Conscious Awareness, Free Will, Choiceless Action

[silent thunder]

Well here we are again with this choice topic.

 

Rather than derail another thread, I'm bringing this here.  Disclaimer:  I'm not sharing this to convince anyone of anything.  But I'm driven to share my unfolding experience and realization of the processes going on within that amorphous thing I refer to as 'myself'.  To be honest, this doesn't even feel like a choice.  I've deleted it twice, hidden it once in my personal section and am now going to post it because I find it intriguing and enjoy sharing and listening to other's experiences.

 

So...

 

Lately (particularly the last 13 years or so, moreso since becoming a father and watching my son develop, delving more deeply into cultivation than ever before in my life and witnessing as my wife's life is totally consumed for the last four years in the suicide inducing pain of assimilating resurfacing repressed memories of childhood trauma and torture), my experience of choice has shifted and I no longer hold to my prior notion that what I refer to as "I" is something that moves through life enacting conscious choices that exhibit control over my actions, environment and responses to the stimuli of life.

 

More and more as I release into being, it seems compellingly to be the case to me that what is commonly referred to as choice is really the illusory experience of control over compulsive unconscious actions of response to stimuli, driven by conditioning, subconscious impulses and survival prompts... and is not a consciously driven response at all.  Action and reaction happen, and then conscious mind assigns rationalization after the fact.

 

As I experience it now, the actual choice occurs beyond/beneath conscious awareness, prior to the concsious mind's involvement... the illusion of choice, is the rationalization my conscious mind makes during/immediately after the compulsion to act and is an attempt by the conscious mind to explain to my mind and to others why the compulsion took place, while giving me an illusory and supposedly comforting sense of control about it.

 

I know this is neither popular, nor irrefutable and whenever I share this, I add the disclaimer that I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything, merely sharing my unfolding realization of my experience of the illusory and surface nature of the concept of conscious choice... (and boy did I resist this for a long time, it was unsettling in the best of cases at first, and downright terrifying in others).  Yet it has arisen time and again, more recently as an almost physically palpable sense that this experience that I used to call conscious choice arises deep beneath conscious direction. 

 

Accepting it, or at least no longer needing to define it or fight against it, has become incredibly liberating.

 

This notion has been reinforced repeatedly with myself and those closest to me in recent years, particularly in cases where there are repeated patterns of destructive 'choices' being made by seemingly rational people.  Looking back, how often do we think to ourselves... 'why the hell did I do that?'.   Only after the reaction, does a rationalization arise with 'a reason' for why I made that choice... when in the moment, there is only action/reaction.  Conditions arise and my system responds to the stimuli and then my conscious mind interprets what occured in an attempt to make sense, understand or have a sense of control.

 

Also contrary to what I used to assume, that this would be demoralizing and inhibiting and eat away at my sense of potency... my experience has been the opposite.  Liberation, bouyancy and a sense of incredible potencty arises as I release into accepting that my choices arise from my true nature, in the same manner that my heart beats, my endocrine system operates and my bones and organs repair themselves without my conscious choice or interference.

 

I experience a grand bouyancy of the utterly intimate interconnectedness of action arising from my essential nature.  A merging of the outer and inner is a seeming biproduct, giving rise to the palpable notion of unity between my true nature and the entirety of stimuli around what I consider to be my separate self.

 

It certainly seems I don't choose my emotions, or illnesses, or thoughts.  Who chooses their thoughts, or has conscious control over their mind?  Isn't that what meditation and cultivation is all about?  The attempt to rest control over what and how much, when and what we think and feel?  Isn't cultivation on a base level and admission that we don't choose concsiously what we think and feel, but would desperately like to... so we train and rewash our brains in order to try and gain some more control over processes that lie beyond the slim light of our conscious focus?

 

Are you choosing how you feel in response to my words, or the barking of your neighbor's dog, or your reaction to the guy who cut you off, or the woman who held the elevator door for you?   Do you choose to drink water over juice?  Did you choose to be thirsty?

