If you try to pay attention to what you're doing, you realize most (if not all) of it is unconscious. Moving your arm. Looking this way, that way. Responding to something. Emotions arising. Do you do any of these things consciously? I don’t. I just moved my PC, and only noticed that I’d done it after it happened.

There are very, very few truly conscious decisions, I think. So in a sense, you’re just an observer. Life, it seems, can be best likened to a highly interactive movie - so immersive that you forget it’s a movie at all.

The “self” that claims authorship seems more like a commentator arriving late to the scene, stitching together a narrative. The actual flow of life unfolds like an ultra-immersive simulation: responsive, adaptive, dynamic - but largely driven by forces deeper than conscious intent.

Consciousness, it seems to me, is ruled by the unconscious. It's like someone watching a show on the TV from a sofa, but then suddenly being sucked into the movie as the main character. Still powerless to affect it, because the movie already exists, yet feeling as if they’re actually there. Claiming agency where there is none.

What really gets my head mixed up is the realization that, on a much deeper level, the one “doing” is still me, just at a level I have no conscious awareness of, and no agency in.

That realization is at the heart of why I think the future becomes not necessarily what I want it to be, but what I, at the deepest level, actually am.

And in that surrender of agency to the “deeper self,” a truer freedom emerges. Because if everything I’m going to do is already determined, then I’m free to do anything fearlessly. If, however, I am free to do anything and nothing is determined, I become paralyzed by choice and are paradoxically unfree, bound by fear.

It’s very much like a child, who knows its parent has its back if it should fall.

The child is free to play, free to act, free to enjoy.

Perhaps that’s why Jesus called it “The Father". The key to such fearless freedom it seems, might just be to "Trust yourself". Which should not be hard.

"Trust yourself" echoes something I once heard in my "minds ear", as my world descended into madness. I know it to be true because the remembrance of those two words have guided me ever since.

Without them, I would not be writing this. I would fear ridicule. I would fear what people thought. As it is.. I trust myself.