转载：The Choices You Make-How to Make the Right Choices
The Choices You Make-How to Make the Right Choices
by Christopher Hansard
‘Spoilt for choice!” you may have heard the saying. We are lead to believe that we have a wide range of choices in our modern democratic prosperous age. Do your choices make you feel prosperous, equal, successful, individual?
Choices, what are they?
Choices are turning points in our lives.
So many choices, but what is it that we can choose? Another car? Another pair of shoes? What mineral water to drink? Another partner? Some time alone? A holiday? To love or not to love? To stay or go? To protect or defend? To trust or not to trust?Choices are markers that define our actions.
Choices can tip the balance in our lives from going nowhere to suddenly arriving where you have always wanted to be.
All the choices are available, except the understanding of what a choice is, and what you can do with it. The power of choice is so huge that it often misses our perceptions entirely. Choices define who we become and who we used to be. Choices change our lives.
The theology of most of the world’s religions dispute the nature of choice under another name, free will.. Adam and Eve got in trouble for the choices they made.. free will is a choice that inhabits the unconscious mind of many of the world’s people, but it creates a submerged collective identity; but personal choice is an emerging spiritual and emotional reality, a child of the mid twentieth century.
Originally formed by moral philosophers of the eighteen and nineteenth centuries but popularised by the movies, advertising, alternative thinking and consumerism. Choice is the essential dogma of the free market, of the capitalist structure that powers all our financial prosperity. Choice is regarded as crucial in nearly every constitution on human rights. From the right to bare arms, which is a choice through to live and prosper as each person sees fit.
Governments, Corporations and many others, are telling us that choice is our right. We have the right to choose. Choice is everywhere.
So much so, that most people do not know what choice really is as they have so many imitations of choice made apparent on a daily basis. After awhile, people switch off and their hearts close down a little, their minds get a little narrower and they think that choice is what to buy for dinner or what is best for them only. It’s not their fault; it’s just a forgetting, an enchantment, cast over the understanding of choice.
I would like to ask you a question: In an age of supposed global freedoms, where people everywhere have the choice to live their lives as they wish, can they really do that? How true is that? Do you believe it is? Do you feel that it is?
We may have more material choices than our forefathers did, but as to whether a wide range of choice is any better is yet to be seen. Mankind has always traded, creating a choice of goods, ideas, options for belief and behaviour, yet if I asked you what you choices do you have in your life today, right now, I wonder what you would say?
Could you give me a list?
Most people would believe that deep within them that they have little freedom of choice, that there are not many choices to be made, and that as far as their life goes, they have to do the best with what they have.
We are told we have choices, but not how to make them. We are encouraged to make choices, but often only within a set framework of our culture, our neighbourhood, our family’s opinions, our views of how the world should be. Often our range of choices are limited because our daily life is beset with the difficulties of daily living or the increasing intolerance and self-destruction of the world around us. Often, we do not know what our choices are made of or where they come from.
Yet, each of us has more choice than we can consciously know, when we make a conscious choice we transform our reality. We get bigger within. When this takes place the world sits up and takes notice, supporting this as the natural evolution of your inner self.
Are you aware of the affect that the choices you have made have had upon your life? Or upon other people?
There may have been choices you made that have made you sad, angry, and isolated or have completely turned your world upside down?
Are you afraid of making choices, so you let other people make them for you?
There comes a time in your life when you must make a choice and take a risk on living. Making a choice is taking a risk. When you make a choice you give birth to the spiritual, emotional and material energies latent within you.
A choice is an act of creation. So if you want to create something good, be prepared to make a choice. The questions you need to ask yourself are:
If I do not make choices for myself then how do I start?
If you make choices already, then ask yourself the following:
What are my choices fuelled by? Are they just a response to my circumstances or do they come from inner change?
What is behind my choices and are they really good for me?
The questions I have just mentioned are really the same thing. But they have different experiences and different outcomes.
The ability to make the right choice or any choice at all comes from knowing where you are in your life and where you are within yourself.
Take a moment, please breathe in and breathe out, slowing down and ask yourself, do you know where you are in your life and where you are within yourself? You can start to find out by slowing down. Slowing down allows you to see choices. Slowing down allows you to see your self.
It’s a bit like this, I knew someone that had lots of pen and ink drawings, and cartoons for magazines done by his friends. One of them depicts the following scene:
The picture is a large aviary full of canaries. On the door is a sign, “Position Available apply within”. In the drawing, the sign pointing to where to knock has fallen off, and so the man makes a choice and knocks on the aviary door. The man keeps on knocking. ..Canaries are not good at opening doors.
Life and the choices we make can be a bit like that. Knocking on the wrong door brings unexpected consequences, when you make the right choices, doors of opportunity just open and often, you do not need to knock, or deal with a bunch of canaries.
Can you make a list of all the things that went right on their own when you made the right choice? I am sure that you can if you think about it. If so write them down in chronological order. Then reflect on when and where you were at that time in your life. Remember the people you knew, the things you did. Then try to recall the choices you made and see how they led you to where you are now.
Now do the same for all the other choices, the ones that didn’t work out and came to nothing and the ones that went wrong and led to difficult consequences.
Do the same for each of these as you did for the positive ones. After doing all of these, see if you can find a link between all three…a chronological link, an emotional link and a circumstantial link.
Take your time to make a series of associations between each link, between each choice and what happened next.
When you can do this you immediately reveal to yourself the pattern of your life. The pattern of your life influences how you made and make choices and what you do with them, when they work out, and what you do with them when they do not become successful.
The first choice that you made was to be born. Yes, your birth was a choice, for which the majority of people truly appreciate but then forget. The next choice was that you started to grow up and have a life, from which lessons are learnt and the next one after that is that you eventually die.
These are the big three choices, which affect all the others you will ever make, even the choices that never happen or remain hidden.
These three big choices are facts of life. The choice you have is whether to understand them directly or just ignore them, living as best you can. A lot of people ignore them, some try to understand these three choices. When you try to understand them, your life changes its nature, energy and path.
The way you regard birth, the process of living and your eventual death affect all the other choices and abilities to make choices. You may say ‘I haven’t really thought about death, I am to young to be concerned, or my birth? I didn’t have anything to do with that! Or, Life, it just happens and you just do the best you can!
All of these are fears, fears that become excuses for not taking responsibility for who you are. These three, birth, living and death are the tripod on which your choice making ability rests. So, think, what do you know about your birth? What did your Mum and Dad say? Relatives or Family friends?
