. We don't choose. We decide. We weigh up options.
Then, based on a set of already known preferences, we turn towards one and away from the others
. In other words, what we commonly mistake for choice is simply (as Ivan Pavlov may have said) a preprogrammed response to the most attractive bell.
What we call choice is really a response to a stimulus, and an automatic one at that.
That's nasty medicine if in addition you believe in free will.
When our most cherished freedom, the freedom to choose, is revealed to be little more than a reflex,
we need to rethink the whole paradigm within which we constitute ourselves as free.
We're puppets.
We're puppets with feelings and emotions.We're puppets with opinions,assessments,and interpretations.
We're puppets giving birth to more puppets.We're puppets having no idea we're puppets.
We're puppets blind to our own puppetness.
Even if, by some miracle,
we were granted a special kind of vision with which we could see own puppetness,
we're puppets who at any cost resist confronting and admitting to our own puppetness.
Life is the puppet master pulling our strings. We can do nothing but react.
That's it. The world and our lives in it is a never ending Punch and Judy spectacle.
That's all there is. There's nothing else.
Given the total domination and bleakness of our lot as puppets,
it would take nothing short of a miracle to shift what's possible for us. If a miracle could occur,
we as puppets are unable to conceive of what not now possible it could cause to become possible.
Hindsight, however, is always 20/20 vision.
What becomes available with the miracle of transformation is a place to stand where we're at the source of our lives
, at cause rather than at effect.
And while it's said you and I can choose at any moment under all circumstances to stand there,
standing there is the only place from where authentic choice can be made.
Again the paradoxes of Zen ...
Until there's transformation and authentic choice in the matter of our lives, this is all we are from the time we're born until we die: no choice marionettes modeled from pure and total automaticity.-Neelanjan
we were granted a special kind of vision with which we could see own puppetness,
we're puppets who at any cost resist confronting and admitting to our own puppetness.
Life is the puppet master pulling our strings. We can do nothing but react.
That's it. The world and our lives in it is a never ending Punch and Judy spectacle.
That's all there is. There's nothing else.
Given the total domination and bleakness of our lot as puppets,
it would take nothing short of a miracle to shift what's possible for us. If a miracle could occur,
we as puppets are unable to conceive of what not now possible it could cause to become possible.
Hindsight, however, is always 20/20 vision.
What becomes available with the miracle of transformation is a place to stand where we're at the source of our lives
, at cause rather than at effect.
And while it's said you and I can choose at any moment under all circumstances to stand there,
standing there is the only place from where authentic choice can be made.
Again the paradoxes of Zen ...
Until there's transformation and authentic choice in the matter of our lives, this is all we are from the time we're born until we die: no choice marionettes modeled from pure and total automaticity.-Neelanjan
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