There’s no such thing as ‘an intelligent life choice’, despite our very great conviction to the contrary. ‘Intelligent life choices’ are a rational fantasy that we are suckered into taking seriously – they are a manifestation of ‘the illusion of control’, nothing more.

We can after all only choose what we know. We can only choose between ‘known options’, which means that our choices are necessarily going to be trivial ones. Only the Unknowable is not trivial, only the Unknowable is real, but the Unknowable isn’t something we want to have any truck with…

“And he said: truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of heaven.” [Matthew 18:3]

Jesus didn’t say ‘unless you make the correct life choices you will never enter the Kingdom of heaven!’ How can we choose something we can’t understand, something we don’t (and never can) have a map of? All of our choices equal ‘the map’ or ‘the model’ but when we focus on the act of choosing (or the act of controlling) we forget this. To focus on the act of choosing is to forget that the map is only the map; to launch into controlling is to lose sight of the fact that our understanding of the situation is just an illusion.

Choices are always an extension of our knowing, our maps, our theories – we can never ‘choose to go beyond the map’. We can never choose to stop choosing either and this is what we might call the ‘Hotel California Effect’! Choosing is an illusion, choosing is a dream, choosing comes out of ‘what we think we know but don’t’…

Our choices are our own thinking disguised as ‘reality’, disguised as ‘genuine opportunities for change’. We don’t see that we are just ‘pushing out the map ahead of us wherever we go,’ thereby (secretly) ensuring that we never go beyond the known and the accepted. That’s the only thing that really matters to us, if the truth were to be known. On paper, we’re ‘going somewhere’, on paper we’re ‘making progress’ but in reality – however – we can never leave the map and the map isn’t real.

The map is only an idea that we have in our heads – it’s a collection of ideas that we can’t ever go beyond. Our ability to make choices (i.e., our ability to stay in control) is fine just so long as we’re content to stick within the Prescribed Domain, just so long as we’re happy to remain within the ‘Predetermined World which comes out of our thoughts’. It’s fine just so long as we don’t mind living our lives within the Mechanical Reality, but this isn’t something anyone can be fine with! We can’t be fine about the Mechanical Reality because the Mechanical Reality basically translates as ‘suffering without end’…

Mechanical existence is inseparable from suffering – every last little bit of it is suffering, if only we could see it. Even our pleasures are pain. Mechanical existence is suffering itself – anything that is not genuinely spontaneous is suffering. Anything that is not genuinely spontaneous suffering because anything else is false. Anything else is merely ‘the script’. Everything else is the false (or ‘scripted’) sense of identity we call me, which is at all times wholly controlled by the blank impersonal rules that govern mechanical existence.

Our obsession with choices (our ‘obsession with making the right choice’) is really our obsession with our maps, our theories, our models, our ‘digitalized picture of reality’, which equals our obsession with security. To talk about ‘having an obsession with finding security’ is to talk about fear, of course. There’s nothing else going on here in the Mechanical Realm but fear – everything that goes on here comes down to ‘the mechanics of fear’, blank impersonal rules working themselves out to their ultimate predestined conclusion.

What lies behind our obsession with making the right choice is our denial – our ‘fear of fear’. We are afraid but we’re afraid to see that we are afraid because our fear is too great. We can’t allow ourselves to see that we are being driven by a terror too great for us to countenance and so we turn everything around and speak instead in terms of choices, which provides us with the sense of security that we crave so much. This way we get to feel empowered, this way we get to feel that we have a choice when we don’t (which is of course what denial is all about). Our belief in the supposed validity of our mind-created ‘choices’ is driven by our very great fear of reality therefore, which is itself – as Krishnamurti says – quite choiceless.






Image – polygon.com