If you were an orphan or had foster parents what do you know about the circumstances around your birth? Is there a feeling inside of you since your were small trying to tell you this important information?
What you know about your birth story influences your ability to set off the impulse behind your choices. This does not mean that you consciously may know every little detail of your birth; you are connected to your birth experience more than you realise. Your birth is relived everyday in your actions and thoughts. Your rebirth takes place every time you make a choice.
The majority of people are cajoled into suppressing the birth experience and the memory, until their birth is taken for granted. Nothing is our life can be taken for granted. Yet we do this very thing when we forget that we have the ability to make a choice that can change our lives.
What about your daily life, the life you have right now? It is full of unseen choices, it’s a tapestry of choices from your past actions to the ones you are making this very moment.
To empower your choices ask yourself this question: Do you make your Life, or does Life make you do things? Some people would say that they make their own life, while others feel that they should just accept what happens.
The answer is both, to know when to act and to know when not to act. In order to know this, you need to make a fundamental choice.
To trust life utterly, and thus gain insight and connection on when to act and when not to; or be pushed around by your reactive mind or circumstances. By making the choice to connect with the Life within you, life then reacts positively and supports your choice.
If you are afraid of death it means you are afraid of the future and of daily experience. If you have no clear feelings or thoughts about death, you need to know why. It may be that without realising it, you have given up your right to make choices and you should claim that back. It may be that you feel powerless.
Death is not the death of Life, but the ending of your body and the unnecessary emotional burdens and the evolution of the essence of your personality. Even in death we have a choice to live again consciously or fall into the treadmill of unconsciousness.
Also as we live day by day we make a thousand choices we are not always conscious of and we do not understand how these influence our own life let alone the lives of others.
‘Spoilt for choice!” you may have heard the saying. We are lead to believe that we have a wide range of choices in our modern democratic prosperous age. Do your choices make you feel prosperous, equal, successful, individual?
Choices, what are they?
Choices are turning points in our lives.
So many choices, but what is it that we can choose? Another car? Another pair of shoes? What mineral water to drink? Another partner? Some time alone? A holiday? To love or not to love? To stay or go? To protect or defend? To trust or not to trust?Choices are markers that define our actions.
Choices can tip the balance in our lives from going nowhere to suddenly arriving where you have always wanted to be.
All the choices are available, except the understanding of what a choice is, and what you can do with it. The power of choice is so huge that it often misses our perceptions entirely. Choices define who we become and who we used to be. Choices change our lives.
The theology of most of the world’s religions dispute the nature of choice under another name, free will.. Adam and Eve got in trouble for the choices they made.. free will is a choice that inhabits the unconscious mind of many of the world’s people, but it creates a submerged collective identity; but personal choice is an emerging spiritual and emotional reality, a child of the mid twentieth century.
Originally formed by moral philosophers of the eighteen and nineteenth centuries but popularised by the movies, advertising, alternative thinking and consumerism. Choice is the essential dogma of the free market, of the capitalist structure that powers all our financial prosperity. Choice is regarded as crucial in nearly every constitution on human rights. From the right to bare arms, which is a choice through to live and prosper as each person sees fit.
Governments, Corporations and many others, are telling us that choice is our right. We have the right to choose. Choice is everywhere.
So much so, that most people do not know what choice really is as they have so many imitations of choice made apparent on a daily basis. After awhile, people switch off and their hearts close down a little, their minds get a little narrower and they think that choice is what to buy for dinner or what is best for them only. It’s not their fault; it’s just a forgetting, an enchantment, cast over the understanding of choice.
I would like to ask you a question: In an age of supposed global freedoms, where people everywhere have the choice to live their lives as they wish, can they really do that? How true is that? Do you believe it is? Do you feel that it is?
We may have more material choices than our forefathers did, but as to whether a wide range of choice is any better is yet to be seen. Mankind has always traded, creating a choice of goods, ideas, options for belief and behaviour, yet if I asked you what you choices do you have in your life today, right now, I wonder what you would say?
Could you give me a list?
Most people would believe that deep within them that they have little freedom of choice, that there are not many choices to be made, and that as far as their life goes, they have to do the best with what they have.
We are told we have choices, but not how to make them. We are encouraged to make choices, but often only within a set framework of our culture, our neighbourhood, our family’s opinions, our views of how the world should be. Often our range of choices are limited because our daily life is beset with the difficulties of daily living or the increasing intolerance and self-destruction of the world around us. Often, we do not know what our choices are made of or where they come from.
Yet, each of us has more choice than we can consciously know, when we make a conscious choice we transform our reality. We get bigger within. When this takes place the world sits up and takes notice, supporting this as the natural evolution of your inner self.
Are you aware of the affect that the choices you have made have had upon your life? Or upon other people?
There may have been choices you made that have made you sad, angry, and isolated or have completely turned your world upside down?
Are you afraid of making choices, so you let other people make them for you?
There comes a time in your life when you must make a choice and take a risk on living. Making a choice is taking a risk. When you make a choice you give birth to the spiritual, emotional and material energies latent within you.
A choice is an act of creation. So if you want to create something good, be prepared to make a choice. The questions you need to ask yourself are:
If I do not make choices for myself then how do I start?
If you make choices already, then ask yourself the following:
What are my choices fuelled by? Are they just a response to my circumstances or do they come from inner change?
What is behind my choices and are they really good for me?
The questions I have just mentioned are really the same thing. But they have different experiences and different outcomes.
The ability to make the right choice or any choice at all comes from knowing where you are in your life and where you are within yourself.
Take a moment, please breathe in and breathe out, slowing down and ask yourself, do you know where you are in your life and where you are within yourself? You can start to find out by slowing down. Slowing down allows you to see choices. Slowing down allows you to see your self.
It’s a bit like this, I knew someone that had lots of pen and ink drawings, and cartoons for magazines done by his friends. One of them depicts the following scene:
The picture is a large aviary full of canaries. On the door is a sign, “Position Available apply within”. In the drawing, the sign pointing to where to knock has fallen off, and so the man makes a choice and knocks on the aviary door. The man keeps on knocking. ..Canaries are not good at opening doors.
Life and the choices we make can be a bit like that. Knocking on the wrong door brings unexpected consequences, when you make the right choices, doors of opportunity just open and often, you do not need to knock, or deal with a bunch of canaries.
