Our choosing just happens. It doesn't spring from free will.

It's such a beautiful way of looking upon the world. I didn't choose to write this blog post. You didn't choose to read it. Yet here we are, a blog post having been written, and a blog post having been read.

This is how the entire world works. Things happen, yet there is no one making them happen. 

As bizarre as this may seem, it makes good sense for a couple of reasons. First, free will is an illusion. Second, the notion of an independent self capable of freely choosing also is an illusion. 

So choosing just happens. I love those words. So I'll repeat them. Choosing just happens. The proof that it happens is that I just said it, twice. I could have said something else, but I didn't. You could be reading something else, but you aren't.

More proof that choosing just happens. If you need additional convincing, here's some passages from the "Choice and Choicelessness" chapter in Joan Tollifson's book, Nothing to Grasp.

In this chapter, Tollifson talks openly and honestly about her personal problems. I find this marvelously refreshing. Most writers about spirituality either explicitly or implicitly convey the impression that they've got their act together, and they're going to tell you how to follow in their evolved footsteps.

That isn't Tollifson's style. She's my kind of spiritual writer: open, honest, humble, outspoken, unafraid to let the reader know who she really is. There isn't a trace of "holier than thou" in what I've read of her writings so far.

In her 20s, Tollifson drank a lot. Way too much. She sought help and made progress on stopping drinking, finding a therapist who believed that it was possible for a drunk to cut down drastically on their consumption of alcohol, yet still have a drink occasionally.

She writes:

After a few years of drinking this way off and on and being effortlessly aware of the whole thing as it happened, a decision emerged not to drink anymore. This decision felt entirely different from all the previous decisions that had failed.

It seemed to come not from the thinking mind, not from the part of me that was in conflict with my drinking, but rather from nondual awareness, the unconditional love that has no problem with anything. This was not the dualistic, fear-based desire to stop rooted in the thought that "I" was in trouble and needed fixing. This came from an absence of conflict and separation.

There was a felt difference that I cannot entirely articulate, but the hallmark of it was a certainty, an absence of doubt that I could never have manufactured or engineered. It was exactly the same kind of experience I'd had back in 1973 when I first sobered up.

I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt when I met my therapist for the first time that something had completely changed. It was different from all the times when I had tried to stop before and failed. I knew I wasn't going back. No one can manufacture this kind of certainty or make this kind of shift happen. On both occasions, it was clearly not my doing.

Tollifson uses her experience with smoking and drinking as an illustration of how choices occur.

Like many people, I have seemingly made a choice to abstain from smoking and drinking. But what inspired and enabled me to make these "choices" when I did? Why did it work when it did and not on previous attempts that had failed?

What shifted when the decision felt like it came from nondual awareness and had that doubtless certainty about it? What allows me to stick with these choices in any given moment of temptation? Why was I sometimes able to have one glass of wine and sometimes unable to resist pouring myself a second?

If we look deeply, we find no single cause, no easy explanation. If anything, there is an infinite and untraceable web of causes and conditions.

This passage closely echoes the core message in Robert Sapolsky's book, Determined, where he brilliantly argues that free will doesn't exist in the light of modern science. Tollifson also has a problem with finger biting, a habit that she hasn't been able to break.

More and more, brain science is revealing that many of the things we have long considered to be psychological, spiritual or moral strengths and weaknesses are in fact the result of genetics, neurology, hormonal and neurochemical changes, problems with the endocrine system, undetected brain conditions, and a host of other factors including diet, early childhood experiences, socioeconomic conditions, our moment in history, post-traumatic stress, exposure to electromagnetic fields or toxic chemicals, and all kinds of seemingly random things that you would never imagine might be having an impact on your "choices" about something such as finger biting or smoking.

For example, the shape of your throat and your airway may lead to undiagnosed sleep disorders that have recently been linked to such things as depression and attention deficit disorder, and those in turn might trigger a desire to engage in some kind of comforting, addictive, self-soothing behavior.

Because choosing just happens, there's little or no room for judgement of ourselves of others. Sure, we all do this. But that doing also just happens.

We judge ourselves so harshly for being the way we are -- for not making enough money, for not being neat enough, for eating too much, for being too fat, for not being a better mother or a better daughter or a better husband, for not being able to stop smoking, for being depressed, for not being able to snap out of it, for not being present or "in the now" enough, for thinking and daydreaming too much, and on and on -- as if there were some single entity called "me" inside this bodymind who could and should get it together and do a better job of steering the ship.

But no such entity can actually be found. One neuroscientist has recently compared the brain to a "team of rivals," and much of what drives us is below the level of conscious awareness. No one is in control -- not God, not Zeus, not "me." Those are all mythological characters (unless we understand God in a very different way).

Maybe this sounds negative to you. Actually, it isn't. Sometimes seemingly good things just happen. Sometimes seemingly bad things just happen. It is all just happening.

