We want to believe that we always have our own intentions, make personal decisions, can make up our own mind and possess free will. We resist the possibility that situations and events occur regardless of ‘choice.’
We want to think that we have real choices and that everybody has a choice. Everybody? Could the ‘choices’ we make be directly taking away the ‘choices’ of others? For example, we are one of many who apply for a job, or we buy cheap imported goods, or we make a lot of money.
Is the notion of choice emerging from the very centre of self-delusion?
On reflection, many of our ‘choices’ seem bizarre since some were mistakes, foolish acts, or leaving us desperately unhappy. Who would choose to be miserable? Why can’t you choose to be happy everyday?
I have noticed that it is hard for anyone to explain what a choice really is. We don’t know what it means despite years of our parents, educators and advertisers drumming belief in choice into us. Choice? What choice? Can you choose not to make any more choices?
What have we chosen?
We live in a secular-based society with widespread domestic and street violence, pornography, abortion to continue a lifestyle, obesity, alcohol, drug and cigarette addiction, overcrowded prisons, junk food, paedophilia, the nightmare of personal debts, countless unloved children and major leaps in numbers for cosmetic surgery, due to lack of self esteem.
There is widespread selfishness, fear, envy, corruption, loneliness, depression, blame and minds endlessly filled with the desire for more and more. One any given day, around half the Western population is taking some kind of pill.
From the view of an ‘outsider,’ our individual and collective ‘choices’ hardly seem inspiring.
We worship the Market and zealously promote technological progress. Our God is Science and the Son of God is technological progress while our secular culture promotes a lifestyle divorced from the spiritual, religious and sacred. Is it any wonder that secularism fails to be fulfilling when it ignores a crisis of values in our society and our deep spiritual sensitivities?
Is this what you have chosen?
The Buddha strongly discouraged us from blindly putting our faith in science, religion, secular values or the self. When we fail to examine the dark and pain-filled shadows in such a desire driven value system, we enter into denial, treat Western values as transcendent to other cultures, and place pressure on the world’s population to adopt our collective neurosis to add to the neurosis elsewhere. The world seems like a lunatic asylum run by the patients!
Choice? What Choice?
Some of our ‘choices’ are made under the belief that our choices will bring us more happiness and satisfaction than can be delivered.
Would you have chosen to vote in 2001 for the British government if you had known that two years later the same government:
would wage war on an impoverished Arab country,
permit the killing and dehumanising of countless Iraqi men, women and children,
violate international law and the will of the international community (UN),
and block further search for weapons of mass destruction?
Would you have chosen to take prescribed medicine if you knew of the harmful side effects?
Would you have chosen a certain carpet knowing the impact on the lungs of your young children playing on the floor?
Would you have chosen to start a relationship that triggered later conflict and emotional pain?
Would you have chosen to spend years in higher education only to end up hating your chosen subject?
Would you have chosen to end a happy relationship because your partner did not want to be a parent? As a result, you spend years sleeping in a double bed with nobody to share it with.
Would you have chosen to smoke a cigarette or start drinking that became an addiction leading to cancer or heart disease?
Would you have chosen to go into debt if you knew how much stress it would cause you?
Would you have chosen to get involved with a religious/spiritual group if you knew how much abuse of power took place behind closed doors?
I could go on forever with this list but it will only sound like a rant!
The Undecidable
We make choices because we think something is important to us. What we believe is important to us may not be that important. Choices become tied to our forecast of the consequences while our choice mostly relies upon the way we feel and think on that day. Researchers are telling us we ‘overestimate the intensity and duration of our emotional reactions’ to our choices. Positive and negative events may not make the difference you think they will.
You think a detached house will make you happy. You buy it and all too quickly you lose your friendship and informal contacts with your neighbours when you lived in a flat. You end up less happy. The new home becomes a backdrop at the expense of bumping into a friendly neighbour or popping into their flat for a cup of tea. True wealth is found in real friendships.
We live in this mental construct of free and independent ‘choices’ – as if we really had them and also had the power to override what is undecidable. Every supposed choice keeps the undecidable hidden from view. We cannot determine events through our so-called choices. Everything is incalculable in terms of the consequences. What we cannot know hangs around consciousness and remains inseparable from our perception. The chosen (that is the dance of perceptions) and unchosen go together rendering questionable any decision, any choice. Our intentions, determinations and resolutions are all bound up with countless unknown conditions governing events.