Can you make a list of all the things that went right on their own when you made the right choice? I am sure that you can if you think about it. If so write them down in chronological order. Then reflect on when and where you were at that time in your life. Remember the people you knew, the things you did. Then try to recall the choices you made and see how they led you to where you are now.
Now do the same for all the other choices, the ones that didn’t work out and came to nothing and the ones that went wrong and led to difficult consequences.
Do the same for each of these as you did for the positive ones. After doing all of these, see if you can find a link between all three…a chronological link, an emotional link and a circumstantial link.
Take your time to make a series of associations between each link, between each choice and what happened next.
When you can do this you immediately reveal to yourself the pattern of your life. The pattern of your life influences how you made and make choices and what you do with them, when they work out, and what you do with them when they do not become successful.
The first choice that you made was to be born. Yes, your birth was a choice, for which the majority of people truly appreciate but then forget. The next choice was that you started to grow up and have a life, from which lessons are learnt and the next one after that is that you eventually die.
These are the big three choices, which affect all the others you will ever make, even the choices that never happen or remain hidden.
These three big choices are facts of life. The choice you have is whether to understand them directly or just ignore them, living as best you can. A lot of people ignore them, some try to understand these three choices. When you try to understand them, your life changes its nature, energy and path.
The way you regard birth, the process of living and your eventual death affect all the other choices and abilities to make choices. You may say ‘I haven’t really thought about death, I am to young to be concerned, or my birth? I didn’t have anything to do with that! Or, Life, it just happens and you just do the best you can!
All of these are fears, fears that become excuses for not taking responsibility for who you are. These three, birth, living and death are the tripod on which your choice making ability rests. So, think, what do you know about your birth? What did your Mum and Dad say? Relatives or Family friends?
If you were an orphan or had foster parents what do you know about the circumstances around your birth? Is there a feeling inside of you since your were small trying to tell you this important information?
What you know about your birth story influences your ability to set off the impulse behind your choices. This does not mean that you consciously may know every little detail of your birth; you are connected to your birth experience more than you realise. Your birth is relived everyday in your actions and thoughts. Your rebirth takes place every time you make a choice.
The majority of people are cajoled into suppressing the birth experience and the memory, until their birth is taken for granted. Nothing is our life can be taken for granted. Yet we do this very thing when we forget that we have the ability to make a choice that can change our lives.
What about your daily life, the life you have right now? It is full of unseen choices, it’s a tapestry of choices from your past actions to the ones you are making this very moment.
To empower your choices ask yourself this question: Do you make your Life, or does Life make you do things? Some people would say that they make their own life, while others feel that they should just accept what happens.
The answer is both, to know when to act and to know when not to act. In order to know this, you need to make a fundamental choice.
To trust life utterly, and thus gain insight and connection on when to act and when not to; or be pushed around by your reactive mind or circumstances. By making the choice to connect with the Life within you, life then reacts positively and supports your choice.
If you are afraid of death it means you are afraid of the future and of daily experience. If you have no clear feelings or thoughts about death, you need to know why. It may be that without realising it, you have given up your right to make choices and you should claim that back. It may be that you feel powerless.
Death is not the death of Life, but the ending of your body and the unnecessary emotional burdens and the evolution of the essence of your personality. Even in death we have a choice to live again consciously or fall into the treadmill of unconsciousness.
Also as we live day by day we make a thousand choices we are not always conscious of and we do not understand how these influence our own life let alone the lives of others.
Start to think about how much of your daily life runs on automatic, and all the choices you once initiated have now become habits.
To change your life means changing the choices you make. To change your life for the better here is a list of suggestions that you can try to implement.
I call them “The Ten Filters’ as they help to filter out all that stops you from learning how to recognise and make the right choices.
1.The first filter is to change what you eat and wear daily and to get up one hour earlier than you normally do. In that time spend some of it on your own, even if its five minutes.
2.The second filter is to examine your motives behind the way you communicate to others daily.
3.The third filter is to speak and behave with as much openness and compassion as you can regardless of your mood.
4.The fourth filter is listening with your heart instead of your head to everything you see, read, hear and are told.
5. The fifth filter is to change the way you think about, behave to and judge other people.
6.The sixth filter is to appreciate that your life as it currently is, is what you need to have. As part of this, examine if your current work really reflects who you are and can be.
7.The seventh filter is that you can take responsibility for your thoughts, actions and speech and be able to carry this out with care and discipline. Also as part of this forgive all the real and imaginary wrongs done to you by other people and ask forgiveness of others that you have wronged.
8.The eighth filter is to try to trust all that you do and everyone you meet.
9. The ninth filter is to regard your daily life as a lesson in humility and peace. Look to be taught lessons by anyone at anytime. Remember there is no such thing as a stranger. A stranger is a friend that you have yet to know.
10. The tenth filter is to remember each day that you are good inside and a worthy of respect as all other people. Do not confuse the person inside with their actions and behaviour.
Each of these filters is designed for you to be aware pf how to make better choices and carry them out. If you can do each of these over the course of day you will start to become aware of what choices you do make, and what you do not.
Then once you do become aware, you can start to make choices that will create a new life and a new way of being. This is not as easy as it sounds.
The power that comes from making a choice is the realisation that you are the only person who has responsibility for your life. That’s why you have the life you do. This is not as easy at it sounds.
You may have had a shocking terribly unhappy life, but deep within you, you will know why. The choices surrounding your spiritual growth are the most important for they direct the outcome of everything else.
Spiritual growth is anything that helps you to be a better person and has nothing to do with religion, teachers, this week’s guru or prevailing popular attitude. Spiritual change, emotional wellbeing, having a good home and work, a loving relationship, all comes from making the right choices, and all of this is spiritual growth. All choices essentially return to spiritual and straightforward emotional development.
The freer a person is from any rigid or habitual belief has more opportunities for transforming themselves. The freer that person is to make choices. To go from a set belief to an inner connection that affirms your experience of Life gives you the power to make the right choices consistently.
How free are you in regard to what you believe?
Do you know what you believe?
Belief can often reduce your choices, especially when there is a large amount of fear and doubt underpinning the belief, because often we are not sure what we believe or why we believe, whether it be God or in ourselves or that life goes on as usual. Our fear and doubt rob us of the natural innocence and benefits of belief and thus reduces our ability to make intuitive choices.
