The Mystery of Choosing
El Misterio de Elegir
A question about whether authentic choice resembles a kind of breaking away from conditioned patterns, and how free choice actually arises from intimacy with the mysterious source of all action.
The Mystery of Choosing
A question about whether authentic choice resembles a kind of breaking away from conditioned patterns, and how free choice actually arises from intimacy with the mysterious source of all action.
It's interesting how you describe it as not choosing. It can be tempting to think that on some level. I was going to say that when you break away from a system, when you exercise some sort of autonomy or individuality or unique expression, that represents a breaking away from the system, like a rogue ant escaping from the colony and doing its own thing. But it just occurred to me that maybe that is actually more what you're talking about with regard to aligning with what is true.
I'll propose to you a kind of koan, a bit of an exploration or experiment. What if the nature of choosing is that when a bird sings and when you make a choice, it is the same consciousness making those two choices?
Noticing what you don't choose
A lot of this practice involves many methods of teaching, and one that is quite popular is to notice how much you don't choose, so that you can see the automatic behavior. What that does is snap the illusion that constitutes the knowing of what I am. To believe that I am choosing everything I'm doing: when that is happening, we are more likely living in an illusion, not in freedom.
Choosing as mystery
But when the choosing is experienced as mystery, as this choice that is happening (you could say "within myself," except the "myself" isn't a known thing), it is choosing happening, and it's almost indistinguishable from the choosing of the bird song. It's equally mysterious. Why did the bird sing? Why did I choose?
And actually, there is not even a sense of "the bird and I." There is a choosing happening in this body and a choosing happening in the sound of a bird, coming from the same mystery. And when that is what is experienced, if we pay close attention, that's when choices are freer. When "I am separate from that, and I am choosing only this," we have delegated the choice to the automatic body-mind.
So in other cases there is probably some sensation of choosing, but you're saying there are attributes or qualities of how that choice feels that can help you understand whether it's the animal body-mind or mystery consciousness?
Yes, I'm describing two kinds of qualities, of feeling and also of interpretation. When there is a lot of interpretation, it is more of a mechanical behavior. This has actually been shown through fMRI studies, where the researchers will see the brain stimulus of a choice, and then up to a second or two later the person claims to have made a choice. But it had already been done by the body-mind, and then there is an interpretation: "I chose this." That creates a sense of free choice, but it's actually automatic. The closer we are, the more intimate we are with the process, the freer the choice.
Conditioning and the dissolution of analysis
As you're talking, I was thinking about conditioning and neural networks. If you have a person with ordinary experience in this world, it's tempting to make choices through analysis, through accessing the knowledge structure in your neural networks to make an informed decision. That can differ quite a bit from what happens when people are on psychedelics, for instance, where those neural networks are somewhat dissolved and they're more in touch with the rawness of experience, as you were describing.
Yes, and the experience is that you lose control, the sense of not having the control you thought you had. Because that sense of control is, in a sense, a story. It's a contraction and an interpretation. But there is something choosing, and we are that. It simply doesn't have the attributes and qualities that we interpret it to have. It is not separate. It is not located. It does not begin in time and end in time. It is always present. It is the alpha and the omega.
The unknown I am
And it is always creating, always new. It is unknown, mysterious, and it is the "I am." You can have very subtle glimmers of that, even just by hearing about it or reading about it. It's like that reflection of the moon in the lake. Something in you says, "Yes, yes, something, yes." And it draws us in. It's beautiful. It's loving.