Category: Choice

Free Will

As I have expressed before, there is nothing more powerful than choice. It originates as what one might call divine intent, the initial expression of which called forth our physical universe.

It could be argued that curiosity and imagination would have been necessary for the notion of creation, and of what to create, to arise in the first place, but in terms of raw power it seems to me that choice reigns supreme. Love, which many people point to as primary, might well have come into existence in the moments after the Big Bang and perhaps existed as a possibility before the Big Bang, but without duality there would have been nothing in existence that might have evoked the experience of love.  

Since we are aspects of consciousness, it seems logical to me that we tap that same power of choice in order to do things in our everyday lives, used with particular potency in our declarative choices. And all the while we are also being impacted by every single one of the choices upstream in “our” historical past. We would be, after all, the product of a long lineage of choices starting with some “let there be light” type of choice from which they all began, as I have articulated in previous writings. Thus it makes sense to me that all of those ancestral choices are still sourcing us and therefore should be “sense-able” at more and more subtle levels as we take our awareness back upstream towards that Source. I have noted before that the most discernable way that these choices appear comes in the form of preferences. Some of them we would call instincts and some we might actually recall choosing ourselves in this lifetime. The power to impact us at any given moment will depend on the power of that declarative choice when originally made, and how and where our attention is focused in our immediate circumstances. Continue reading Free Will

Family Traits

This essay is taken from my book (pictures added). These primary traits have been a recurring presence in my mind of late so I began a new Post, which became unnecessary when looking back at this piece.

In the essay above on Looking Good, I stated that I think that all of the most basic traits of consciousness flow through every level of awareness. Thus, my curiosity wonders which of these were present before the Big Bang and which might have developed later. So it is again time for more “creations of imagination”. [I’m going to ignore the idea of a multiverse, since if that possibility is mentioned in mystical writings, it’s not discernible to me in any that I am familiar with.] In that vein I’ll repeat what I suggested in Creation and Appreciation: “For any choice to occur there must have been, at a very minimum, the options of creating or not creating. Options require distinctions between one “thing” and another, so the possibility of making distinctions must have existed before that initial choice.” For distinctions to be possible, observation must also have been an aspect of consciousness.

If, to borrow a phrase, we were “made in the image and likeness of God,” then it makes sense that we still reflect the “likeness” of our parent energy, which some call god. It also makes sense, from a purely evolutionary point of view, that the essence of what we evolved from would still be embedded in us, much like the DNA in our bodies. And where those likenesses are most visible in a relatively undiluted form is in young children. Initially it takes time to bring their attention into our perceptual ranges, but as they do they are insatiably curious. They observe, then explore and enjoy. Continue reading Family Traits

The Experience of Time

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Soren Kierkegaard

Lately I’ve been noticing the layers of preferences and how they appear to reflect rates at which I experience the flow of time. If a preference – the result of an earlier choice – is immediate, like what on your dinner plate you will eat first, the distance between the choice, the completion and the enjoyment are minimal and there is very little, if any, deliberate thinking going on. If the choice is that you’d like to change careers, it will take a while before you can enjoy the results.

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The time between the initiation of the choice and its fruition is much longer. It will take planning, and a multitude of choices along the way. The result of each choice will have its own brief experience of fulfillment, if one takes the moment to enjoy them, but the end result will be enjoyed after transiting a vast number of choice/appreciation cycles (frequencies).

Now one of the results of long-term planning is that some choices will become automated along the way. That is, they will no longer require conscious thought since they are a single component that is in line with the long-term intent. If you are training for a new line of work, taking your books to class is not something you think about, you just do it. It is a choice that has become a habit and is just part of the process towards your goal. Your long-term pursuit is to have that new career and the fruit of that intent. Its enjoyment will be experienced when you land a job doing what you want to do. You may or may not take the time to experience the satisfaction of individual results along the way. That will depend on what you are focused on in the moment. The long-term goal’s satisfaction will be commensurate with the effort you’ve put into it, but you’ll have to wait until that goal is achieved. Continue reading The Experience of Time

A Well Oiled Machine

The mind is often pointed to as a “problem” and it certainly can appear that way at times. But it seems to me to just be a machine that does what we command it to do. “I am….” fill in the blank, and it just does what we told it to do. Any choice, declaration, command etc. is an instrument by which we give it instructions, from “I’m reliable” to “He’s a jerk”. Part of its nature, which is what we sometimes disparage, is that it defends the commands that we give it, a form of a survival mechanism.

It seems to me that any distinction generates a boundary between itself and anything else and that perhaps some survival mechanism comes along with the act of distinguishing. In the case of a command/choice directed to the mind, this means that not only is it to be executed as instructed, but also to be defended against contrary perspectives. It’s the defense that is more obvious than our choice that created it in the first place since being “defensive” is frowned upon and threatens our inclination to be liked/included.

Part of our conflicted natures is due to the fact that we have made many choices that are contradictory. We are often a mass of internal conflicts of interest of our own making. Internally we can chastise ourselves for acts or words that we regret, when in actuality we have simply allowed one of our own choices to override another. Choosing between any two is sometimes conscious but more typically automated. The automation comes in the form of underlying preferences, which I’ve addressed before, and may depend on a range of things but at least one’s “mood”, how far upstream the command was placed and the amount of energy (intensity) with which it was put there. “He’s a jerk” is a pretty narrow focal range but “I’m reliable” is, though filtered, flavoring a wide variety of behaviors and part of the mind is always on the job watching out to defend the command. The ones that are less deep, like “He’s a jerk”, are often easily discarded by being present to either our deeper commitments or to qualities in that person that resonate with our deeper selves. But those that lie farther upstream can be more entrenched and hold more sway. As in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”, the computer ignored what it considered lower level commands of the astronauts and followed the instructions higher upstream in the command structure.