People think that decisions and choices are the same, but they are not. A choice is an opportunity and you need to know how to recognise which choice is right for you. Decisions, do not create choices, a decision is an intention.
A choice is a complete opportunity that you can intuit, see and act upon. A choice is a gift. How well do you receive gifts? When you know how to make the right choice, its because the choice in a sense ‘talks’ to you, telling you about what life can be like if you act upon its prompting.
But what about making the wrong choice? There are no wrong choices. It is how we relate to the choice we have made and how we learn from the choice. We have many opportunities in one choice. A choice is a life changing experience. A choice is a catalyst of energy that can be used or applied unskilfully thus creating less than positive outcomes.
I want you to look at your life, and see if there was just one choice that you could have over again. Think on it. Now, quietly, speak it out aloud. Describe it out aloud. Feel the connections, regrets and emotions you have around the lost choice.
Follow it back from your life as it is now; see the events, the people, all which flowed out of that choice. As you feel this, see the lesson that you could learn from this. Try to understand it. In doing this, the choice you thought you had passed over is offering you a new choice of learning, acceptance and wisdom.
The past choices that you have made whether they turned out or not offer you a great opportunity to gain the insight of how the choices you made brought you the life you have.
I would now like you to sit quietly and comfortably and close your eyes. See before you a blazing fire, roaring, bright and hot, and in that fire cast away all the significant choices and insignificant choices into the fire. Focus as you do this and feel the energy and emotion that they release within you. As you finish, give thanks to the fire, and slowly open your eyes. Reflect upon what took place and write it down.
Next I would like you to create a ‘Choice Journal’. In the journal write down all the choices that you remember having made and how they turned out, then right down how they made you feel in the past and now. As you record the choices see if the same choices come up in differing forms.
There are times in our lives when it is easier to get stuck make the same unskilful choices over and over again. The above fire exercise and Choice Journal will help you to see if you are trapped in a cycle of poor choice making. Poor choice making comes from emotional confusion; skilful choice making comes from allowing the core of the choice teaching you its essential lessons.
The essential lessons offered by the core of each choice are normally experienced in three ways.
Firstly, you will feel an emotional state of knowingness or rightness; also you might feel exhilarated, energised but a little scared, in a good way, as you feel the power of the choice.
Secondly, Images, possibilities, plans may come rushing into your mind. As this happens, slow down and let them all come, let them layer themselves, down, until they are laying one upon the other, each connecting to the other. You then may feel that you have to carry this out, that its right, other people might think you are wrong. Ignore them, take the risk.
Thirdly, trust the inspiration that starts to come from the core of the choice, feel it and identify with the experience, become it. Become the choice in order to make it happen. Choices are actions, actions of intent, inner knowledge and results. A choice seeks a conclusion. Do you want to follow things through in your life to a final outcome?
These three dimensions of choice enable you to be aware of the process that goes on within you as you face the choices in your life. Making the right choices often comes down simply to having the courage to make a choice, regardless of the outcome.
When you next make a choice that you need to consider go through these three aspects of choice, then you will discover that naturally you will apply these three discoveries to all the choices you are consciously aware of.
Choices connect people and make history, your history and history of your friends, family, neighbourhood, and country. The choices our leaders make affect our daily lives; all of us are connected by the energy of choice.
Yet if just one of us decides to make the choice of becoming who we truly can be, our divine innermost self, that alone would change the negativity in our world. Can you imagine if we all made that conscious choice? The world would change completely from what we understand it to be, time, space and the matter that we live in and on that makes our planet would simply change into a higher state of being.
The power of choice that exists within each of us is a thread, a filament of the universe that together weaves the fabric of all things. Each thread, each brilliant filament is a stream of light and consciousness, which dwells in the essence of each choice you make, sometimes seen and other times unrecognised.
You are this thread, this light, this brilliant filament; you exist at the core of each choice. For every time you choose well, you choose your highest Self, you recognise your own brilliance and incandescent being. Creation dwells within you because of choice, and choice holds Life in its centre. You are that centre, that Life, that Creation.
What are we here in the journey of our own life to learn?
That we are made of the choices of our past? That we make our own present by the choices we recognise? That our future lies in the choices we have understood and learnt from?
Yes… we are here on our journey to learn all these things.
By understanding that we are made of the choices of our past and that we can recognise the choices of the moment; and that our future lies in what we learnt from our choices; we capture life in the beat of our hearts and we change from looking at life from the outside looking in, but from within the very thrum and flicker of how each choice joins one to other only if we allow ourselves to do so.
We go from merely looking on at life to having vision that comes from life. You become a visionary concerning your needs, truth and the reason why you are here, blossoming in this progression of choices called your life.
When our choices are taken away from us as can sometimes happen in Life, the first thing that we can do, is to accept everything as a blessing.
Your life may be falling to pieces, it can happen, you may have lost all that had, you may be losing a false identity or security, part of your life may be coming to an end, whatever it is, be glad for what is to come. There is the learning of lessons that the recognition of how to make the right choices brings.
Its not about money or that great career, or the ideal spouse or the perfect relationship which will solve all your problems, it is about taking the step to know that even when we do not know what is to come or we can not see clearly, it is a special kind of choice; the choice of unknowing, the gift of trusting the unknown.
Making the right choices comes from relating to your inner state, of how the quality of your being truly is. The quality and strength of your inner self enables you to sense the continuance of your life’s history. Can you be at peace with your past? Look at the choices you made and do not ask why these all happened, but how. In asking how these things happened, your past gives up the lesson it has for you and you will be at peace.
What does your history mean? What is its significance?
Do you recall it ever helping you to understand today?
All of our lives we make choices, good or bad, and then create ways of trying to escape the choices that reveal who we are.
There is no escape from this, we cannot escape ourselves and if you seek to make the right choices in your life, the time has come to be kind to yourself and accept yourself without judgement of any kind. Take the time to look directly at your choices, as deep as you can and give a heartfelt thanks for each and every one.
Choices and understanding them make us all the more human, revealing our weaknesses and strengths, talents and wisdom, guiding us to living more compassionate and connected lives. Knowing how to make choices is an art, an art that teaches us to live as best we can.
Your life will rise and fall, just like your breath, good and bad will decorate your days, each a testament to your experience and as you live more deeply, each choice you make changes from the recognition of an opportunity, to the profound recognition of your being, of the love and compassion that heals everything and you will discover that the smallest choice is a window, path and sanctuary of the eternal light that blazes in every human being.
