Choosing: Making Decisions—and Un-Choosing
“Whatever you do in life will be insignificant but it’s very important that you do it.” —Mahatma Gandhi
There can be madness in our lives if we allow it. Now—today—locally and globally—there are myriad circumstances that don’t jibe well with our lives. Or so we are wont to assert, but this is for another time.
Nonetheless, we possess the capacity to become Aware and consequently choose to avoid, or un-choose madness should we find ourselves in its precincts. We no longer need be the children of Hamlin lured by the omnipresent Pied Piper.
I used to train personal growth workshops. One block of instruction was on resistance. It begin: “What you resist, you create, exaggerate or become.”
I had numerous experiential examples justifying the claim—and that our circumstance improves in our letting go of resistance. What I didn’t know at the time was the phenomenology of Attention nor its incomprehensibly impactful role in our lives.
I did not know that consciously—with Awareness—managing the placement of our Attention is one of the differences that profoundly makes The difference in the quality of our lives—in our direct sensory and psychological experience—in expressing ourselves creatively and not.
The Pied Piper of today is of course social media and the news and the television and the internet and the entertainment industry and advertising and our politicos in service to their gods—and all our myriad personal and cultural crisis and disasters—small and large—whatever their cause.
The Pied Piper of today also consists of the energetic vestiges of our Karma/karma, and the Fates; and in our ancestral, familial and personal experiences—those that hadn’t gone so well. Our past and current wounds are present with us most generally in our subtle sensations of feeling heavy or unnecessarily pressured, or our fatigue or our feeling a bit unwell with seemingly no easily traceable cause—the sensations that we’ve become inured to—habituated to—lollygagging at the threshold of our awareness.
Everything that captures and holds our Attention without our Aware, well-reasoned conscious consent—or our well-honed Awareness of the non-ordinary realities, or our long tested intuitive knowing—is an invitation to an entrapping madness. Want to know more? Curious what directing our Attention has to do with choosing and un-choosing?
What do the following questions evoke?
1) Ever wonder whether you’re making the best decision? The “right” one?
2) Ever uncertain what to do now? Or next?
3) Ever allow your emotions to influence your decision taking?
4) Ever put decisions off?
5) Ever aware of of options yet unable to choose, decide and execute one?
6) Ever want or need to know the “how-to” models of choosing, un-choosing and
deciding?
7) Ever wish you had a Whisperer or psychic to access what lies beyond your current
understanding and knowledge?
8) Ever want genuine insight? Authentic real-time Wisdom?
9) How have you unwitting chosen madness? (If you have.)
10) How did you continue doing it?
11) How do you un-choose madness?
12) How do you choose a resourceful equanimity instead?
13) How do you choose to more frequently engender a relaxed-in-your-body-for-no-
reason presence? and a fitting energetic/mental/emotional state?
14) How do you genuinely be yourself?
15) How do you discipline yourself to do the things you want and need to do?
16) How do you choose to love completely? And, what does this mean?
More in upcoming posts.