Any human being who has to hold himself together is someone who is ready to fall apart. Trying to hold yourself together is a terrible way to go through life. Our task is to prove this to ourselves. The fears of falling apart can never be quieted by adding more pieces to your self, such as success or the hopes of success. With this approach to life, you wear out faster, because you now have even more conditions you believe you must control in order to keep your life together. Consider closely the following higher insight. It reveals the intelligence behind your wish to let go.

Anything that you have to control, controls you. The problem with self-control is that it is part of a war inside of you. No one ever wins in a war! Let’s look at this same idea again from a slightly different perspective. Whenever an uncertain situation arises, the mind works feverishly to resolve it in order to regain a sense of being in control. However, the more feverishly the mind works, the more out of control you become! You can see this for yourself. Anything that is afraid of losing control is already out of control: an accident waiting to happen. There is more, and we must see it all if we are ever going to rise above our present life-level to true self-certainty.

Whenever we picture ourselves, there is one image that rarely, if ever, enters into our mental movie: that of being someone who is ready to fall apart. But again, few of us see ourselves in any self-compromising light at all. We feel safe within the dimly lit theater of our own circle-of-self pictures, and we return to it often—especially when the harsh light of reality starts to break through and show us that we may not be as together as we’d like to think. This is why we need the truth in our lives. The truth is what allows us to see reality without being frightened about what we see. Part of the truth’s rescuing action is to reveal to us that we are not apart from what we see. From this unique, inner vantage point, the light of reality isn’t harsh—it’s Home. The more of this light we can welcome into our circle-of-self and its cast of 1,001 self-images, the easier it becomes to let go. Why? Because we aren’t losing anything except for what has been keeping us in the darkness.

If we are honest, we realize that our lives seem to grow smaller as we grow older. We have fewer friends, fewer activities; we take fewer and fewer risks. But why? Why should a person’s possibilities for new and stimulating impressions diminish with their age? Why, if we are continuing to develop and grow as we should be, shouldn’t we be looking for greater and greater personal challenges instead of avoiding them? Could this slowly constricting life of ours be the result of an unconscious urge on our part to avoid any situation or relationship that might toss the proverbial straw onto the camel’s back of our picture of ourselves?

“I can see the logic of what you are saying, but as you said, I don’t think this applies to me.”
“Are you willing to see if it does?”
“Of course.”
“Good. Do you ever get angry or anxious?”
“Yes, I do, but what does that have to do with falling apart?”
“Let’s see. What makes you angry or anxious?”
“When things don’t go the way I want them to.”
“In other words, you’ve pictured how things should be, and when life doesn’t confirm these pictures, you get negative in one way or another.”
“Yes, that about describes it. What are you getting at?”
“Let’s work together at this. You said that when life doesn’t confirm your self-pictures, your hope of future security, love in relationships, or whatever it is, then some kind of stress or unhappiness comes up as these pictures of yours begin to fall apart?”
“Please proceed.”
“This shows us that within your present way of thinking, you believe your future happiness actually depends upon these pictures. This is why, as your pictures begin to crumble, so do you!”
“Yes, but why do I get angry or anxious?”
“Because these punishing emotions are part of a subtle system of self-subterfuge that accomplishes two dark things at once: it keeps the problem alive and, at the same time, it keeps the real solution out of sight.”
“What is the problem?”
“Essentially, it is a lack of understanding about your true nature. You are about to discover that you are not who you think you are. No matter how attractive or repulsive, you are not any picture you may be holding of yourself.”
“And what is the real solution?”
“Go ahead and let yourself fall apart!”
“What? That’s going to take some explanation!”
“And there is one if you will go through the experience; but for now, here is the intelligence behind this unexpected answer: you are not what will fall apart. Who you are can never fall apart. What will collapse is the haunted house of self-flattering and security-seeking pictures you had mistakenly identified as a solution to your shaky life. These pictures are not the solution to your shakiness, they are the source of it.”