(ENDS)
by Christopher Hansard
‘Spoilt for choice!” you may have heard the saying. We are lead to believe that we have a wide range of choices in our modern democratic prosperous age. Do your choices make you feel prosperous, equal, successful, individual?
Choices, what are they?
Choices are turning points in our lives.
So many choices, but what is it that we can choose? Another car? Another pair of shoes? What mineral water to drink? Another partner? Some time alone? A holiday? To love or not to love? To stay or go? To protect or defend? To trust or not to trust?Choices are markers that define our actions.
Choices can tip the balance in our lives from going nowhere to suddenly arriving where you have always wanted to be.
All the choices are available, except the understanding of what a choice is, and what you can do with it. The power of choice is so huge that it often misses our perceptions entirely. Choices define who we become and who we used to be. Choices change our lives.
The theology of most of the world’s religions dispute the nature of choice under another name, free will.. Adam and Eve got in trouble for the choices they made.. free will is a choice that inhabits the unconscious mind of many of the world’s people, but it creates a submerged collective identity; but personal choice is an emerging spiritual and emotional reality, a child of the mid twentieth century.
Originally formed by moral philosophers of the eighteen and nineteenth centuries but popularised by the movies, advertising, alternative thinking and consumerism. Choice is the essential dogma of the free market, of the capitalist structure that powers all our financial prosperity. Choice is regarded as crucial in nearly every constitution on human rights. From the right to bare arms, which is a choice through to live and prosper as each person sees fit.
Governments, Corporations and many others, are telling us that choice is our right. We have the right to choose. Choice is everywhere.
So much so, that most people do not know what choice really is as they have so many imitations of choice made apparent on a daily basis. After awhile, people switch off and their hearts close down a little, their minds get a little narrower and they think that choice is what to buy for dinner or what is best for them only. It’s not their fault; it’s just a forgetting, an enchantment, cast over the understanding of choice.
I would like to ask you a question: In an age of supposed global freedoms, where people everywhere have the choice to live their lives as they wish, can they really do that? How true is that? Do you believe it is? Do you feel that it is?
We may have more material choices than our forefathers did, but as to whether a wide range of choice is any better is yet to be seen. Mankind has always traded, creating a choice of goods, ideas, options for belief and behaviour, yet if I asked you what you choices do you have in your life today, right now, I wonder what you would say?
Could you give me a list?
Most people would believe that deep within them that they have little freedom of choice, that there are not many choices to be made, and that as far as their life goes, they have to do the best with what they have.
We are told we have choices, but not how to make them. We are encouraged to make choices, but often only within a set framework of our culture, our neighbourhood, our family’s opinions, our views of how the world should be. Often our range of choices are limited because our daily life is beset with the difficulties of daily living or the increasing intolerance and self-destruction of the world around us. Often, we do not know what our choices are made of or where they come from.
Yet, each of us has more choice than we can consciously know, when we make a conscious choice we transform our reality. We get bigger within. When this takes place the world sits up and takes notice, supporting this as the natural evolution of your inner self.
Are you aware of the affect that the choices you have made have had upon your life? Or upon other people?
There may have been choices you made that have made you sad, angry, and isolated or have completely turned your world upside down?
Are you afraid of making choices, so you let other people make them for you?
There comes a time in your life when you must make a choice and take a risk on living. Making a choice is taking a risk. When you make a choice you give birth to the spiritual, emotional and material energies latent within you.
A choice is an act of creation. So if you want to create something good, be prepared to make a choice. The questions you need to ask yourself are:
If I do not make choices for myself then how do I start?
If you make choices already, then ask yourself the following:
What are my choices fuelled by? Are they just a response to my circumstances or do they come from inner change?
What is behind my choices and are they really good for me?
The questions I have just mentioned are really the same thing. But they have different experiences and different outcomes.
The ability to make the right choice or any choice at all comes from knowing where you are in your life and where you are within yourself.
Take a moment, please breathe in and breathe out, slowing down and ask yourself, do you know where you are in your life and where you are within yourself? You can start to find out by slowing down. Slowing down allows you to see choices. Slowing down allows you to see your self.
It’s a bit like this, I knew someone that had lots of pen and ink drawings, and cartoons for magazines done by his friends. One of them depicts the following scene:
The picture is a large aviary full of canaries. On the door is a sign, “Position Available apply within”. In the drawing, the sign pointing to where to knock has fallen off, and so the man makes a choice and knocks on the aviary door. The man keeps on knocking. ..Canaries are not good at opening doors.
Life and the choices we make can be a bit like that. Knocking on the wrong door brings unexpected consequences, when you make the right choices, doors of opportunity just open and often, you do not need to knock, or deal with a bunch of canaries.
Can you make a list of all the things that went right on their own when you made the right choice? I am sure that you can if you think about it. If so write them down in chronological order. Then reflect on when and where you were at that time in your life. Remember the people you knew, the things you did. Then try to recall the choices you made and see how they led you to where you are now.
Now do the same for all the other choices, the ones that didn’t work out and came to nothing and the ones that went wrong and led to difficult consequences.
Do the same for each of these as you did for the positive ones. After doing all of these, see if you can find a link between all three…a chronological link, an emotional link and a circumstantial link.
Take your time to make a series of associations between each link, between each choice and what happened next.
When you can do this you immediately reveal to yourself the pattern of your life. The pattern of your life influences how you made and make choices and what you do with them, when they work out, and what you do with them when they do not become successful.
The first choice that you made was to be born. Yes, your birth was a choice, for which the majority of people truly appreciate but then forget. The next choice was that you started to grow up and have a life, from which lessons are learnt and the next one after that is that you eventually die.
These are the big three choices, which affect all the others you will ever make, even the choices that never happen or remain hidden.
These three big choices are facts of life. The choice you have is whether to understand them directly or just ignore them, living as best you can. A lot of people ignore them, some try to understand these three choices. When you try to understand them, your life changes its nature, energy and path.
The way you regard birth, the process of living and your eventual death affect all the other choices and abilities to make choices. You may say ‘I haven’t really thought about death, I am to young to be concerned, or my birth? I didn’t have anything to do with that! Or, Life, it just happens and you just do the best you can!
All of these are fears, fears that become excuses for not taking responsibility for who you are. These three, birth, living and death are the tripod on which your choice making ability rests. So, think, what do you know about your birth? What did your Mum and Dad say? Relatives or Family friends?
