As I have expressed before, there is nothing more powerful than choice. It originates as what one might call divine intent, the initial expression of which called forth our physical universe.
It could be argued that curiosity and imagination would have been necessary for the notion of creation, and of what to create, to arise in the first place, but in terms of raw power it seems to me that choice reigns supreme. Love, which many people point to as primary, might well have come into existence in the moments after the Big Bang and perhaps existed as a possibility before the Big Bang, but without duality there would have been nothing in existence that might have evoked the experience of love.
Since we are aspects of consciousness, it seems logical to me that we tap that same power of choice in order to do things in our everyday lives, used with particular potency in our declarative choices. And all the while we are also being impacted by every single one of the choices upstream in “our” historical past. We would be, after all, the product of a long lineage of choices starting with some “let there be light” type of choice from which they all began, as I have articulated in previous writings. Thus it makes sense to me that all of those ancestral choices are still sourcing us and therefore should be “sense-able” at more and more subtle levels as we take our awareness back upstream towards that Source. I have noted before that the most discernable way that these choices appear comes in the form of preferences. Some of them we would call instincts and some we might actually recall choosing ourselves in this lifetime. The power to impact us at any given moment will depend on the power of that declarative choice when originally made, and how and where our attention is focused in our immediate circumstances.
What prompted me to write this particular essay was the feeling of being at the mercy of eons of preferences, nearly all of which I am unconscious of. It felt like a limitation of my natural desire to be free and unencumbered. If my suppositions are accurate, then there is some impetus of this planet that produced life here and I am simply one form of it. I am a result of that impetus, as are all of my personal human and pre-human ancestors. I’m not about to, for instance, extract myself from the survival instinct, my natural delight of sunshine on a warm spring day, nor am I likely to shed the most fundamental cultural norms and metaphors imbued by my parents and friends when I was young.
So I do experience, at moments, a semblance of confinement in the notion that my billions-of-years heritage is inescapable. There is also the tangible solidity of the physical world that seems to strongly limit what my imagination would like to create here, which can feel like an impediment too. But it is clear to me that this pattern, of preferences followed and explicit choices made, has continued on unabated in some form through the eons. So deep within us the intent to have our world be much like it is was our collective intent at some point in our past and our more differentiated selves now get to choose within the confines of ALL of the choices that have arisen from the aspects/inhabitants of the Earth which have already been successfully manifested. This pattern is clearly fundamental and since it has been wildly successful, it’s not going anywhere. In a way, accepting responsibility for those choices eliminates the option of complaining about our current circumstances. Within this pre-chosen framework, we are free to create, and then to experience, the fruits of our collective and individual creations.
Our personal habits are all a result of choices too. Those will reflect the different levels of psychological development that have been nicely delineated over the past many decades, and refined more recently. It does seem to me that as I become more aware of the subtlest of my experiences, the more I tend to gravitate in the direction of inclusivity. It seems that when I react to a given moment’s input, the speed at which I pass through those earlier stages continues to increase. The earliest stages fly by far faster than I can sense, though there are rare moments when I do see a flickering of what feels like some recently discarded perspectives passing by. Any vibration initiated in my environment that resonates at a level that I am still sensitive to will tend to call me instinctively to react in that same frequency range (like attracts like) and can halt my attention before it might transit to my higher, ever-evolving sensing range. At the times when anger is triggered, I find that cognitive intrusion typically occurs and I consciously attempt to separate the immediate sensations from the frequency ranges “where I intend to be”; those that are the in the range of my forward-looking focused attention and from which this intention seems to arise. What comes to mind here is the premise “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, whereby what a fetus goes through in the womb resembles the previous stages of evolution of the species.
Our developmental stages do not disappear either. The earliest ones are usually traversed rapidly and our attention tends to settle closer to a bandwidth near the leading edge of our own development. My ability to direct these passages towards my current intended landing strip will alter the space from which the next set of preferences arises and thus will impact the options from which my next choices are selected. The more subtle the space – the farther up the historical choice-stream – the wider and more inclusive the impact will naturally be since we were less differentiated there. Perceiving that inclusivity can not only begin to reunite the now differentiated “WE” into a new resonance, but it can then be paired with our ability to function here in this world where we can collectively attempt to bring that view of inclusivity into manifestation in our everyday world.
In my view we, in both an earlier less differentiated state and in our current “here and now”, have made the choices that have resulted in what is available to experience here in our present state. Our perceived resistance may be due, in part, to the denial of our collective and individual contributions to what exists here and now as we butt up against current manifestations that are now illuminated as imperfect from our new, more inclusive vantage point. What we are resisting is what we had already chosen to create and the striving to make the world more beautiful will always need to penetrate the more individuated creations that we and others have made since we spun off on our own to play here in this place.
With all of that said, it does occasionally feel like a carefully considered deliberate choice can somehow tap directly into the profound certainty and power that is our originating heritage, “Let there be light.” It feels to me distinctly different than allowing our choices to be directed by our preferences, as useful and necessary as they are. It is in these moments of declaration, perhaps, that free will is truly present.
“It is free-will alone….which I find to be so great in me that I can conceive no other idea to be more great; it is indeed the case that it is for the most part this will that causes me to know that in some manner I bear the image and likeness of God.” – Rene Descartes
Thank you for focusing in on ‘choice,’ and especially on ‘every-moment choice’ with such subtle clarity. I recognize my own trajectory in what you’re saying about the lineage of choices that we carry, and my husband’s trajectory in your mention of ‘love’ as a possibility that needs duality and choice to become an experience.
I’m an anthropologist by training, and by inclination, a participant-observer of the shifting consciousness of these times. The words ‘reflect and confirm’ have come to refer to the way that we support one another and substantiate our collective rising tide of greater awareness. Choosing to write this brief comment to you is carried on my intention to reflect and confirm truth when I see it.
Very clear. Thank you.
Justin, I kinda get the big picture here, but I need examples to be able to follow you. In particular, I can’t tell the difference you’re referring to in your paragraph on psychological development and the following one on developmental stages. What’s the distinction? And how are you using “inclusivity”? Does it refer to including your ancestral perspectives in a “transcend and include” sort of way? And/or does it mean that as you look out on your current range of options, you have less resistance to many of them?
The “levels” of psychological development and developmental “stages” are interchangeable.
I used inclusivity here to point to the acceptance of wider and wider experiences that are evoked in me by living things – people mostly – in all of the many ways that these expressions might occur. What I most often have to “accept” or “let go of” seems to be people’s various idiosyncrasies, individually and collectively, which tend to reflect choices made in this lifetime, I think. Psychologists call these neuroses, as does my dear friend Andy who is one.
There is a “transcend and include” component to this. I think that it starts with transcending and including my own idiosyncrasies via some form of shadow work. Since there is typically projection going on, I can then begin to allow for such behavior when others act similarly, thus beginning to “include” them just as they are. There is a broader, less entangled perspective to peer out from. