The Fantasy Of Decision Making

Perhaps the greatest distraction in this journey for the serious seeker lies in the illusion of making decisions. For most of you during the average day, there is a continual experience of choosing. It is the way that this illusion of a chooser, a doer, continues to survive.

True choice lies in intention only, not outcome. The intention to see what is real, as opposed to following movement based on a story of conditioned mind, which tells you there are all kinds of choices. If the mind is followed, it is an endless flow throughout the day, from the most subtle to the most obvious. But when the intention is to see where choice appears from, what is discovered is that the choice and the chooser are pure myth.

It is like a water molecule that is running down a major river that breaks into smaller and smaller tributaries, that moves over boulders and smooth regions, that goes over waterfalls and flat areas, and this particular molecule of water experiences this process as its own choice.

Take the simplest things that seem like you are making a decision: do I feel like taking a walk..... do I feel like taking a nap....should I clean the kitchen now? It's all illusion. It is all happening by itself. It is never possible to find from where it's coming, and if there is the looking, it is never possible to find where the looking is coming from. There is never any individual one who has ever made an individual choice. It is all a smokescreen.

What occurs is spontaneous preconditioned thought which carries with it a subtle message that 'you' are the thinker. But with investigation, what is found is that there is no 'you', no thinker, and thus no decision to make.

It's not about making the right choice but instead, it's about finding who the chooser is. The possibility is to be freed from the illusion of decision making, as if something could be other than it is at any time.

Just right now experience a moment of freeing the habit of involvement with decisions. What occurs is that the juice that drives a future moment is released. Efforting to awaken is released. The recognition is that there is no choice. It is all being carried, just like the molecule of water.

The very word decision, inherent in itself, is pure fantasy. There is no such thing as decision. The only choice is in the intention, the humble, open, yielding intention to know yourself. This is never an action, which sets it aside from all aspects of decision making. It is not a doing. It's a seeing.

The truth is, it is all choiceless. There are not a million possibilities, there is only one. And even that is not quite accurate. There is only This. It could not be more simple.

It has nothing to do with the appearance of choice no longer appearing. Appearance of choice is pre-contrived. It is what makes the dream seem real. It is what makes someone seem real.

The most amazing thing occurs in aligning oneself with choiceless freedom, unchanging eternal pure peace. What becomes clearer is that the body does all the same things. It takes care of all the tasks. It is discovered that there was never any involvement to begin with. The only thing that happened is that your awareness became contracted and your conditioning gummed up the works and created all the distraction and effort and appearance of someone with problems and issues to solve.

There is no choice. There is freedom from choice. There is freedom from the need to follow thinking. Thinking is completely unnecessary. It is a little more accurate to say, identification with thought, personal relationship with thought, is unnecessary. And distractive, and problematic.

And the answer is Now, it is always Now, it is only Now. What decision does Now make? Is Now making choices? When the attention is on Now, does the body stop breathing, does the heart stop beating? There is something governing all of it. When the attention is freed, pure divinity carries the whole show.

All supposed individual choice is ultimately discovered to be preordained and the devotion to the Ordainer becomes the devotion to every single phenomenal appearance.