If you were an orphan or had foster parents what do you know about the circumstances around your birth? Is there a feeling inside of you since your were small trying to tell you this important information?
What you know about your birth story influences your ability to set off the impulse behind your choices. This does not mean that you consciously may know every little detail of your birth; you are connected to your birth experience more than you realise. Your birth is relived everyday in your actions and thoughts. Your rebirth takes place every time you make a choice.
The majority of people are cajoled into suppressing the birth experience and the memory, until their birth is taken for granted. Nothing is our life can be taken for granted. Yet we do this very thing when we forget that we have the ability to make a choice that can change our lives.
What about your daily life, the life you have right now? It is full of unseen choices, it’s a tapestry of choices from your past actions to the ones you are making this very moment.
To empower your choices ask yourself this question: Do you make your Life, or does Life make you do things? Some people would say that they make their own life, while others feel that they should just accept what happens.
The answer is both, to know when to act and to know when not to act. In order to know this, you need to make a fundamental choice.
To trust life utterly, and thus gain insight and connection on when to act and when not to; or be pushed around by your reactive mind or circumstances. By making the choice to connect with the Life within you, life then reacts positively and supports your choice.
If you are afraid of death it means you are afraid of the future and of daily experience. If you have no clear feelings or thoughts about death, you need to know why. It may be that without realising it, you have given up your right to make choices and you should claim that back. It may be that you feel powerless.
Death is not the death of Life, but the ending of your body and the unnecessary emotional burdens and the evolution of the essence of your personality. Even in death we have a choice to live again consciously or fall into the treadmill of unconsciousness.
Also as we live day by day we make a thousand choices we are not always conscious of and we do not understand how these influence our own life let alone the lives of others.
‘Spoilt for choice!” you may have heard the saying. We are lead to believe that we have a wide range of choices in our modern democratic prosperous age. Do your choices make you feel prosperous, equal, successful, individual?
Choices, what are they?
Choices are turning points in our lives.
So many choices, but what is it that we can choose? Another car? Another pair of shoes? What mineral water to drink? Another partner? Some time alone? A holiday? To love or not to love? To stay or go? To protect or defend? To trust or not to trust?Choices are markers that define our actions.
Choices can tip the balance in our lives from going nowhere to suddenly arriving where you have always wanted to be.
All the choices are available, except the understanding of what a choice is, and what you can do with it. The power of choice is so huge that it often misses our perceptions entirely. Choices define who we become and who we used to be. Choices change our lives.
The theology of most of the world’s religions dispute the nature of choice under another name, free will.. Adam and Eve got in trouble for the choices they made.. free will is a choice that inhabits the unconscious mind of many of the world’s people, but it creates a submerged collective identity; but personal choice is an emerging spiritual and emotional reality, a child of the mid twentieth century.
Originally formed by moral philosophers of the eighteen and nineteenth centuries but popularised by the movies, advertising, alternative thinking and consumerism. Choice is the essential dogma of the free market, of the capitalist structure that powers all our financial prosperity. Choice is regarded as crucial in nearly every constitution on human rights. From the right to bare arms, which is a choice through to live and prosper as each person sees fit.
Governments, Corporations and many others, are telling us that choice is our right. We have the right to choose. Choice is everywhere.
So much so, that most people do not know what choice really is as they have so many imitations of choice made apparent on a daily basis. After awhile, people switch off and their hearts close down a little, their minds get a little narrower and they think that choice is what to buy for dinner or what is best for them only. It’s not their fault; it’s just a forgetting, an enchantment, cast over the understanding of choice.
I would like to ask you a question: In an age of supposed global freedoms, where people everywhere have the choice to live their lives as they wish, can they really do that? How true is that? Do you believe it is? Do you feel that it is?
We may have more material choices than our forefathers did, but as to whether a wide range of choice is any better is yet to be seen. Mankind has always traded, creating a choice of goods, ideas, options for belief and behaviour, yet if I asked you what you choices do you have in your life today, right now, I wonder what you would say?
Could you give me a list?
Most people would believe that deep within them that they have little freedom of choice, that there are not many choices to be made, and that as far as their life goes, they have to do the best with what they have.
We are told we have choices, but not how to make them. We are encouraged to make choices, but often only within a set framework of our culture, our neighbourhood, our family’s opinions, our views of how the world should be. Often our range of choices are limited because our daily life is beset with the difficulties of daily living or the increasing intolerance and self-destruction of the world around us. Often, we do not know what our choices are made of or where they come from.
Yet, each of us has more choice than we can consciously know, when we make a conscious choice we transform our reality. We get bigger within. When this takes place the world sits up and takes notice, supporting this as the natural evolution of your inner self.
Are you aware of the affect that the choices you have made have had upon your life? Or upon other people?
There may have been choices you made that have made you sad, angry, and isolated or have completely turned your world upside down?
Are you afraid of making choices, so you let other people make them for you?
There comes a time in your life when you must make a choice and take a risk on living. Making a choice is taking a risk. When you make a choice you give birth to the spiritual, emotional and material energies latent within you.
A choice is an act of creation. So if you want to create something good, be prepared to make a choice. The questions you need to ask yourself are:
If I do not make choices for myself then how do I start?
If you make choices already, then ask yourself the following:
What are my choices fuelled by? Are they just a response to my circumstances or do they come from inner change?
What is behind my choices and are they really good for me?
The questions I have just mentioned are really the same thing. But they have different experiences and different outcomes.
The ability to make the right choice or any choice at all comes from knowing where you are in your life and where you are within yourself.
Take a moment, please breathe in and breathe out, slowing down and ask yourself, do you know where you are in your life and where you are within yourself? You can start to find out by slowing down. Slowing down allows you to see choices. Slowing down allows you to see your self.
It’s a bit like this, I knew someone that had lots of pen and ink drawings, and cartoons for magazines done by his friends. One of them depicts the following scene:
The picture is a large aviary full of canaries. On the door is a sign, “Position Available apply within”. In the drawing, the sign pointing to where to knock has fallen off, and so the man makes a choice and knocks on the aviary door. The man keeps on knocking. ..Canaries are not good at opening doors.
Life and the choices we make can be a bit like that. Knocking on the wrong door brings unexpected consequences, when you make the right choices, doors of opportunity just open and often, you do not need to knock, or deal with a bunch of canaries.
