Welcome to this talk plus meditation cheat sheet about making life's choices.
So right at the start here I want to invite you to bring the choice that you're thinking about to mind and just check in how it is to be with that choice.
Maybe it's something around buying a house or your love life or a career or something small that somehow is important to you.
So just bring it to the forefront of your mind right now and just sit with it for a few moments.
And really allow yourself to go into your normal habitual contact with this choice that you're facing.
Maybe there are arguments that come up for either side of the choice and just run through it in your mind.
And as you're doing this I wonder how it feels for you.
How is it for you to be with this decision?
What do you notice in your belly,
In your body?
Is your face still relaxed?
How are your shoulders?
How are you breathing?
And just notice any effect that being with this decision has on you.
Now it might be that it's a very relaxing experience for you.
I would like that.
I hope that.
But coming to this meditation I imagine that it's not completely comfortable for you to be with this choice.
Or maybe you just want clarity.
And one thing that I want to point out is that for many of us thinking that there's a right choice and that in the worst case life can be ruined by the wrong one can be very stressful.
We can get really contracted around making choices.
I wonder if you recognize that.
And what I want to draw your attention to is that this kind of contraction is actually a very deep psychological motif that we can also trace back to the likes of Buddhism in its attempt to unwind that mechanism.
And I will quote Andrew Holowczyk on this very point from his book Reverse Meditation.
And he talks about how we have all these contractions and that the biggest contraction that we have is the contraction of thinking we are a separate self,
Doing things and making choices and managing our lives.
And he says along with Buddhism that this is actually an illusion.
And this is the quote.
To end contraction is to transcend the ego which is why so much of the spiritual path is about letting go.
The challenge we experience in attempting to let go reveals how much we love to grasp.
End quote.
So here is directly pointing to the contraction that is the ego,
This sense of having a self that gets us all into sort of a twist,
Into a knot.
And that's why also Buddhism is called a soteriology which means a kind of practice to free us,
To free us from these mental knots.
And the biggest mental knot that we can have is to think we are a separate individual,
Somehow a being that is definable.
And Rupert Spira in addressing the idea of making a choice,
He makes this very clear.
And I'm paraphrasing here what he said.
He uses the example of choosing if you want a tea or a coffee.
And so as he describes it you hear the question would you like tea or coffee?
And then upon hearing that there's a thought in your mind that says I would like tea.
And then there's a next thought.
I choose to have a tea.
And that's so funny because what Rupert Spira points to is that there's a choosing kind of a thought but there's actually no chooser.
The choice itself is more like a thought.
And so is the chooser.
They come up in us.
We don't actually do something magically.
So Rupert Spira says that the choice actually just appears to us.
There's nothing really that we do.
I find that very interesting.
And even the chooser as he sometimes calls it is a thought after the fact.
You already somehow came to a choice or a choice came to you and then you sort of identify with that.
And that's also by the way if you have seen the movie The Matrix when Neo goes to the Oracle.
He thinks he goes there to make a choice but what the Oracle tells him is that no you already made a choice.
You're actually here to understand why you made the choice.
So there too is this element of the choice is something that more appears to us than that we actually manifest it.
I find that very interesting.
I also want to invoke a radically different type of figure.
Mr.
Robert Sapolsky who is a an evolutionary biologist.
And Sapolsky is also a neuroscientist and he has done extensive research on stress and its effect on human behavior.
And he's a professor at the Stanford University and he focuses on the intricate relationships between stress,
Neurobiology and primate behavior.
And I want to read a few quotes by Sapolsky that somehow point to a kind of determinism in our choices.
A sort of biological social determinism.
So this is the first quote.
You cannot decide all the sensory stimuli in your environment.
Your hormone levels this morning.
Whether something traumatic happened to you in the past.
The socio-economic status of your parents.
Your fetal environment.
Your genes.
Whether your ancestors were farmers or herders.
Let me state this most broadly.
Probably at this point too broadly for most readers.
We are nothing more or less than a cumulative biological and environmental luck over which we had no control that has brought us to any moment.
End quote.
And what he points to here is all these factors really influence our decisions and they can be predicted incredibly well.
I will say a bit more later about that I do not completely agree with his sketch of what we are.
That we are nothing more or less than cumulative biological luck.
I don't agree with that.
But I do agree with his point here that our choices are immensely influenced by all these factors.
And he later on also speaks about how thinking you can choose what you choose is a bit of an illusion.
So here's the second quote.
And he talks about Sam Harris in this quote.
Sam Harris argues convincingly that it's impossible to successfully think of what you're going to think next.
The takeaway from chapters two and three is that it's impossible to successfully wish what you're going to wish for.
This chapter's punchline is that it's impossible to successfully will yourself to have more willpower.
End quote.
So what he says here quite beautifully invoking Sam Harris in his turn is that you cannot choose to want what you want.
And if you even could choose somehow against your heart's desire that doesn't make any sense does it?
We want to make choices that make us happy.
So now then how can we make the right choice?
Without answering the ultimate question of free will I will suggest that the wisest thing we can do is to find out what our soul wants or if you will what our deepest self wants and to follow it to more or less become a disciple to our own heart.
And just to make a note as promised earlier I do resonate with Sapolsky's perspective but I also see that I'm not just my brain and I do see that this evolutionary deterministic analysis describes my body mind but not the awareness that I am.
And by the way Sapolsky is very aware that he uses this kind of reductionism.
And just to state a bit of a counter position to this meditation has indeed been shown to increase connections in our prefrontal cortex where our executive decision making is located.
