choose choicelessness

It's time to choose choicelessness

Our suffering, our torment, comes because we feel we have choice, and that choice implies that we are going to miss out on some opportunities. We choose one thing instead of another. And in that choice, of course, we go down one path, and that path might bring us great, beautiful, amazing things. But we don't know what lay down that other path. We feel we have missed out on something, a possibility, and that's in a way our anguish – a missed opportunity.

In reality, though, we don't have choice. We don't have free will. Our choices are conditioned. And when we fully acknowledge this, there comes a relief. In a way we surrender our power. By admitting choicelessness, we are saying we are not in control. Another way of putting this is that our life unfolds according to existence, or according to the will of God – thy will be done, as the Christian prayer says. And as long as we think we have choice, then it's a choice to surrender that control to the will of God.

But another way of looking at it is that's actually what's going on anyway, and we have just been fooling ourself to think that we are choosing. Of course we have various urges within us. We have the instinctual side, the animal side, the id driving us to satisfy our basic needs of food and security, of sex. And then we have the superego, the voice of conscience that's been hammered into us by society, by our parents, the manmade morality which allows us to live together in community and society. And of course often these two are at odds with each other. And there is the ego sitting in between, trying to decide whether to do what is morally required by society, or to do what our more instinctive passion desires. And then there is the rational mind, trying to make rational choices.

However, there is another part of us that can determine our actions, and that is our being. It's deeper even than the instinctive gut feel. When we are really in tune with our environment, when we are totally present, centered, grounded, and open to what is around us, then moment to moment we always know what to do. We always know how to respond to the moment, not through thought, not taking time to figure out what to do, but in the moment we can respond from a place that is so connected to the rest of existence that we can't call it a choice any more. When we respond in this way to life, life is a dance, and we are responding to the music of life, and life has a flow to it, a beauty to it. This is the choiceless way of being in the world. This is the way of the buddhas. 

So I say, it's time, it's time now to choose choicelessness. It's time to admit that you are a buddha.