Imagine a game someone might have gifted to us as a child. We open the box and turn it upside down. Hundreds of pieces fall out all higgledy-piggledy on to the floor. We feel quite excited at first. The sight of all those pieces seems to offer limitless possibilities. All of a sudden, we might feel something else: fear. Limitless possibilities can mean limitless confusion, indecision, and failure. We don't know if we should shout or cry, jump into, or run away. Children, frankly, live through some very hard moments like this.
It probably happened that something else fell out of the box but demanded our attention less than the pieces. It came as writing on paper. Its form could vary from a single sheet with just pictures to go by all the way to a rather long booklet full of writing. When we finally get to that document, we find that it gives us instructions, patterns by which the seemingly random pieces take form.
We try to fit the pieces to the patterns. We may struggle mightily to do so, but we mostly persevere (a word we would not know but would enact every day). After many a spurt and stop, we arrive at something that looks exactly, or very close to, what we saw in the instructions. Oh frabjous day. We made something take shape, to take on a form, to have some meaning. As children, we desire the power to do, to make, to change, and we receive precious little of such things. No matter how loving others mean it, we get ordered and pushed about a good deal. All of a sudden, in playing with this toy, we sense our own power to manipulate other things into a form that we choose. We don't consciously say to ourselves, "Wow, power like this really does something for me" and flex our muscles. We just feel the power within us and our minds and our hands, and then we flex our muscles. It just feels good to do the dominating rather than always being on the dominated side of things.
Then the "Oh boy!" sense of things turned up, or maybe the "Oho!" or even the "Oh no!" moment turned up. We, all of a sudden, sense that the instructions we followed helped us in one way, but also dominated us in another. We made form out of the chaos of all those liberated pieces on the floor, but the order belonged to the instructions. The instructions told us what to do in its terms, and we learned it and executed it. It did not give us the slightest idea about how to make order out of the chaos we find around us for ourselves. When we really wanted power within self and within the world around us, we needed to know how to make form for ourselves.
We need to know how to make such form out of chaos for the rest of our lives. We need to know now. It is in us to know. It's our gift. It's our essential power. Like language, we enter the world with the potential. It isn't a technique. We still need a right environment to make it fully happen.