When it comes to this idea of trusting the universe, putting it in the hands of whatever's
out there and just being okay with whatever happens: not an easy thing to do sometimes,
and it seems like one of the pieces that makes it difficult, one of the areas of resistance
against having that kind of trust and faith in the universe, is just that it seems so
passive.
It seems like "Oh, I'm not gonna do anything myself.
I'm just going to let the universe take care of me, and I'm just going to passively accept
whatever the universe throws at me."
And it seems to kind of put us in this kind of passive position where we're giving up
control over our own lives.
There's something more satisfying, in a way, with this idea that, you know, "I control
my destiny.
I will, through my own choices and my own actions, decide what happens to me."
Because then at least I'm doing it my way.
Maybe I get unlucky, things don't go my way, but at least I can choose.
I can make my own decisions, take my own actions, and then if I go down, I go down living life
the way that I think is best.
So there's this certain kind of pride that comes with a kind of active approach to life,
where I'm making the decisions.
Of course, we all know we still have to be at the mercy of whatever fate throws at us,
but at least we can kind of take this kind of active approach to making our own decisions
and actions.
And because of that, it seems like we look at the idea of trusting the universe, and
it just seems like maybe being lazy, doing nothing, crossing our fingers and hoping for
the best.
So I think another way of looking at it is if we just- we don't need to see trusting
the universe as not taking action.
It doesn't have to be passive at all.
We can still take full action, and you know, do our best to make our own decisions, and
try to live using the abilities that we have.
We can still make all these, all our choices and actions that we're able to.
But the difference is in dividing what we do and the results.
And this seems to be a powerful way to look at things, is if we can really separate away
the results away from what we do.
Of course, we do things, we want the results, so it is hard to separate them, because you
know, we're doing something and we want a result from it.
But it's the actions that we do that we can control.
The results are up to the universe and chance and fate and everything else, that something
outside ourselves decides whether we get the result that we want.
But we can still make the decision to take the actions that will tend to more likely
get us the result that we're looking for.
So if we can separate actions and results, and just we decide OK, you're still looking
for a certain result, and certain actions make that result more likely.
Say like OK, I'm going to exercise, because I want to have a fit body and be healthy.
OK, well, there's no guarantee that you're gonna be fit and healthy if you exercise,
because so many other things can go wrong along the way.
But it certainly makes it a lot more likely that you'll be healthy than, you know, simply
living on a couch.
So we take the action, and naturally, you know, we're exercising because we want to
be fit and healthy, but if we can separate those in our mind: once we've decided to exercise,
then we can simply exercise.
Choose that action and do it as our choice, our action, application of our will.
We choose "I'm going to do this action, regardless of what happens."
And forget about the result.
Don't even worry about it.
Let the universe take care of it.
Same with maybe making money, and you know, having a home and food.
You know, maybe we're working in order to support a home and food.
But all the things that can go wrong, we don't know how everything's going to turn out.
So still it makes more it makes it more likely for us to have home and food if we work.
So we do our work and then have this kind of trust that things will probably be OK.
Now maybe the word "probably" doesn't fill us with too much confidence, because, you
know, if someone says "You'll probably be safe", it doesn't sound very comforting.
But maybe that is the best that we can get in this universe.
We never get a guarantee of anything.
And if we can accept the idea of, you know, "I'll do my thing, and things will probably
be OK, and in some ultimate sense it will all be OK", then maybe that's all we need
to have trust and faith in the universe.