The Horse and Buggy Story:

(Excepts from a talk by Dr. Bob Gibson in Salt Lake City October 1970)

[from Marsha   All my life I’ve heard people say I’m waiting for God to tell me the right thing to do and sometimes they say, “it was the will of God” when things don’t go to suit them.   I believed these words since it was so common a saying, but where did that leave me?   Where does it leave you? The following excerpt from Donna Lancaster’s library gave me another way of seeing.   It is a lovely idea to work with and observe.]

The discussion this morning will be relationships. When everything is in its proper relationship it works real conveniently. Let’s take a buggy, a horse and you have a driver sitting on the seat. So you have the vehicle. You have the motive power. You have the driver. If you put them in the proper relationship you have transportation.   You have a function.

Now you have heard of putting the cart before the horse. If you tie the horse behind the cart, the driver gets on the seat and hollers “Gitty-up”, and nothing much happens. He hasn’t got it in the proper relationship. If he puts the buggy behind the horse and the driver is sound asleep, the horse usually doesn’t go very far in any particular direction. If the driver gets drunk and falls off the buggy, not much goes on. Now if the driver got up on the seat and said, “I’m going to sit here and wait to see the will of the motive power here and then we will go”, the horse could care less which way he goes. His nature is to provide power. So who is responsible for the direction the motive power takes? The driver.

We can use this parable to see our various aspects – when all of this works as a unit, everything works smoothly. We have transportation. The driver is going where he wants to. The horse is furnishing the motive power and the vehicle gives the transportation to the desired destination.

However, does the driver take on the responsibility or does he sit down and whine and want to be told what to do and where to drive the horse. He waits for the horse to tell him where he wants to go and what to do?

The horse really could care less. His nature is Power. The nature of X is to express energy. Where would X express it without an awareness, the driver here, to decide what to do with it? Let’s put the driver to sleep with an anesthetic, maybe ether. What does the motive power do then? Nothing. Its nature is the expression of energy. What would you say then is the “will of the horse”? To please the driver? Now the driver is trying to get the horse to tell him what to do. Stays up all night trying to get the horse to tell him what to do. And what happens? Nothing. And the horse is sitting there with all the power of the universe ready to go.

And what are we doing? We don’t want to be responsible for directing the pony down the road. So we sit and say we want to find out the will of the Power. The Power loves the driver very dearly. The horse loves the driver very much or he would have already left the driver and the buggy. But he has only one thing, “You tell me what you want”. It’s up to you. And if you don’t do it, it won’t get done.

Now the will of the horse is for you to make up your cotton-picking mind, then we’ll do it. Now usually the driver doesn’t know what he wants. He pleads with the horse to tell him what to do. The horse will do anything the driver directs him to do. It will be happy to work with you as long as you drive. But when you don’t drive, everything comes to a stand-still or never starts. We have a responsibility and we avoid this responsibility, because if something happens and we’re criticized. we can blame the horse and say the horse did it. It was the will of the horse.

All our limitations have been chosen because we don’t want to be responsible for the outcome. Who is the director of the motive power? We are. Now with all this conditioning in the awareness we have, how many drivers are sitting on the driver’s seat?   (see the picture of man on the website under illustrations to see who the driver’s are.) But when the driver (awareness) tells all these Not-I’s to shut up and he’s driving the horse, everything goes well. It is a matter of making up the mind and giving the command to the motive power. We are through with conditioning, right there. We are the driver of this most wonderful steed who loves us dearly. But we like to use the phrase “it’s the will of whatever” to not be responsible. It there any excuse not to be the driver?

Do you see where you fit in the Picture of Man? Do you see what your position is? We not just going along for the ride, even though that’s what we try to do. There is only one thing that keeps us in eternal bondage. We don’t want to be responsible. “Now you just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it beautifully”, we say. But we have all the Power of the universe at our direction. The driver is always with the horse. That is the most perfect union in relationship there is. That is when the motive power and the direction are ONE. That is real marriage.

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