Forever limited in scope, all of our ‘choices’ are ultimately unfulfilling due to our very limited mind. The temporary sensation and numerous influences, known and unknown, give support to the notion of choices. Choices belong to self, to ego. Nowhere else. They ‘exist’ in a kind of ‘dream world.’ We have become imprisoned in this subjective world of choices, actions and results. The unstable arising of pleasure and pain serve as a basis for our ‘decisions,’ that means landing on a specific perception.
Our poor mind wavers in a tiny field, as it alights upon one object or thought and then another, until it ‘decides.’ The unknown brings its influence to bear on the known, both immediately and later. There can hardly be such a thing as ‘free will’ when we exist in such a restricted circle of thought. Even our best of intentions can end up as a nightmare. If more ‘choices’ made us happier, then our happiness should increase correspondingly. It seems the more options we think about the more confused we become.
We might still believe we have a ‘choice’ but, if there is choice, it is so severely restricted that it ridicules the definition of it. Reflect on this view. Meditate on it. You may see that all your choices are empty of any substance.
In Hindsight
When we look back over an important situation in the past we often recognise that events had to unfold in the way that they did. In hindsight, there is an acknowledgement that our ambivalence, plethora of options, indecision and efforts to fathom things out had little or nothing to do with the process or eventual outcome. All that stressful thinking was meaningless.
A situation that arises may well be filled with truths, half-truths, falsehood, projections and beliefs. There is
what is actual
what is potential
what is not having any potential
what is not possible.
If we do not see clearly, we find ourselves in a mess of a situation.
The biggest deception is that the self is the agent of events. The self cannot initiate the situation, or the course of action but simply emerges out of the events that are taking place. The self cannot think what it wants to think and cannot not think what it does not what to think. Most important of all, it cannot think about what it doesn’t know.
The self believes it is the cause for action and believes it is the experiencer of the consequences. It fails to realise it is a small subset of the event.
Rather than be ensnared in the wretched ideology of real choices, it would be far more worthwhile to question this construct of ‘I decided to …’ It could be stated that when we come to a decision, after experiencing certain doubts (from the Latin: dubia – in two minds), we have blocked off inner process and settled for knowing what to do in order to escape doubt.
Our ‘decision’ may be a block to the unfolding experience. Is ‘choice’ a fruitless effort to exert control over our past, present or future? Why do choices easily culminate in unrest and disappointment or only a temporary satisfaction?
Being a limited instrument, the mind tries to make events work to its favour. The idea that we have control over our lives belongs to the contemporary mythology of choice.
In the West, we have moved on from the Middle Ages with its dependency on a God who issues rewards and punishment to the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ to a religious belief in the supremacy of the Self to determine our lives. ‘Reality’ remains ‘hidden’ in both views.
Past or Present?
To dismiss choice totally, we might end up with the view that preceding situations determine all current events. Some schools of science give support to this view. Science currently tells us that one third of a second before we consciously make a choice the brain has determined what to do. In other words, science is now claiming the ‘choice’ comes to us. We don’t make it! If we adopt this view, there is no point in thinking we make a choice if we don’t.
If the past determines all events, then there are no real choices, so that every outcome is dependent upon what was. To adopt this view, as to the way things really are, it would mean that we could not hold ourselves, nor anyone else, accountable for our or their actions. Praise and blame, success and failure, gain and loss would be rendered meaningless. Past forces simply move our life along while deceiving us through notions of choices. We are then enmeshed in impersonal global forces until we die.
When there is passion to realise the Infinite, we lose interest in the transitory, the passing and the fleeting pleasurable sensations of a here and now hedonistic lifestyle. We stop obsessing about goods, information and social position due to a complete loss of interest. It is not as if we made a choice to lose interest.
What the Buddha said
In Middle Length Discourses 101, the Buddha criticised those who claim that “whatever a person feels, all that is caused by what was done in the past.” He dismissed the much adhered to view in the East that spiritual practices only consist of working out the past, called karma or the view, often adhered to in many schools of psychotherapy, that suffering ends through making the unconscious become conscious. The Buddha indicates it would be an utterly inexhaustible effort.
As he points out, we would not know how much we have already worked out and how much we left to work out. He dismissed the commonly held view that all ‘painful, piercing feelings’ indicate the arising of fruits of the past. He said that such feelings can also arise through ‘self-imposed’ exertion’ due to ‘ignorance, unknowing and delusion.’