Continue reading A Well Oiled Machine

Letting Go

Babies do not need to be trained in “letting go”. Initially, letting go is their natural state and they are being trained to focus here in order to grasp and get some relative stability in the wavelengths at which we operate. But once they are well grounded adults, it seems important to bring that finely-honed cognitive ability to bear on the choices that were made both before and during the process of bringing our focused attention to this “place”. It is my view that we consciously chose to be here and that part of the process of acclimating to these frequency ranges is to bring that same conscious capacity into our cognitive awareness here. If we are to fulfill our intention for being here, we must first and foremost become conscious of what it was. Regardless of whether we came to play, create, observe or whatever, in order to actively participate in the completion of our intent, the first step must certainly be to sensitize ourselves to the direction in which our preferences – the nudging of our earlier choices – lead us, and to deliberately choose to move in that direction. Ideally, it would behoove us to be consciously aware of our intent for this particular life and re-choose it in a form that will most fully manifest it here.

So, how do we come to dis-cover the choice or choices that resulted in this life? There are an immense number of layers of choice but I examine most of the ones that I come into contact with in a similar way. Some show up as broad and subtle preferences, which become apparent by observing every-day life. Others may better be described as habitual behaviors. Here I’m not referring to something repetitive in the sense of putting fork to mouth but habitual in the sense of something automated and not preferred. In both the broad and the particular I’m looking for what it is that is recurring. Examining them will reveal choices typically laid down behind the manifestation of the behaviors themselves. The first aspect of the examination is to cognitively observe the habitual behavior, see what patterns are visible within it, what repeats. The second is how do those habitual actions or preferences feel? What is the flavor of the experience? This begins with choosing to sense what is present in the moments that you find yourself in a repetitive behavior. Whether it is gross, subtle or causal, the body is the only input device that we have, so the simple sensing of what we “feel” must be the place to start. This is not how we feel about it but what sensations are being felt. What is important to note here is that you cannot examine feelings unless you are in the experience. If you are angry you could try and examine your thoughts and actions after the fact, but you can only observe the physical sensations that are manifesting in the body during the experience. So, if you want to fully unpack something, it is best that you be cognitively conscious during the event but it is essential that you be sensually conscious during it. The first requires active inquiry and the second only observing. But, as I pointed to in Language and Reality, the words and the energy are linked by cognitive association and so what you hear in your head is directly connected to what you are feeling in your body so it’s best to do the work in the moment that the experience is occurring. I do realize this isn’t pleasant or easy but it is useful in making distinctions.

Continue reading Letting Go

The Archives of Becoming

Becoming’s gusto to beautify, to make more perfect, appears relentless and Being’s appetite for appreciating the beautiful also seems inexhaustible. Both of those energies are still very much “us” and every nuanced layer “down” through time can be felt if one can but “remember” them in their energetic splendor. Here I’ll focus on what I see as a trait of Becoming’s energy.

Blue glowing futuristic jump gate in space, computer generated abstract background

As the intent of Becoming’s evolutionary flow spreads out, metaphorically, to where our consciousness resides now, that evolution has created an energetic trail, which is still our source. The intentions (choices) which initiated those varied flows are carried along downstream and reside in tenuous flavors of preference that lie below our conscious thinking. Those deeper directives have been diluted by our more focused localized beautification decisions, which operate at faster frequencies and thus mask the gentle undulations beneath. To be able to sense them we most often use some kind of “letting go” or “bringing forth” practice, which can melt away the most superficial frequencies. What is revealed is where some aspect of “us” – a less differentiated We – used to look out from. We are familiar with every space along our route, since we created them on the way here by “our” own beautification choices.

It seems to me that, by the very fact that they were the opening through which we created this place, those intentions are of a broader vision of the beautiful. They are less focused on the relative minutia that we as individuals are intent upon now. The urgent yearning of survival, for instance, is much deeper than what clothes are most suitable for the event you are attending. Both are a form of a beautification – a “what will make the next moment more perfect” choice – but are of differing depths. If you are in a real, or imagined, life and death situation, all minor preferences/choices disappear. Yet all of these, in some way, must reflect the life force infused in us through the planet, the star and their energetic ancestors.

Continue reading The Archives of Becoming

Choice, One Source of Shadow

In the piece “Choice and Appreciation” I proposed the possibility that there is a flow of choices all the way from the “big bang” to my moment-by-moment choices right now. From an energetic perspective, that means that every single choice upstream has some impact on the energy that is represented as me, since I am sourced by the entirety of that stream.

I’ll return to my “Siemens” analogy about levels of awareness. Choices made upstream always will have some impact downstream. Those upstream choices will impact a wider array of downstream people and processes in their organization but typically at a more subtle level. Upstream choices are reflected in me primarily as moods, ways of being, tendencies, worldview, and the like. They can act like an overarching steering mechanism. They obviously are experienced, but I tend to be most aware of them when I’m not actively engaged in anything. What is most visibly impactful are the choices made with clear and present attention. Conscious choices will most often override upstream intent because, as I’ve pointed out, downstream shorter wavelengths tend to mask the longer ones. You’re not likely to be thinking about your overall commitment to life while you’re zipping down a mountainside on a snowboard or trying to put a squirming child into a car seat. Though your overall commitment is reflected in your individual choices here, making an impact in this world still requires taking action within these local frequency levels where it can be experienced and appreciated.

Continue reading Choice, One Source of Shadow