Can you make a list of all the things that went right on their own when you made the right choice? I am sure that you can if you think about it. If so write them down in chronological order. Then reflect on when and where you were at that time in your life. Remember the people you knew, the things you did. Then try to recall the choices you made and see how they led you to where you are now.
Now do the same for all the other choices, the ones that didn’t work out and came to nothing and the ones that went wrong and led to difficult consequences.
Do the same for each of these as you did for the positive ones. After doing all of these, see if you can find a link between all three…a chronological link, an emotional link and a circumstantial link.
Take your time to make a series of associations between each link, between each choice and what happened next.
When you can do this you immediately reveal to yourself the pattern of your life. The pattern of your life influences how you made and make choices and what you do with them, when they work out, and what you do with them when they do not become successful.
The first choice that you made was to be born. Yes, your birth was a choice, for which the majority of people truly appreciate but then forget. The next choice was that you started to grow up and have a life, from which lessons are learnt and the next one after that is that you eventually die.
These are the big three choices, which affect all the others you will ever make, even the choices that never happen or remain hidden.
These three big choices are facts of life. The choice you have is whether to understand them directly or just ignore them, living as best you can. A lot of people ignore them, some try to understand these three choices. When you try to understand them, your life changes its nature, energy and path.
The way you regard birth, the process of living and your eventual death affect all the other choices and abilities to make choices. You may say ‘I haven’t really thought about death, I am to young to be concerned, or my birth? I didn’t have anything to do with that! Or, Life, it just happens and you just do the best you can!
All of these are fears, fears that become excuses for not taking responsibility for who you are. These three, birth, living and death are the tripod on which your choice making ability rests. So, think, what do you know about your birth? What did your Mum and Dad say? Relatives or Family friends?
If you were an orphan or had foster parents what do you know about the circumstances around your birth? Is there a feeling inside of you since your were small trying to tell you this important information?
What you know about your birth story influences your ability to set off the impulse behind your choices. This does not mean that you consciously may know every little detail of your birth; you are connected to your birth experience more than you realise. Your birth is relived everyday in your actions and thoughts. Your rebirth takes place every time you make a choice.
The majority of people are cajoled into suppressing the birth experience and the memory, until their birth is taken for granted. Nothing is our life can be taken for granted. Yet we do this very thing when we forget that we have the ability to make a choice that can change our lives.
What about your daily life, the life you have right now? It is full of unseen choices, it’s a tapestry of choices from your past actions to the ones you are making this very moment.
To empower your choices ask yourself this question: Do you make your Life, or does Life make you do things? Some people would say that they make their own life, while others feel that they should just accept what happens.
The answer is both, to know when to act and to know when not to act. In order to know this, you need to make a fundamental choice.
To trust life utterly, and thus gain insight and connection on when to act and when not to; or be pushed around by your reactive mind or circumstances. By making the choice to connect with the Life within you, life then reacts positively and supports your choice.
If you are afraid of death it means you are afraid of the future and of daily experience. If you have no clear feelings or thoughts about death, you need to know why. It may be that without realising it, you have given up your right to make choices and you should claim that back. It may be that you feel powerless.
Death is not the death of Life, but the ending of your body and the unnecessary emotional burdens and the evolution of the essence of your personality. Even in death we have a choice to live again consciously or fall into the treadmill of unconsciousness.
Also as we live day by day we make a thousand choices we are not always conscious of and we do not understand how these influence our own life let alone the lives of others.
Start to think about how much of your daily life runs on automatic, and all the choices you once initiated have now become habits.
To change your life means changing the choices you make. To change your life for the better here is a list of suggestions that you can try to implement.
I call them “The Ten Filters’ as they help to filter out all that stops you from learning how to recognise and make the right choices.
1.The first filter is to change what you eat and wear daily and to get up one hour earlier than you normally do. In that time spend some of it on your own, even if its five minutes.
2.The second filter is to examine your motives behind the way you communicate to others daily.
3.The third filter is to speak and behave with as much openness and compassion as you can regardless of your mood.
4.The fourth filter is listening with your heart instead of your head to everything you see, read, hear and are told.
5. The fifth filter is to change the way you think about, behave to and judge other people.
6.The sixth filter is to appreciate that your life as it currently is, is what you need to have. As part of this, examine if your current work really reflects who you are and can be.
7.The seventh filter is that you can take responsibility for your thoughts, actions and speech and be able to carry this out with care and discipline. Also as part of this forgive all the real and imaginary wrongs done to you by other people and ask forgiveness of others that you have wronged.
8.The eighth filter is to try to trust all that you do and everyone you meet.
9. The ninth filter is to regard your daily life as a lesson in humility and peace. Look to be taught lessons by anyone at anytime. Remember there is no such thing as a stranger. A stranger is a friend that you have yet to know.
10. The tenth filter is to remember each day that you are good inside and a worthy of respect as all other people. Do not confuse the person inside with their actions and behaviour.
Each of these filters is designed for you to be aware pf how to make better choices and carry them out. If you can do each of these over the course of day you will start to become aware of what choices you do make, and what you do not.
Then once you do become aware, you can start to make choices that will create a new life and a new way of being. This is not as easy as it sounds.
The power that comes from making a choice is the realisation that you are the only person who has responsibility for your life. That’s why you have the life you do. This is not as easy at it sounds.
You may have had a shocking terribly unhappy life, but deep within you, you will know why. The choices surrounding your spiritual growth are the most important for they direct the outcome of everything else.
Spiritual growth is anything that helps you to be a better person and has nothing to do with religion, teachers, this week’s guru or prevailing popular attitude. Spiritual change, emotional wellbeing, having a good home and work, a loving relationship, all comes from making the right choices, and all of this is spiritual growth. All choices essentially return to spiritual and straightforward emotional development.
The freer a person is from any rigid or habitual belief has more opportunities for transforming themselves. The freer that person is to make choices. To go from a set belief to an inner connection that affirms your experience of Life gives you the power to make the right choices consistently.
How free are you in regard to what you believe?
Do you know what you believe?
Belief can often reduce your choices, especially when there is a large amount of fear and doubt underpinning the belief, because often we are not sure what we believe or why we believe, whether it be God or in ourselves or that life goes on as usual. Our fear and doubt rob us of the natural innocence and benefits of belief and thus reduces our ability to make intuitive choices.
People think that decisions and choices are the same, but they are not. A choice is an opportunity and you need to know how to recognise which choice is right for you. Decisions, do not create choices, a decision is an intention.