 

Can you choose not to have an emotion, or not to respond to my words if you disagree when I claim 'we are all meat bots of awareness... complex patterns of predictable behaviors, programmed by unconscious survival drives responding to the stimuli of our environment through our desires to certain responses by the vast unconscious process of our own dance with Maya?

 

If we choose our parents... then perhaps there is some choice in the universe.  Otherwise all of the stimuli that forged the responses I have to my environment, were beyond my conscious control as I was conditioned by my environment, society and family. 

 

How often do we ask a child why they did something and they respond 'i don't know'. 

How often do we wonder why we did something?

 

We act according to our nature... just as all living beings do.  And are we ever really acting?  Primal action?... My experience is I am always responding to stimuli, not creating independent action.

 

So where is choice, from where does it arise? 

 

To me, my actions accord with and stem from my essential nature.  How often do I intend to do one thing, change a behavior and then find myself doing just the opposite? 

 

Even after decades of dedicated practice and systematic brain rewashing... my reactions seem to arise from deep within my compulsory nature.

 

When there's a discrepency between my conscious mind's intentions and wants and my actual responses... I get the sense that my conscious mind is like a child with a toy steering wheel, sitting in the passenger seat while dad drives the car.  I steer and shift and choose... and the car goes where dad drives it.  The flea riding the elephant says... "let's go to the library and study daoist texts..."  and the elephant nods, then crashes back through the forest to the watering hole where the pretty ladies bathe...

 

Take the actions of soldiers in battle, who find themselves careening through cascades of bullets and mortar fire to grab their fallen brothers and sisters and drag them to safety... Ask them after the fact what was happening at the time and they often respond "i don't know... i wasn't thinking, i just did it".  Reaction arises from our essential nature is how it seems to me.

 

The teacher who stepped in front of the bullets meant for students in the high school... this to me speaks of the compulsory nature of reaction to stimuli being a choiceless action arising from one's essential nature with its source far beneath the slim flashlight of conscious awareness.

[Everything]

I totally get where you're coming from, you don't control your emotions, but that is a good thing. Just like you woulden't want to control a navigation system, you don't want to enter all the details of it and try to make it guide you to a location you want by changing all the signals. What you wanna do, is enter a difference location, and enjoy the guidance that lets you know you're on your path.

 

If you feel really bad, extreme negative emotion, it means your thoughts are already rolling in such high momentum and attraction power, that yes, you no longer have control. Once you give thought to something that feels bad, long enough, that pain can even turn into physical discomfort and illness. It may sound cheesy, but the secret is to prevent this from happening, and not healing it. Because if you heal something, you focus on it, and from that point of view, you support the ilness and the cause of the illness.

 

However, if you truely feel like you're stuck in despair, then you have no choice, but just look for what you're doing wrong, and desperately try to do something, that allows for emotional comfort. Meditation is a good way, and the pain will also really motivate someone to focus, which allows one to stop thinking, or distract themselves from a powerful momentum of thought patterns that keep on expanding. And those thought patterns can cause tremendous despair, so rather than trying to turn a running train to stop, you simply release your attention on those thought patterns, and you sort of naturally wanna keep thinking those thoughts, so your mind keeps going back. But if you for 20 minute, make time and decide, that you are going to do your best to constantly return your awareness to your breath, or mantra, or vision of your eyes, or you can even count your breaths to ensure you fall back into thinking. Eventually, what will happen, your mind sort of becomes silent, and in that, a clarity appears, emotionally, it will feel like a mountain of cool waterfall flowing down a hellish valley of fire, and the relief is tremendous. And just doing this one time, is enough to help you realize, that perspective, and realize you have to ability to not think, which is allot easier than trying to change your thoughts, and still yet, restores your natural inclincation to harmony and balance, no matter if you had discomfort just 4 minutes ago, or you have been depressed and anxious for over 50 years. A simple ceasing of thought, naturally allows for harmony and balance to return, it is just how nature is inclined. 

