Discovering your centre of gravity?

What pulls you back to being you? Whilst the gravity of the entire planets pulls you down towards the ground, the pull back towards yourself is less clear cut, when we wake in the morning, it can take a moment to figure out where you are and what is happening, what is less defined is when you can say that you are you again. The alarm clock rings and our automatic behaviours kick in, the noble warriors out there might be able duck and roll out of bed, into twenty press ups, a glass of water and then a meditative pose, the rest of us are more likely to hide under the duvet and hope that the snooze button is going to take the day off. However for all of us, there is a moment (or an hour) where we are not really sure who we are, we are just along for the ride until we get into the flow of the day, we might need coffee or movement to get going and then we remember what we are about, it is only then that we discovery our centre of gravity, who we are and how we are going to act in the world today.

We drop back down into ourselves with a familiar drop, we are here again after the wild wandering of the mind during dreams, where things just happen to our consciousness, we are free of our earthly tether but we are also without our direct agency, we follow the groves of our subconscious because we have no directing centre of gravity and self. It is the defining characteristic of being asleep, we lose ourselves and allow our subconscious minds the freedom of expression denied to them during our waking hours, we stop binding them to the central purpose of serving the story of who we are and the actions that the story needs in order to be true, so much of our existence is about proving the truth of that story, and it is exhausting for a good reason instead of just taking the right action, we have to check that it agrees with the story and that every subconscious mind agree to it too.

We are run by committee, with every action we remember our past, the mistakes we have made, what good action looks like, we seek to repeat the best version of whatever action we are attempting in the moment, we think of the future and how this action is going to look to our future selves. It is why we love habits so much, even bad one, because they come with pre-approval, they are actions that have made it through the committee so often that they do not have to be debated again, they are triggered, we act and then we are rewarded (by dopamine) for a task that has been done. That is why we describe habit as unthought about actions, not because they were never thought about but because they do not need to be thought about again, and it also why bad habit are so easy to acquire as they feel good in the moment, the committee does not scrutinise good feelings that hard, it overlooks the long term consequences until afterwards which we then experience as guilt or shame.

We can mislabel this committee as being us, it can feel like our centre of gravity where all our actions revolve about, in many ways it is where our character is formed, after all is not our actions the only guide to who we are, our actions matter both to us and others, and from the exterior view it is the singular way of accessing who someone else is. However it is not the only view of who we are, there is also an objective view that can be considered, we can witness ourselves from above this centre of gravity (or more accurately from within the centre) with our meta-awareness, we can observe the actions of the committee like a silent judging auditor. The committee is a collection of sub-minds that come together to present a binding moment of consciousness, but ultimately it is empty space that it is filled up by the sub-minds to swap information and judge their relative merits before communicating their decisions back down to the sub-minds.

There is nothing special about this empty space except as a space for communication, it does not have a personality or soul, we are drawn to it because it is the source of agency that we lack in our dreams, it feels real because that is it's purpose, it has agency but that is not the same as self or who we are. We know this to be true as we are so often horrified by our actions afterwards, our actions do not represent who we really are, it makes too many mistakes, it is there to take action until you take responsibility for doing so, it is a holding committee until the true you emerges, they are the children in charge of the show until the adult turns up, the fully matured version of you. We do not blame children for their action, we have compassion for them, we take it upon ourselves to teach them to make better decisions, we forgive them for their inexperience.

So why it is that we blame adults for their immature actions, obviously adults can do a lot more damage with their poor choices, and the world would be a horrible place without responsibility as without it we would not have the possibility of control (control being directly proportion to the amount of self-responsibility we take). However this is not an accurate picture of our maturity, it does not stop in a fixed manner at the age of twenty five when our brains stop developing, like a fine whiskey the longer you keep it in the barrel the better it tastes. We live, we take actions, we make mistakes, true maturity comes when we stop letting the committee from taking all the decisions, we do not just think through problems but balance it with how we feel about them (or the other way round, we do not just feel but start thinking as well).

However we are not just limited to surface thoughts and feelings, they are the weather, what increases our maturity is when we tap into the climate, the slower moving aspects of our being that are contained in our spiritual heart. The mind is reactive, it deals with things in sequence, one sense, one feeling, one thought at a time, the heart on the other hands in eternal and timeless, it is where the emotions lay, our higher, self-actualised version exists, it is the real centre of gravity that all our wild actions rotate around, every action that is out of alignment with it circles around, our regret pulls us back towards it, every unskilful feeling fires past it. Maturity is the feeling of getting closer to our centre, action that moves us towards that centre do not feel as exciting but they do feel easier, gentler and less effortful, we do not have to justify them with reason rather they have a sense of being right and we get to land on the solid ground of right action.

That is the payoff of finding your centre of gravity, you are no longer putting all that effort in to reasoning your actions into a framework of self because you are actually being yourself, you are acting from love rather than fear as you are no longer afraid of having to justify yourself. You do not have to debate in your consciousness whether you were right or wrong, you just act in alignment with yourself, you do not need others to like you as you like and love yourself and you do not have to prove to others that you are lovable.

By being yourself you stop wasting all that energy on thinking through everything, and instead you get to spend your presence on being aware of what is happening around you, you get to listen to exactly what is being said, you can investigate through conversation what you have in common with others, even recognise the love in other people that you have inside of you and it develops your compassion for those who are still gripped by the fear of those who are still lost in their immaturity and captured by their thoughts. It is by having a centre of gravity that you are able to give solidarity to others to achieve an unity of our common interests in the pursuit of our true self and the common love that each of us share within our hearts, we are all on the same journey and path to a better more loving world where our centre of gravity is shared and combined into a powerful source of love for everyone.