A choice is a complete opportunity that you can intuit, see and act upon. A choice is a gift. How well do you receive gifts? When you know how to make the right choice, its because the choice in a sense ‘talks’ to you, telling you about what life can be like if you act upon its prompting.
But what about making the wrong choice? There are no wrong choices. It is how we relate to the choice we have made and how we learn from the choice. We have many opportunities in one choice. A choice is a life changing experience. A choice is a catalyst of energy that can be used or applied unskilfully thus creating less than positive outcomes.
I want you to look at your life, and see if there was just one choice that you could have over again. Think on it. Now, quietly, speak it out aloud. Describe it out aloud. Feel the connections, regrets and emotions you have around the lost choice.
Follow it back from your life as it is now; see the events, the people, all which flowed out of that choice. As you feel this, see the lesson that you could learn from this. Try to understand it. In doing this, the choice you thought you had passed over is offering you a new choice of learning, acceptance and wisdom.
The past choices that you have made whether they turned out or not offer you a great opportunity to gain the insight of how the choices you made brought you the life you have.
I would now like you to sit quietly and comfortably and close your eyes. See before you a blazing fire, roaring, bright and hot, and in that fire cast away all the significant choices and insignificant choices into the fire. Focus as you do this and feel the energy and emotion that they release within you. As you finish, give thanks to the fire, and slowly open your eyes. Reflect upon what took place and write it down.
Next I would like you to create a ‘Choice Journal’. In the journal write down all the choices that you remember having made and how they turned out, then right down how they made you feel in the past and now. As you record the choices see if the same choices come up in differing forms.
There are times in our lives when it is easier to get stuck make the same unskilful choices over and over again. The above fire exercise and Choice Journal will help you to see if you are trapped in a cycle of poor choice making. Poor choice making comes from emotional confusion; skilful choice making comes from allowing the core of the choice teaching you its essential lessons.
The essential lessons offered by the core of each choice are normally experienced in three ways.
Firstly, you will feel an emotional state of knowingness or rightness; also you might feel exhilarated, energised but a little scared, in a good way, as you feel the power of the choice.
Secondly, Images, possibilities, plans may come rushing into your mind. As this happens, slow down and let them all come, let them layer themselves, down, until they are laying one upon the other, each connecting to the other. You then may feel that you have to carry this out, that its right, other people might think you are wrong. Ignore them, take the risk.
Thirdly, trust the inspiration that starts to come from the core of the choice, feel it and identify with the experience, become it. Become the choice in order to make it happen. Choices are actions, actions of intent, inner knowledge and results. A choice seeks a conclusion. Do you want to follow things through in your life to a final outcome?
These three dimensions of choice enable you to be aware of the process that goes on within you as you face the choices in your life. Making the right choices often comes down simply to having the courage to make a choice, regardless of the outcome.
When you next make a choice that you need to consider go through these three aspects of choice, then you will discover that naturally you will apply these three discoveries to all the choices you are consciously aware of.
Choices connect people and make history, your history and history of your friends, family, neighbourhood, and country. The choices our leaders make affect our daily lives; all of us are connected by the energy of choice.
Yet if just one of us decides to make the choice of becoming who we truly can be, our divine innermost self, that alone would change the negativity in our world. Can you imagine if we all made that conscious choice? The world would change completely from what we understand it to be, time, space and the matter that we live in and on that makes our planet would simply change into a higher state of being.
The power of choice that exists within each of us is a thread, a filament of the universe that together weaves the fabric of all things. Each thread, each brilliant filament is a stream of light and consciousness, which dwells in the essence of each choice you make, sometimes seen and other times unrecognised.
You are this thread, this light, this brilliant filament; you exist at the core of each choice. For every time you choose well, you choose your highest Self, you recognise your own brilliance and incandescent being. Creation dwells within you because of choice, and choice holds Life in its centre. You are that centre, that Life, that Creation.
What are we here in the journey of our own life to learn?
That we are made of the choices of our past? That we make our own present by the choices we recognise? That our future lies in the choices we have understood and learnt from?
Yes… we are here on our journey to learn all these things.
By understanding that we are made of the choices of our past and that we can recognise the choices of the moment; and that our future lies in what we learnt from our choices; we capture life in the beat of our hearts and we change from looking at life from the outside looking in, but from within the very thrum and flicker of how each choice joins one to other only if we allow ourselves to do so.
We go from merely looking on at life to having vision that comes from life. You become a visionary concerning your needs, truth and the reason why you are here, blossoming in this progression of choices called your life.
When our choices are taken away from us as can sometimes happen in Life, the first thing that we can do, is to accept everything as a blessing.
Your life may be falling to pieces, it can happen, you may have lost all that had, you may be losing a false identity or security, part of your life may be coming to an end, whatever it is, be glad for what is to come. There is the learning of lessons that the recognition of how to make the right choices brings.
Its not about money or that great career, or the ideal spouse or the perfect relationship which will solve all your problems, it is about taking the step to know that even when we do not know what is to come or we can not see clearly, it is a special kind of choice; the choice of unknowing, the gift of trusting the unknown.
Making the right choices comes from relating to your inner state, of how the quality of your being truly is. The quality and strength of your inner self enables you to sense the continuance of your life’s history. Can you be at peace with your past? Look at the choices you made and do not ask why these all happened, but how. In asking how these things happened, your past gives up the lesson it has for you and you will be at peace.
What does your history mean? What is its significance?
Do you recall it ever helping you to understand today?
All of our lives we make choices, good or bad, and then create ways of trying to escape the choices that reveal who we are.
There is no escape from this, we cannot escape ourselves and if you seek to make the right choices in your life, the time has come to be kind to yourself and accept yourself without judgement of any kind. Take the time to look directly at your choices, as deep as you can and give a heartfelt thanks for each and every one.
Choices and understanding them make us all the more human, revealing our weaknesses and strengths, talents and wisdom, guiding us to living more compassionate and connected lives. Knowing how to make choices is an art, an art that teaches us to live as best we can.
Your life will rise and fall, just like your breath, good and bad will decorate your days, each a testament to your experience and as you live more deeply, each choice you make changes from the recognition of an opportunity, to the profound recognition of your being, of the love and compassion that heals everything and you will discover that the smallest choice is a window, path and sanctuary of the eternal light that blazes in every human being.
(ENDS)
posted by Rich8rd | 6:23 AM
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