No. 10 from Avikal’s collection, Coming Home
One of the most controversial concepts in spiritual seeking, religion or philosophy concerns the question: ‘Does man have freedom of choice?’
Immediately, the very wording of the question introduces dualism and creates a boundary – that inevitably becomes a battle line.
As a Zen master might put it, ‘If you say yes, I’ll beat you 30 times. If you say no, I’ll send you to a hell without gates’.
The idea of choice implies a reduction of your freedom. Indeed, what is choosing, if not first having to limit the possibilities to a finite number, and then striving with all your might to favor and isolate one of them?
What a mad attempt to confine the immense abundance of every moment within the narrowness of the dualistic mind, and what an absurd illusion of control!
The very idea of free choice is based on the fear of not being free, and on a childish approach to life and our place in it.
Observe what you are doing right now, and whatever it is, ask yourself: ‘Have I chosen to do this?’
Of course, the mind will say yes.
Look more closely and see if there is a point at which a choice occurs to do what you are doing: reading, stopping reading, thinking, feeling your body, deciding to go to the toilet, or getting distracted… You will easily see that this moment of choice does not exist, that you cannot isolate a thought and say ‘Now I choose’ because the question immediately arises: ‘Who chose this thought of choosing?’
Try choosing your next physical sensation.
Try to choose your next emotion, or your next thought.
EVERYTHING JUST HAPPENS!
Not only is there no choice made by you, but you do not exist either. If you look closely, you cannot find an ‘I’ (a little Johnny, or Lily, or Charlotte, or Jack…) within you which, separate from you, commands and directs you – perhaps sitting in your heart or in your head behind a desk with a thousand buttons, now exciting you, now making you feel happy or depressed…
‘I’ is a concept, an idea, a linguistic fiction useful for indicating what is ‘me’ and what is ‘not-me’. What lies within the primary boundary of my skin, and what lies outside it.
But if there is no ‘I’, who then is in charge of making choices?
And yet choices seem to be made – or are they merely events that unfold of their own accord? I get up and go for a drink, I write these words, I hear the washing machine running and I listen…
But if I do not exist, if inside there is only emptiness, then who is conscious? Could it be Life itself? Could it be that I am an instrument through which Life is conscious?
Is it possible that I am to existence what the eyes, ears, mouth, hands and nose are to me?
Is it possible that it is Life that makes choices through me?
Is it possible that what appears to the mind as the work of the Ego is, in fact, the uninterrupted and uncontrollable flow of Life within this system I call ‘I’?
If this is so, then I am not free to choose, because I do not exist as a separate entity – and at the same time I do exist as that absolute potentiality and total freedom which is Life. If this is true, then I can choose anything at all, because it is Life that chooses through me.
And what if I were to replace the word ‘God’, anywhere I find it, with ‘Existence’, or ‘Life’?
Featured image by the author – translation from Italian by Osho News
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