The Sense of Agency

The psychological sense of agency has been defined as the subjective feeling of controlling one's own actions and, through them, external events, or as the perception of being in the driver's seat when it comes to our actions.[1] It addresses the question of whether this vehicle that we have is self-driving, driving itself and taking us for a ride, or are we driving it. To understand this, and to better understand ourselves, we begin by looking at what self-driving means in the context of being human, with this instrument of our body, heart, and mind. The sense of agency matters for our psychological health, for acting responsibly, for our spiritual work, for our relationship with ourselves, with others, and with the Sacred, and for living a life well-lived.

The fundamental hurdle on the spiritual path is our misplaced sense of agency. Our automatic patterns of thought, emotion, and physical impulses form a loose-knit agglomeration that we call our personality. We believe in that. We believe that is who we are, to such an extent that we abdicate our locus of agency to it, to our personality. Our personality chooses what we say and do; it chooses by habit and reaction. It chooses our thoughts. It chooses how we feel.

Yet these are not real choices. They are foreordained by our experience, our conditioning, our ingrained patterns of reaction to the events of our life, large and small. These pseudo-choices are automatic. Despite the contrary illusion, there is no free will in our personality, in our lower self. It may be good and kind, but is neither free nor independent. We become adept at hiding this fact from ourselves and from others, adept at promoting the illusion that our personality, with its many, often-conflicting impulses, is one integrated thing that is who we are, adept at pretending to be someone before we really know who we are.

At its core, our personality is empty. It is a programmed, self-driving vehicle that is driving us. We are not driving it. It is the wrong place to put our sense of agency because there is no agent in it. The agent behind our personality, the agent that everything in our personality points to is called ego. But that ego is an illusion, because there is nothing and no one really there. The mere fact that our personality thinks "I," does not mean that the I that it references is really there.

This misplaced sense of agency can be corrected and healed by our inner work, which enables us to see into ourselves, to see how our automatic, self-driven thoughts, emotions, and physical impulses, coupled with the deep need to be something, creates this mirage of an integrated personality, along with the pseudo-agency of a false, singular I out of the many fractional I's vying for center stage in us and successively purporting to speak and act for the whole of us. Seeing through this illusion exposes and removes this false sense of agency.

That opens the possibility of learning to be, just be. Through attention to the present moment, we assert and insert our real I into what then becomes our presence. When we are here in our body, mind, and heart, we can be said to be, to be present. We have a unified will, our I, our true agent: the one who sees what we see and does what we do. We all have this, though it may be buried under misplaced and false senses of agency. Our spiritual inner work brings our I to the foreground again and again, until it begins to stick. This is a major milestone on the path. Yet it is not the ultimate sense of agency we seek.

As we look deeper into ourselves, we "see" that our I, though real enough, does not begin in us. Its innermost roots, the source of our I, the source of our attention and will, open out into a timeless and comprehensive wholeness, encompassing all that was, is, and will be. We are a particle of the agent of the universe, a particle of all. In this deeper sense of agency, love is the wild unity underpinning the whole. By our work, by our presence, by delving within, by acting with conscience, and by prayer, we come toward that sacred, universal agent in stages.

As always, we begin where we are. One way to cultivate the sense of agency is through movement, especially non-habitual movement. If we are learning a new physical skill or a new way of moving, we push ourselves to pay careful attention to our movements and to move in the required manner. In those cases, it is clear that we are choosing to move as we do, even if clumsily at first. We are the agent behind the movements. Engagement with the arts, crafts, and other physical skills builds our sense of agency. Tai Chi, Chi Gong, and Gurdjieff Movements are examples of spiritual movement practices through which the sense of agency grows.

With habitual movements that we do daily such as brushing our teeth, bathing, dressing, walking, washing dishes, and so on, having a sense of agency in those movements does not come on its own. Indeed, we can let our automatic, habit patterns take over and drive those movements, without our intentional involvement, except perhaps to initiate the action. But it need not go that way. If we sense our body and stay present as the ongoing intention to move, as we walk, as we brush our teeth, and the rest, we can be fully engaged and present. We can be the conscious agent behind our movements, even the habitual ones, moment to moment. Then we really do exist, without pretense. We occupy the driver's seat of our being.

For this week, step toward being the real you.

[1] James W. Moore; What Is the Sense of Agency and Why Does it Matter?; Frontiers in Psychology; 2016; 7: 1272.