[http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zQgbnGEdaCE/S9DRhtc6lgI/AAAAAAAAA0w/DH4bCHUuI\ nU/s1600/Airplane_autopilot_small.jpg] <http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zQgbnGEdaCE/S9DRhtc6lgI/AAAAAAAAA0w/DH4bCHUuI\ nU/s1600/Airplane_autopilot_small.jpg> <http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zQgbnGEdaCE/S9DRhtc6lgI/AAAAAAAAA0w/DH4bCHUuI\ nU/s1600/Airplane_autopilot_small.jpg> http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zQgbnGEdaCE/S9DRhtc6lgI/AAAAAAAAA0w/DH4bCHUuIn\ U/s1600/Airplane_autopilot_small.jpg <http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zQgbnGEdaCE/S9DRhtc6lgI/AAAAAAAAA0w/DH4bCHUuI\ nU/s1600/Airplane_autopilot_small.jpg>
Thinking about Marek's fine challenge this Thursday morning, I find myself pondering the concept of "autopilot." In aircraft, that's that thing that is supposed to keep the plane flying straight and true while the pilots are off watching porn and casting one or more of the flight attendants in their own inner movie. When it works, cool; when it doesn't, headlines. I once knew a commercial airline pilot who was also a Buddhist. He lived in the same apartment complex I did in Marina del Rey, CA, near the L.A. airport. Relaxing in one of the complex's hot tubs one night, we got to talking and he told me that -- as a Buddhist and someone who tried to approach life from a mindful point of view -- he had somewhat of an issue with autopilot. He almost never used it. His reasons were clear, and completely pragmatic, not Woo Woo at all: "The autopilot makes too many assumptions about things, assumptions that may not be true." This got me thinking, at the time, about spiritual practice, and how so much of it is spent on autopilot. I had, after all, just walked away from the TM organization, in which I had spent many years "on courses," or "on the program," and thus "on autopilot." Now I was on my own, piloting my own inner aircraft, having to look out for mountains suddenly looming up out of the fog in front of me. No more reassuring automated voices from teachers or scriptures saying, "Just keep doing what you're doing. Everything will be OK. Take it easy, take it as it comes." If you think about it, much of traditional spiritual practice is structured in "being on autopilot." TM residence courses were structured so that you didn't have a single free moment to yourself; everything was preplanned and scheduled such that you knew exactly what you should be doing at every minute of the day. The rule was "follow the rules," and everything will be OK. Except when it wasn't. Like when someone on a course went more than a little crazy and someone had to handle it by calling doctors or the police or someone who *wasn't* on autopilot to take care of it. Because none of the people with their spiritual autopilots turned ON *could* handle it. Heck, even life outside of "courses" was like that to some extent. And one of the reasons, of course, was that a life lived on autopilot was actually the *goal* of the practice. It was considered low-vibe to think that *you* had any responsibility for your own life and its direction; the Laws Of Nature did all that for you, and so what you should aspire to is becoming more and more "in tune" with them, and just allowing them to do their oh-so-wise-and-benevolent thing. Autopilot. Many, many years later, I've come to *like* not living on autopilot. I *like* having to deal with each new day as if it's actually new, and as if it may present challenges that no electronics engineer could ever have foreseen well enough to program an optimal solution to and thus code them into the machine intelligence of an autopilot. Like the real, live pilot I met so many years ago, switching my personal autopilot OFF has been as personally liberating for me as him switching the one in his aircraft OFF was for him. But every so often posts like Marek's yesterday bring up the fact that, like everyone else, I get into ruts of my own design, and start coasting on autopilot again. I shouldn't be surprised. That is really the *nature* of mindful living; you never really "get it down" or "master" it; you just keep trying and, when you realize that there are areas of your life that are less than fully mindful, you try again. So I *like* this idea of turning OFF the FFL Autopilot one day a week, and instead of writing about the things we normally write about, trying something different, something new. Good luck to everyone today trying to find something new of their own to write about.