It simply doesn’t ring true that we are totally bound to our past OR that we have free will and can make independent choices in the present to achieve what whatever we want.
Genetic science currently proclaims that our genes significantly help determine our personality make up, tendencies and life expectancy. Choices then seem to be formed out of a combination of the human genome AND our culture and environment. This shows that genes and culture make a further mockery of the ideology of a personal free will and independent choices.
The hard truth is that the individual, personal self is a social construct. The Buddha’s teachings on ‘not self’ constantly point this out as part of his determined effort to wake us up from belief in the self.
Action and Results?
The Buddha challenged the entire concept of ‘choice.’ In an examination of action and results, he asks four questions:
‘Can you make the results of an action that is here and now come later?
E.g. You get sick today. You can’t postpone your ill health.
Can you make the results of an action that comes later arrive here and now?
You have to wait for two weeks for the results of your medical examination.
Can you change the results of an action from pleasant to painful?
The doctor says the tests give you the all clear.
Can you change the result of an action from painful to pleasant?’
The doctor says the results of the tests confirm that you have cancer.
In other words, what choice do we have in terms of timing of results and our experience around them?
The Buddha also ruthlessly dismissed beliefs in an all-powerful, all knowing God and other commonly held views. He said to one deeply religious believer:
‘If a Supreme God created all pleasure and pain, then this God must be evil to create such painful feelings for you.
If all pleasure and pain was caused by the past, then you must have all engaged in bad deeds to experience such pain.
If caused by your past deeds, then you should be censured for what you did in the past.
If caused by chance, then you must have experienced a lot of bad luck to go through painful feelings
If caused by birth and class, then you must have been born into a bad class.
If caused by exertion, then you must be striving badly.’
Who would choose painful experiences? The Buddha reminded us that we are subject to birth, ageing, pain and death. We are born into particular situations and various circumstances that we never chose for ourselves. We only have to contemplate on a handful of unexpected events that affect us on a single day, for 'better or worse,’ to remind us of daily experiences that we never chose nor sought after.
Faced with such a quandary, we may try reaching some kind of compromise around our plight of trying to work out whether we have any real choices or not. What part of our choice (flickering perceptions) comes from the past and what part of our choice is not shaped by the past? Who is making such a measurement? Is the self that makes such a determination born from the past, the present, environmental and cultural conditioning or from an independent self?
Deeper than choices and decisions
We are now in a real predicament. We have nowhere to turn. No answer, either inwardly or outwardly, not past nor present, not in the physical world, nor a metaphysical standpoint to rely upon. It is for the questioning heart a huge challenge to face up to all of this. We may want to take a position, or hold onto ‘no position,’ so that we can naively get on with our life living in a ‘world’ and a ‘self’ apparently shaped by past and/or present factors and belief in choice.
It would be a pity to compromise, to settle for mundane and unexamined perceptions, rather than explore this existential uncertainty. Have we ever made a choice? Has anybody ever made a choice? Are decisions made before the action or does the self claim later it made a decision as a means to reinforce the notion of its independent existence. Was the ‘decision’ an escape from or suppression of painful feelings or through blindly grasping onto pleasurable feelings?
You could read all of the above and conclude that everything is determinate. Or you could arrive at the conclusion that everything is indeterminate. Or both. Or chance. That would be a pity. You might give up on resolving the problem of ‘choice’ and its relationship, if any, to the past, present and future. That would also be a pity. You would still be descending upon one view or another in a messy swirl of ‘choices’ and the subsequent views and standpoints. ‘The world of ‘choices’ belongs to a superficial and unexamined life; ‘choices’ fade away as we go deeper into the nature of things.
Meditate on the emptiness of choices. See through this conventional thinking. Don’t be afraid to disempower such mental constructs? Treat choosing to and choosing not to as two sides of the same worthless coin. There is a complete resolution to this dilemma. When you have resolved this issue everything will fall into place. And you will have put to rest this narrow ideology of narcissism, consumerism and cynicism. Oops! I mean freedom, secularism and democracy. And all the scientific, corporate and personal claims that believe in it. Keep questioning.
There is an extraordinary realisation available that is closer to you than your usual conditioned thinking. Truth is one without a second and immeasurable. ‘Choice’ belongs to the deceptive, to flickering perceptions. When the force of Truth comes, we can only respond fully to it. Realising Truth often marks a break with the old ways or reveals situations in a totally new light. When Truth touches us we have no choice but to know it and live it. Truth set us free, nothing else can.