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I’ve been thinking a lot about choices lately. How we make them and why. Where fate seems to overshadow choice. Which choices come easy. Which are more challenging. And what I need to do to create more freedom and agency in my life.
To start, I’m of the belief that we indeed are agents of consciousness. That we have the capacity to make decisions that are outside of the context of everything we have known. Life learns through us.
Therefore, development means the expansion of choice, which follows awareness. With broadened awareness, we have more options. We can choose to stay on more efficient levels of consciousness or we can go deeper. This becomes a conscious decision through the human development process.
There are times when efficiency outweighs depth and vice-versa. For example, it’s convenient that we don’t have to figure out how reading works every time we go to read something. But, in fact, we can explore that with our awareness if we choose to.
The challenge is, we have many wired patterns that we would not be so happy with if we were to have a look. It’s good that you don’t have to learn your ABCs again to read this essay, but what about the way you’re sitting right now? Is there some way it could feel better, easier, or softer?
Posture is commonly fixed in our post-modern society and it’s not so great because different situations call for a range of postures. Tension in the body can be compiled over the years by taking the same posture and trying to fit it into inappropriate contexts, again and again. The same goes for our mental and emotional “postures.”
This is just an example but the point is that our lives are directed by our choices, conscious or unconscious otherwise. Conscious choice requires that we are not so involved in our experience.
I once asked a teacher about the process of choice and he told me “The level of our current development is also the level at which we experience choice.” Through development, we slowly become the conscious observer of the choice happening through us.
He said it’s true that the more we are open and aligned, the only choice is life, the divine, the supreme reality, God, or whatever you may call the all-organizing force.
However, we still have to respect our current level of experience. For many of us, there are layers masking the body’s intelligence and clarity of choice. So my teacher was saying that here – the lack of agency around choice – we have to be honest with ourselves and take a look.
Confusion Needs Respect
No matter how much we may want to choose from alignment, we carry processes that intelligently move us away from aligned action. These need both recognition and appreciation. Within these processes, it seems like the choice is not so obvious or, in more extreme cases, not even an option. We feel that life is happening to us rather than being co-creative agents.
Although it rings counterintuitive, the process of clouding inner alignment is no mistake. We may think our confusion stands in the way of where we are heading. The tendency might be to pressure the situation. To sit down and force ourselves to become clear about what we want.
We might start thinking about the tough decision – going over the pros and cons and analyzing the details. If we’ve gotten that far, we skipped over a process. What’s needed is to take a step back, easing pressure and strain, and look from a different angle.
Rather than forcing clarity, we can question why a choice is not clear in the first place. “In alignment, the choice is obvious anyway.” Unclarity points to inner tension. The tension is usually between our past and future, which just represent obsolescence and innovation/creativity, respectively, rather than a timeline.
This is an intrinsic and evolutionary tension. Not something to get rid of. We can observe this phenomenon in our natural environment. If we have the capacity to be with the tightness we will see that the update is actually embedded in the integration – meaning the physical, emotional, and mental understanding – of the outdated process.
This would suggest that it is impossible to arrive at clarity through force, past the objects that conceal it. However, we so often walk through life seeking answers and solutions without asking why there is a question to begin with. When, if we were to inquire, we would find a gem that broadens the horizons of our path.
To become clear we have to make the choice to be present with, get curious about, and identify what processes are running automatically. Starting with our confusion. The intelligence of our confusion is that it distorts what may be clear otherwise.
Again, this is no mistake. It may have been dangerous in the past to be so clear. We may have gotten scrutinized for being clear and acting out of our authentic core, so the confusion puts a fog on the path. It’s a safety mechanism. Once we have an embodied sense of this we can accept what role it has played.
It is through acceptance and seeing what an unconscious process does to conceal or hide life that we actually have an opportunity to try something different. To inject a choice.
We have enough space to imagine a different way of perceiving and responding to the world. Confusion dissipates as we accept it and see that our current situation is different from the past. This ends up being learning that gets wired into the nervous system.
All of this requires slowing down and being open to a process of discovery. To sit in discomfort and not seek answers or solutions, but to be with what is.
Intention
The question is then, how do we make conscious choices when we’re running into the power of the unconscious? If we become aware of an automated process that’s not supporting our highest good, then what?
It’s not enough to know about our patterns intellectually and we already said forcing change is out of the question.
Here, where you become aware of an unconscious process, is already the beginning of the transformation. Enough space was created to, for at least a moment, move outside of your habitual movement. And this is a critical moment because usually, it’s here that we say, “Why am I doing that?” or “Why is this so difficult?” and eventually leads to, “This needs to go!”
Instead, we could bring intention into our process. So rather than getting hard, we could get curious, “Ah, I wonder why this is not so clear for me.” The intention is to find out why there’s a question or challenge in the first place.
If we set our intention, we are bound to find out because it places our attention (or awareness) inside of the process. With our attention — the listening mechanism of our consciousness — understanding is compelled to emerge. Which enables choice.
Intention moves attention which creates space for choice.
Intention. Awareness. Choice.
This is a simplification of a multidimensional process. But we commonly miss the power of intention in the journey towards expanded awareness and agency.
Another important element of intention is perseverance. That is to say, no matter how long it takes, I will find out. Days, weeks, months, decades — I will draw my awareness to this process and discover my agency in it. Anything becomes workable if we look at it through this lens.
The Future
The last piece I would like to mention is that I believe there’s a misconception about awakening and the expansion of awareness. It seems that we often project 24/7 clarity and ease on the awakened life. The paradise complex.
From my understanding, this could never be true because life is constantly updating itself. So, maybe the awakened one is clear in regards to their history and able to live each moment anew. But, the future is still arising within them and there would be unknowns around certain phenomena in their specific blueprint. Their wisdom shines through in the capacity they have to choose how they approach the situation.
The patterns, habits, and latent tendencies of the mind are no longer the driving force behind their experience, but the thing that is aware of their experience becomes the driver. They choose from a space that enters from beyond the wiring of the brain or patterns in the body.
This is all to say that lack of clarity isn’t solely about bringing consciousness to unconscious (or past) processes. It’s also about a step into an uncharted dimension. Life learning through us. We are all here to walk territory that has never been walked before. Sometimes we’re unclear because we are side-by-side with evolution’s impulse.
To be at peace with and even in awe that life is evolving itself through you right now, is to bow down. To have the ability to open to what life wants to learn and give generously, through you specifically, is agency.