Richard Feynman, the great quantum physicist and educator said in one of his lectures that just because something is possible does not mean it is probable. This is the same concept as my earlier article The Judgment Trap.
So often we claim something is true because it is possible, and that something is untrue because improbable. The truth is if something is true it is true no-matter improbable it is. And, in reverse untrue is untrue no-matter how probable it seems. If there is no proof either way it remains a probability.
We spend our lives looking for certainty and yet all we have all we have is varying degrees of probability because virtually nothing can be proved conclusively one way or the other.
But there is another type of probability, the probability of future events.
In Douglas Adams' book, Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Universe, there is a spaceship that has a propulsion unit called the 'improbability drive'. The way it works is that, if the pilot of the spaceship wants to be somewhere, he works out the improbability of being there and feeds this calculation into the improbability drive, and he is there.
Everything in our lives is improbable. Starting from your parents and place of birth, try to use statistical analysis to work out the probability of you being where you are now. The improbability will be infinite, but here you are.
That is why you are where you are, because it is totally improbable. Suppose that you were somewhere else. That would be equally improbable. Every single thing that we are, and where we are, is infinitely improbable. We are where we are now because this is the improbability we have chosen.
Lets a number on this and say that the probability of us being where we are now is a billion to one against. How do we use the improbability of anything to make what we want a certainty?
If you see that the probability of any of the other things that could have happened happening is also one billion to one against, then the probability of any of the billion options is equal. The probability of what you want is the same as the probability of anything else. The probability of what you want is equal to the probability of what you don't want.
Given an equal choice out of all the improbable things that could happen all we have to do is to choose what we do want to make it a certainty. It works every time provided we are not logical about it. But as soon as we are logical about it, and decide that something cannot happen because it is totally improbable, we make it impossible.
It does not matter how improbable something may seem, it has an equal probability with everything else, and all we have to do to make it actual is to choose it. The act of choosing changes the probability of that one possibility into a certainty.
Douglas Adams' improbability drive is the same logic, or lack of it. Where you want to be is highly improbable, but so is being anywhere else. So why not choose where you want to be and be there?
Another way to look at is a lottery with a billion tickets. The odds of any one person winning are one billion to one against, but the odds of someone winning are a certainty. How can we tip the odds? By choosing what we want.
The problem with being on a spiritual path is not lack. We can create anything we want. The problem is learning what we really want and choosing it. It really is that simple, and that hard.
There is a conversation in Alice in Wonderland I like.
'Where am I' said Alice. 'Where do you want to be' said the rabbit
'I don't know' Alice replied. 'Then' said the rabbit, 'What does it matter where you are.'
That is the real problem. We can have everything we want just by choosing it, but what do we want. The purpose of our spiritual path is to find out who we are and what we want. If we can work that one out the rest is easy.
