It’s Not the Truth, But It May As Well Be
You were born into some unimportant family in a little carving of some dead-end town or city where the inhabitants pretend there is something going for it. When you were young you were coerced into your proper place, then they threw you in some school. There, you happened upon a group of like-minded individuals, these were your “friends”, later these individuals would influence your future thoughts and behavior, and you, theirs. You started forming thoughts and opinions about the world at large, convinced you were right about this, and that. After all, humans can’t operate if they don’t feel certain about at least some things.
The confused state of the world at the time wanted to push young people in a certain direction, and without knowing so, you made the choice to go in that direction too. After a long three years of confusion you decided this wasn’t for you. Those adverts on YouTube have been telling you to follow your dreams. But I ask you now, did you ever have so much as a choice?
Your parents, a force beyond your control, molded you basically by accident, depending on what they thought was “right” or “wrong”, thoughts which have themselves been formed over generations of misinformation, of constant strife, war, and vastly different and opposing social value’s and norms. The location you lived in determined the access you had to ideas, knowledge, opportunities and the like. You only eat what you do because you were told that the effects are “Not as bad as everyone tells you”, or that “This and that is healthy and good”. Not that anyone who was around you really knew these things, but as they believe, you too, believe.
One day maybe you’ll find a book about good nutrition, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll read that one book, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll live and die never knowing that some food is good for you and some is bad. More likely though, you’ll live and die thinking that some bad food is good and some good food is bad.
One day someone screams at you, and you freeze up in response. Terrified, they subordinate you into a hasted response. You look over your shoulder. An older man is getting the same treatment. He doesn’t flinch, he watches his opponent and responds in his own time. Was it he who made the choice to be calm, or you who made the choice to be afraid?
How Not To Be a Zombie
When do you really get to choose? Are you a slave to your mood, your environment, to your deep seated sense of obligation to The Powers That Be?
I don’t have the answer, but I do have the ability to draw upon my own experiences. I will tell you now that we rarely, if ever, have a choice. The amount of variables to take in and consider is always far too large and far too out of our control. We rarely have the capacity to consider all the things we don’t know, and often what we do know is lost to us in crucial moments. In a world without free will, how does one become a better person?
First, I want you to imagine all situations to be spontaneous. There is not such thing as a choice made over a long period of time, there is only a set of several choices made every moment, each one in combat against the many forces which compete to swing our mind in this direction or the other in each moment.
In a world without free will, how does one become a better person?
Understanding choice in this way, as something that occurs in the ever-changing present and not over a period of time, we can understand all choice to essentially boil down to response. How does one respond to the conflict of their own thoughts? How does one respond to a spontaneous situation with limited information?
Response is interesting because, when we look at the example above of the young person and the old man both being screamed at, one responds with a mind-numbing fear, whilst the other responds without such any visible emotional response.
What makes the two different in this example is not the quality of their responses, but the quality of training that has gone into their response-ability. Responsibility.
The Zen Master and The Boy
If we can not truly choose our circumstances, our life, our direction, our passions, our thoughts, or any other of the plethora that make up life, then life surely seems quite daunting. Hopeless even.
However life is so much more than a series of choices, it is also a series of happenings. A series of co-incidences. Isn’t it funny how Bill Gates was born with the timing to take advantage of the new computer-technology? Or how Julius Caesar took adulthood in a time in which Rome was in such a state that one man could take the guise of emperor without being known as such?
In a world without choice, how we respond to our ever-changing situations is key. The difference between someone who suffers a two year long emotional breakdown due to the death of a spouse, and one who goes on to live their life in spite of tragedy is owed to a fundamental difference in ability to respond.
But if responses are spontaneous and in the moment, how do we control them? We cannot control our fear response, or example, so how are we supposed to facilitate the change?
The Only Choice You Have
There are times in our life where we are less caught up in the flow of things. Naturally quiet moments where we have “space” in our minds; times necessary for any kind of emotional or psychological development to occur. I like to refer to these times as, “Sober Moments”.
It is during these “Sober Moments” that we may affect our future response-ability. You see, the timid man reacts to spontaneous fear-inducing situations with fright, however the man who has no such waking fear responds only to the information he is being given, not to anything else.
To put it in other words, changing your response-ability does not mean honing any kid of skill or technique. It means completely changing yourself.
When we respond, it is not only to the stimulus in front of us, but also to the huge backlog of knowledge, prejudice, ideas and expectations we have formed over a lifetime. The difference between the Boy and the Master is that the Boy implicitly overlaps his past experiences with the one in the moment, whilst the Master only responds to the situation at hand. The boy believes he knows what will happen if we responds this way or that way, and this fear causes him to make mistakes. The Master knows that he has no idea what will happen next. As such, he has no reason to respond to the situation in any way, immediately. Instead, he waits and takes in the new information, using that as the basis for his response.
We can not become the Master by proving ourselves. Masters are not made out of stressful situations. They are made in calm ones, and discovered under stress. Dig Deep. Discover what kind of bullshit you bring to the surface during every encounter in your life. Question your thoughts, your values, the things that you think you ought to prove to others. Practice calmness during silence. Amass these powers to increase your response-ability, because with great power comes great responsibility.
Do this and you too, shall be great.
