Who is Driving My Car?

Who is Driving My Car?

Much of my life just happens to me. It’s like I’m driving a car and I’m on autopilot. My moving center operates the two-ton vehicle and holds the steering wheel, but no one is in the driver’s seat. No one is driving the car. My mind and attention wander. The Driver is not at home. No one holds the wheel, only another machine. How often have I realized, after arriving at my destination, that I cannot recall driving my car? The drive just happened.

Many people are afraid of autonomous cars—the newest invention in robotics—because they feel without drivers such vehicles will pose a serious hazard on the highway. It’s a fair assessment, a legitimate fear. How can such a car safely drive itself with no driver?

When I see clearly, I know that my lower self is no different from an autonomous car. This is what P.D. Ouspensky meant by, “Man cannot do.” How can a man wake up if he does not know he is asleep? The absent driver cannot do.

Fortunately, we can be more than a machine and can drive the car. We can learn to “do” with training, exercise, and growth of being. The first act of doing, or exercising inner will, is observing ourselves and dividing attention. With separation from the machine, we can find a higher sense of self. We find that this experience is in fact beyond sensing and is a different something, the Higher Self, a divine something above the mechanics of the lower self.

The work does not offer freedom for the machine; it offers freedom from the machine. − Girard Haven

Autonomous cars cannot do and I cannot do. Unless I awaken my possibilities, there is no doing. My life just happens to me.

What keeps you asleep? What keeps you from taking command of the vessel?

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William Massey-Stanley driving his cabriolet in Hyde Park, John Fernley