making decisions from a deeper presence. He thought about it and said he could increasingly let go, and take more of the attitude that it’s happening for a reason. Then he went further. He said the frustration is probably not as real or as important to him as he’d made out. He has a home. His family has somewhere to live. It isn’t really a problem.
The Member who asked the question then made a great point. If it isn’t a big problem, that makes it easier to experiment with. There’s less at stake. We tend to save this work for the situations that frighten us, which are harder conditions to learn in. The small irritations are the easier training ground.
The same Member was honest about his own experience of guidance, and how it differs from mine. He doesn’t get an instant response, that he’s aware of. He’ll ask what to do next and nothing comes. But something will happen, invariably, in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours that is so obviously the answer. It isn’t consistent, he said, but it happens often enough that he can see a pattern and pay attention to it. He also admitted to being a bit jealous that I often tend to get words straight away, and he doesn’t. He gets things that happen instead.
That’s an important correction to anyone waiting for their guidance to arrive in the same form as somebody else’s. Each of us has our own journey, as another Member put it, and we’ll all reach the same destination by different paths.
Another Member in the room recognised that he already runs his life this way and hasn’t been calling it anything. He operates on instinct daily without formally asking for it. What I offered him is that asking is also available, and that the useful moment is when we catch ourselves calculating. That’s the point at which we can set the calculation, rationalisation or speculation down. The more often we do that, the quieter the previous programming becomes, and the more clearly we hear what’s actually best for us.
One Member described a different edge of the same work, which is what happens to our relationships as we change. He put it well. You don’t owe anyone the version of who you were yesterday. And in the same breath he named the difficulty, which is how to keep rapport with people who’ve known you a long time while your thinking evolves underneath you.
I had a small demonstration of my own a fortnight ago. I’d hired a motorbike and had to have it back by 5pm. A friend and I rode out, had lunch with some people, and let the lunch run its course rather than cutting it short. We rode home, stopped for fuel, and I looked over at his phone and saw 4.56pm. Enough time to fill up, ride around the corner, and hand the bike back. He assumed I’d been hurrying. I hadn’t. I wasn’t rushing to get back, as I don’t rush anywhere. I was riding at the pace I wanted to, and arrived exactly where I needed to, when I needed to.
Time is a limitation we’ve agreed to, and most of our frustration comes from believing in it and then making decisions from inside that belief. Our plan says one thing, and what’s unfolding says another, and the gap between the two is the discomfort we feel. The incongruence.
So here’s the question I’d put to you. Where in your week are you deciding based on limited information and hoping that it’s for the benefit of all?
The calculating, rationalising, speculating mind will keep insisting that everything depends on you making “wise” decisions with limited information. It doesn’t. Set that down and you’ll notice the day starts arranging itself with far less effort from you, which, for many, is a considerable relief.
“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” — Blaise Pascal