 

Our minds are powerful, that is why you have your heart as guidance. And you don't need to change your emotions, and neither control your thoughts. Rather, understand, you have all your power in this very moment. And you can choose what to think or give your attention to. And if you think about what feels bad, you will always feel bad. If you can find a thought that feels better, from that if you allow that to occur, and surrender to it and let it happen and just go with it, for the sole purpose of finding relief, and not trying to fix anything, and you come closer to a place of acceptance. And then from that point of view, you have the leverage of harmony and balance to work with. And you can exercize that leverage to improve anything in your life. But just like you don't put the oxigen mask on other people, before yourself, you first connect your own, and thereby, have infinite times more power to save many many more people. So don't try to make people happy, if you yourself are not happy.

 

And this going with the flow thing you are sensing creates tremendous relief, because everything in the universe goes with the flow. We humans can only choose to not go with the flow, and have no power in wether or not we actually go with the flow. For in your trying to go against your own nature, like for example, trying to change the past, they are still moving into the future, no matter how hard they try. Infact, if you actually build a time machine, and go to the past, it will be your future, you experience the past from a new point of view. As everything always changes, including change changes into the unchanging law of existance.

 

So in a sense, many people think everything is going wrong, untill something really big hits them, and takes their ability to think that everything is going wrong away from them, and thus, suddenly, they have nothing to hold on to anymore, no power to resist the wellness of all that exists, no power to resist the goodness that is and will always reach for you. You can however, create a lifetime of resisting all the good things that naturally want to flow into your experience, developing habbits and patterns of resistance. But again, death instantly takes all of that away. And often people don't realize how easy it is to sort of let the resistance you have within you die, even while you are still alive and conscious. And meditation is great tool for that, to achieve the mind ceasing thought, as you constantly return your mind from a thought back to your awareness of your breath, untill in time, you will find that your mind is silent, and in that thoughtless experience, you will feel better. And that is how you know you've achieved it.

 

It may be subtle to feel the difference in emotions, if you're used to ignoring them your whole life. Thinking you have no control over them, having been thought by society to go against your own nature, and feel bad, and just suck it up, deal with it, when that is the last thing you wanna be doing. Cause eventually, it will attract illness to you. And again, that will be usually the point when people decide to let go of it all. Of everything. When if you just meditate, before you even feel bad, and feel good, and allow that natural flow of your being to dominate your life experience in all aspects of your life, no illness comes to you in the first place, because your heart would instantly kick into pain the moment you even think about a perspective of life that does not serve you. But you have to learn by personal experience. And when you have developed enough experience, your habbits of thought, becomes conscious to you, and when you become aware of your thinking, just in the moment of thinking it, you become aware you just created that thought, you just chose it, and now it is no longer a habbit, but a choice. Just like smoking a cigarette out of habbit, and then becoming self conscious about it, now you have a choice, you have power and freedom, right here and now, in the present moment.

 

And you may use that power to choose to think about what feels bad, wether in the past or present or future, you create those ideas with your mind. And you cannot reach a perspective of the past that serves you, unless you are in flow with the harmony of your nature, so sometimes, you need to let go of the past, to stop thinking, in order to heal it, when you got your own oxigen mask on, and can now see clearly. That's what meditation does, hooking the plug of the vacuum cleaner into the power socket. And not meditating, is like, vacuuming the flower without power.

 

And also, we act according to our nature, but we can also act in discord with our own nature. And in that you create clarity for yourself. This really hurts, I don't want that, I rather want this. I don't want war, I want peace. So you move towards peace.

 

And if you do have clarity, you can think about what you don't want, and maybe imagine what you do want, and feel how that feels. You do have the ability to think different thoughts, and thus you have the ability to feel different emotions. So it's not like you're completely powerless, but you don't want to change your emotions, you want to simply choose the thought you want to think now, that's it. Always in the present moment is your power. And just accepting your life as it is, often returns you very fast to that point of power of the now. And then when you finally step into your power, now you can make positive change in your life.