And so I've actually experienced myself as well and maybe you have as well in a period where I meditated really vigorously for the first time I noticed a considerable space opening up.
This was sort of a psychological space but really unmistakably noticeable.
That happened when I meditated and I could just see that I had choice where normally I would have reacted out of habit.
So I suggest we use the power of meditation right now.
So let's meditate.
So maybe you want to adjust yourself a little bit to just get into a bit of a self-reflective position.
If you're wearing glasses and you're able to then you can take them off to relax your face a little bit.
And let's just do some slowing down here.
You can have your eyes closed or open.
If you have your eyes open then I suggest to just have a soft gentle gaze at the floor or wall in front of you or wherever you are.
And allow your face to relax.
Allow your shoulders to relax down.
Become more and more still and present.
Maybe just by turning inward like this you're already noticing your breath becoming a little bit deeper and more relaxed.
If you want to you can take a few more deep breaths.
Conscious deeper longer inhalations and even longer exhalations.
And you want to have a kind of gentle lift of your spine if you're sitting.
Gentle lift.
Lift your neck also away from your shoulders ever so gently.
But let your skin and your tissues rely on your skeleton.
And enjoy sitting here in stillness.
If you're noticing thoughts coming,
Let them be.
You don't have to do anything about it.
Just have a bit more focus on your bodily sensations,
Your contact with whatever you're sitting or laying on,
Your breathing.
Focus on the stillness while the thoughts do what they will do.
So then I want us to do a practice with the decision that we want to make.
So I invite you to bring forth your question.
Whatever your question is,
Whatever the choice that you would like to have clarity on.
And imagine,
If you will,
You don't have to be good at visualization.
Just imagine you're standing in front of a well.
You know,
One of those classic cemented wells with a little roof over it and a bucket to draw water from the well.
You're in front of such a well and this well actually goes into the depth of your own soul,
All the way down.
Now I want you to again imagine,
It doesn't have to be a perfect imagination,
But just imagine you're wrapping your question in some kind of wrapping paper and then just throw it down the well.
You will not hear it fall.
It's far too deep for that.
Just give your question to the well.
Really let it go down all the way.
Let it go.
You don't have to think about anything else right now.
Just dropping your question deep into the well and then just let it go.
Go back to where you are.
Meditating,
Breathing,
Relaxing,
Nothing to do.
Just being here for a few more moments.
If the visualization somehow doesn't work for you,
You can also take a moment now and just ask the question,
Directing it into the stillness that you notice.
Just inside of yourself,
In your mind,
Ask the question to the stillness that you're in,
That you're noticing and then again let it go.
Don't wait for anything.
Don't do anything.
Just sitting and meditating for a few more moments.
Very good.
Now that's the end of this meditation and I will say a few more words.
Maybe an answer to your question already came.
Maybe you have already got clarity by this practice.
That's perfectly possible.
But I also imagine that for many of you a question will come up later.
So you've now dropped your choice into the well or you've posed it to the stillness,
That is the background of your mind,
The presence that you are.
And I just invite you to stay open for an answer,
Because an answer will come and it will feel more like an intuition than a thought,
Is my guess.
So just keep one ear open.
You can just go about your day and keep one ear open internally to whatever voice might come.
And I invite you to stay open for an answer,
Because an answer will come to whatever voice might come back from the question that you asked.
And I want to leave you with a quote by Dr.
Ellen Langer,
Who is an American professor of psychology at the University of Harvard.
I really like what she said and I really resonate with it.
She said,
Rather than wasting your time being stressed over making the right decision,
Make the decision right.
Rather than wasting your time being stressed over making the right decision,
Make the decision right.
So what I love about that is that it says something about,
It doesn't really ultimately matter what we choose.
Of course you want to make a choice that's in line with yourself,
That's why we're practicing what we just did.
But more important is that you commit to the choice you make.
Otherwise you'll just be sort of haphazard in the middle of something.
Commit to the choice.
Make one,
In our sense here,
Receive one from your depth,
Which is more true,
I would say,
But then make the decision right.
So I wanted to give you that as well.
And how I had a very subtle insight myself about this,
It was maybe a year ago,
Is that more important than what I do,
I.
E.
What I choose,
More important is how I do it.
So for me,
For instance,
I was thinking about what kind of job should I try to get or how should I make my living.
But I noticed time and time again,
There's such a difference when I focus on how am I actually living my life.
The story I was telling earlier about when I started meditating a lot,
I was doing a relatively random job,
You might say.
I was doing quality assurance for a pharmaceutical wholesale company.
This was about 15,
16 years ago.
And I loved it.
And the reason why I loved it is because I was meditating every day.
I was completely present and I was enjoying myself because of that.
So it's much more important that we have a kind of quality of life than that we sort of hinge everything on these choices that we think we make.
So I hope this perspective helps you as well.
And it's just some kind of nudge that I want to convey that how I live moment by moment also probably has a far greater impact on my happiness.
And to invoke Epictetus here as well,
It's not what happens to you,
But how you react to it that matters.
But how you react to it that matters.
So this is all about the quality of life.
And then the last great voice I want to impart on you is Nietzsche,
Who simply said,
We said more,
But what I want to draw from him is Amor Fati,
Which is the message I hope you get across from here is that,
Love your fate,
Which means live in your days,
Be present,
And then your choices will reveal themselves as they will.
Thank you very much for being with me.
And I hope that a beautiful choice and clarity comes to you.
Thank you.
