One of my guilty pleasures in life is losing myself in spy thrillers. I love reading them, watching movies about them, and even following TV shows based around the theme. One evening I was watching a show called Person of Interest, where a character named “Root” was connected via an earpiece into an electronic supercomputer that monitored and processed the input from every single computer, camera, and online recording device in the world.

When asked by a fellow agent roped into working with her what her plan was, she admitted that she had no idea. “I’m just following orders from the computer,” she said. “I usually don’t know what to do until moments before I do it.”

While I hesitate to read too much into a metaphor from a weekly TV series, it did strike me that this is a vastly unsung and underused facility we all have — the ability to tap into the supercomputer of the mind and let it guide us with “just in time” wisdom and real time responsiveness to the ever changing world in which we live.

Instead, most of us have learned to rely on the personal computer of our brain, ransacking our personal data banks for answers and insights into questions we couldn’t possibly figure out based on our own limited experience. When we get stuck, we either try harder or we ask someone else who seems to have a bigger or more relevant data base for advice.

If they have the answer we were looking for, this reinforces the efficacy of our strategy; if they don’t, we tend to simply assume that we asked the wrong person.

But what if the strategy itself is the problem?

What if reliance on the personal computer of the intellect (or the more powerful personal computer of someone else’s intellect) still leaves us stuck in a zero-sum game, where we are forever trying to wind up on the winning side of a balanced ledger of victories and defeats instead of expanding into the infinite possibility of a thought-created world?

There is a saying, adapted as best I can tell from the teachings of Francis Bacon on money, that “the mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.” When it comes to the little mind — the personal computer of my brain — I quite agree. Letting the petty tyrant of my personal ego try to run the show has proved a bust for enough years that I’m willing to concede that point without argument.

But the Universal Mind — what the religious among us might call “the mind of God” — makes a wonderful master and an indifferent servant. If you try to harness it and bend the universe to your will, as everyone I know who tries to use the law of attraction as a tool for acquisition finds out, you will wind up with some of what you want and a lot of self-blaming reasons for why you don’t have the rest.

If, on the other hand, you allow the universal Mind to harness your will, life unfolds with greater ease, grace, and adventure than you may have ever imagined.

With all my love,

For more by Michael Neill, click here.

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