 

You could say we have a destiny, and that is to fulfill every possible desire that life can hold for us. But we in our physical experience do not have nor need the awareness of all those details. We came here to focus specifically, on the contrast of experience and variety, and expand as a result our conclusions and preferences. And so, we have a non-physical side to who we are, a small part of this big non-physical consciousness' awarness is focused here and now through your physical body, but you are still, and always will be, connected to that larger part of all that you are. And you possibly cannot think it, because you've been thought from a young age to block it, but you can always however FEEL it, it is a non-physical connection, and your emotions help you know wether you're now in allowance of that connection or resistance towards it, meaning your soul, or true nature. And if you feel good, you have that perfect blend of physical and non-physical in perfect coherent harmony, just as is intended, before you came here into this physical body.

[Marblehead]

Know your enemies better than you know your self.  (Our inner enemies.) (Your self being what we consciously prefer.)

 

 

[Everything]

Yeah for sure

Also again, you are not a victim of the past at all, the past doesn't define you, infact, you define it. And often when people feel bad about the past, they just have to allow themselves, as their nature already wants to naturally do, just say

"fuck you you rapist or torturer you bad person, I hate all you, its all your fault. You caused so much pain in me, and now, I no longer allow you will ever to cause pain to me anymore. Because I know now, there is something better than that pain. You are actually alone, not me, I have the power of the entire nature with me, you are acting out of disharmony. It is not longer what controls me anymore, my eyes are opened. I have seen better things in this world exist, and I am now ready to let all of that go. As I've already moved through it! I'm done with it. And I've come out the other way as a stronger person. Exactly because of it. I have never been more clear about what I want, now more than ever. And in this ability to see, I am able to live and choose that which I truely do want in my life. I am no longer a victim, thus, you no longer have any control over me. And if you even try, I'll kick your face, waddaaaaaaa, woOOooooooo. But allas, you cannot even reach me, you feel way too powerless, and that is why you tried so hard to control me all of this time, because you want to create a sense of self worth out of that, desperately, for you have been taught to denie your own worthiness your whole life, and you try so hard to control the entire universe, but you can never control the entire universe. I have learned however, to make peace with the entire universe, by making peace with who I truely am, and surrendering to all that I truely am, and in so doing, I have allowed the entire universe to benefit me, instead of beat up on me. And you have the ability to make the same choice. For I had to really focus very hard on very scary ideas, for a very long times, in order to even be able to be with you. If I was not afraid, I would have never stayed with you and allowed you to hurt me in all the ways you did. Infact, I would have never even been around you in anyway. And yes, there is the power of influence, but love is always far stronger. And I know, that even you, person I hate the most, can find a way to return to your true nature as well. And if my forgiving you, can heal all my wounds, all that is left is for you to forgive yourself."

[Everything]

15 minutes ago, Marblehead said:

Know your enemies better than you know your self.  (Our inner enemies.) (Your self being what we consciously prefer.)

 

 

You could kind of develop some paranoia in that, unless you realize that no one is an enemy, and you can just make peace with whoever you've been so afraid to interact with.

However, even in the paranoia, people will eventually run out of room to run, and then they will have to face the worst enemy of all, as you said, yourself. And now you realize, the thing you feared the most, is actually in yourself. And so you either go mad, or you let go just sort of go with it in small steps. Be the bad guy you've always been running from. And realize, that suddenly, you really enjoy being that bad guy, and not only enjoying it, but all the things you feared about it, is completely and utterly false and totally just completely not true, at all! And actually, this way of living actually has a profound wisdom underlying all of it. An amazing gift is what I have been running from my whole life, you would then say. A gift of a simple message. That there is more than I knew there was. People with values I never even knew of or could have ever dreamed of. And then, when you finally make peace it, the hold it has on your life goes away. And you just allow the other person to be themselves, by you being yourself. And you value eachother in the unique expression and point of view that existance has of experiencing itself.