And yet, if we are hurting ourselves and others, there is a natural desire to find a way to stop. This desire is the movement of life itself, as is the apparent process of going into a recovery program, taking up a meditation practice, doing a Feldenkrais lesson, studying yoga, attending talks on radical nonduality, or whatever life moves us to do.

Sometimes the cure works. When the right conditions come together, sobering up happens, or waking up from the dream of being a separate person happens, or being able to meet hatred with love happens, or dissolving into boundless presence happens. 

When other conditions come together, getting drunk happens, or believing in the mirage of separation and encapsulation happens, or meeting hatred with hatred happens, or being totally hypnotized by thoughts and ideas happens.

It all happens to no one. No one is in control of what remedies we are moved to try and what outcomes they seem to bring about. When we see how choiceless it all is, there is compassion for ourselves and others when it doesn't go the way we think it should.

There's boundless potential for change. In us. In other people. In the world. This is possible because there's no one choosing changes. They just happen in accord with the goings-on of the universe.

I've experienced first-hand both the relief of recognizing that there is no one in control and the relative value of such things as therapy, meditation, marital arts training and somatic awareness work in opening up new possibilities. I've seen how the bodymind -- the brain and the nervous system -- can learn new ways of functioning.

In addition to uncovering many previously unsuspected causes for behaviors previously considered to be spiritual or moral weaknesses, brain science has also discovered that the brain has great plasticity -- it can change in ways we never imagined before.

Of course, no independent agent is in control of any of this change. We don't learn these new ways of functioning on command by some act of will. In fact, much of this learning and transformation happens outside of conscious awareness. But learning does happen (when the necessary conditions come together).

So radical nonduality doesn't mean we have to renounce all such activities. It simply means they are a causeless happening of the whole universe. Nonduality recognizes that there is nothing we need to do (other than exactly what we are doing), but it doesn't tell us that we need to do nothing. There is a big difference.

Comments

[sant64]

Whether it's a focus on Buddhist emptiness or on hard determinism, there's a problem with all these deconstruction proposals. None of them prove themselves as a complete solution to the problem of living in this world.

Take Buddhist emptiness. The Dalai Lama has written countless books about how much sense the emptiness philosophy makes. But we also know that the Dalai Lama weeps when told of the sufferings of Tibetans. If emptiness is truth, that is, the total truth of life, why would the Dalai Lama ever weep? Why wouldn't he just respond with total indifference when told of the rape of Tibetan nuns?

Obviously, "seeing into impermanence" is not all there is to life. And by life, I mean the only lives we can understand as humans. We have a name for people who are incapable of human emotion. Not arahants, but sociopaths.

You may feel I'm overstating things here. But I'm just trying to point out that the same essential flaws of Sant Mat are likewise found in all the no-god no guru deconstruction paths.

Think about it. A lot of people gave up sant mat because they determined all they were doing was putting a veneer of bhakti and idealism on their thinking. They were just taking on a fantasy and an identity as an initiate in God's purest path. They concluded that the whole trip was false.

But really, taking on a seemingly opposite philosophy of cherishing emptiness and anatta is hardly any different. Whether one is into Sant Mat or into Buddhism, they are both artificial modalities that, strictly speaking, are out of sync with human feelings and human needs.

A common criticism of Sant Mat is the feeling of frustration in trying to achieve the unachievable. Satsangis sit for hours a day for 30 years without the promised grand spiritual experiences. People leave Sant Mat then because they find it's not, in a word, practical. It did not make them the saints that they pined to be when they took initiation. They concluded they were on a false path - -not false in the sense that there's another guru out there with a better spiritual path, but false in the sense of seeking something that wouldn't have made them humanly happen and content in the first place. Or perhaps, something so outside of human existence it couldn't be honestly desired anyway (is life without a body and mind in a realm of light and sound really a consummation devoutly to wished?)

But then, who devoutly wishes, honestly, to reach a point where their every human desire is utterly deconstructed and seen as "empty"? And ditto for every thing and every being in the world they live in?
"Nothing is real, all is simply a construct of compounded elements" is all I guess all one would have to say, like the robot in Lost in Space.

Sant mat, Buddhism, Watts -- these are just modalities of philosophy. They are just entertainment. They are reactions to life. Strictly speaking, they are not really ways of life, as life is made up of many little desires that come with being human, and can't be wished or meditated or philosophized away.

[Ron E.]

I’ve been reading some of Toliffson’s ‘Outpourings’ and came across this piece on free will which reflects this post and how I view the matter: -

“Given the "wrong" combination of genetics, neurochemistry, conditioning, provocation, and opportunity, what we consider horrible things can happen. "I" could be the perpetrator of such things, or "you" could. And while we would certainly want a serial killer or a child molester locked up for the protection of everyone; at the same time, if we look deeply, we can see that they are blameless. No one would commit atrocities if they really had a choice, if they were really free. Looking closely, it can be seen that if "I" were in "their" shoes (that is to say, if "I" had the same combination of genetics, neurochemistry, conditioning, provocation, and opportunity), then "I" would do exactly the same thing "they" did, because there is no "I" and no "them" apart from the "shoes" (the ten million conditions -- nature and nurture).”

Sant64’s take on emptiness, impermanence and anatta or no-self reflects a common miss-conception on theses matters. Emptiness impermanence or no-self simply describe the way things actually are which Zen/Chan point to in their various ways which by no means negates our very natural human feelings and emotions, Seeing thoughts and emotions and how they arise are part of Zen practice and it is often pointed out that to believe they need to be eliminated is futile and a barrier to self-realisation.

There is a story I came across recently which illustrates how emotions are the beautiful and normal way of us humans; - “The wife of a Zen master had died. At times his students saw him weeping and were perplexed. They approached him and asked him why such a renowned teacher who taught no-self, impermanence etc. had not risen above such emotions. “Well” he said, “I cry because I miss her.”

[sant64]

"Emptiness impermanence or no-self simply describe the way things actually are which Zen/Chan point to in their various ways which by no means negates our very natural human feelings and emotions,

It by no means negates them, because.....? There is no "because." To claim that our very natural human feelings somehow coexist with the realization of emptiness doesn't work. It's just handwaving away the blatant contradiction of the supposed insight into emptiness that Buddhists pursue, and some Buddhist masters, say they've realized.

As I mentioned, we've seen the Dalai Lama cry. We've also seen countless Buddhist and Advaita gurus fall into scandals of power, money, sex, and intoxicants. What happened to their achievement of insight into the ephemeral nature of all things?

"Oh well, they keep their human side but they are also enlightened because that's the way it works." Come on. It's time to look harder at the assumptions we've made about these paths we're on. Most of us have held on to our romantic notions of self-transcendence even as we've left our gurus. The fact is that we can not self-transcend. We may meditate and have an experience of light, of bliss, or some kind of Zen satori. But these are all temporary experiences, like orgasms.

Just as it's good to realize the limits of a path like Sant Mat, it's good to realize the limits of the self-deconstruction game. Just as you failed to reach Sach Khand, you will fail to "realize impermanence" in anything but an elementary way that will do very little to alter your human condition. So why waste time and buy endless books on that doomed project.

No doubt, practicing something like Zen has real benefits. But none beyond a limited rejuvenation of our nervous system. It's being cruel to oneself to expect anything more from Zen.

"Seeing thoughts and emotions and how they arise are part of Zen practice and it is often pointed out that to believe they need to be eliminated is futile and a barrier to self-realization."

Well yes, being aware of thoughts and emotions is part of Zen practice, and for a couple of reasons. One is that it's largely unavoidable to think and feel. The other is that there's a limited therapeutic or psychological effect in doing Zazen. But where and what is this "self-realization"?

Some Zen masters have achieved an elegant comportment via their years of Zazen. No argument there. Some have had striking satori experiences. I can believe that. I don't though believe any of them have attained "self-realization." And that's because no Buddhist master that I've ever met or heard of lives as though he really, really believes that all phenomena are empty.

One comes to mind who lives in my area. He is a Westerner who became a monk when he was young, moved to Thailand, studied with a Buddhist great, and has for the past 50 years been one of the most diligent monks and abbots you could find. I have great respect for his dedication and accomplishments. But having visited him several times, I noted that he's always talking about politics, and often telling the story of how the master loved him best and how jealous the other monks were of him.

That doesn't make him a bad guy, but "self-realized" either means something very great indeed, or it means nothing.

[Tim Rimmer]

Hey Brian

The Joan Tollifson stuff is a full on enjoyable read. Can’t help noticing some of the speak is very Nisargadatta-ish - she does mention him as a strong influence - a big yes to that. Also re this latest choice/choicelessness post, another cool dude comes to mind - Jiddu Krishnamurti. As far as I can tell he was definitely one of the first, if not the first to use the term ‘choiceless awareness’ as a pointer to this seeming underlying reality, we’re all keen to awaken to.
Of course JK was big on the thinker/thought, chooser/choice being the same thing and ultimately tied up with this illusory self we’ve created from thought.
That this illusory self story is going mainstream, appears to be given some fairly in-depth consideration in the latest New Scientist Essential Guide (no. 20), entitled the Human Mind. I’m about half way through it and enjoying it, came across a cool new term - ‘psychobiotic’- for bugs in our gut that influence mental processes.
From page 41:
“This might come as a shock, but much of what you take for granted about your day-to-day existence is largely a figment of your imagination. From your senses to your opinions and beliefs, how you see yourself and others and even your sense of free will, nothing is quite as it seems”.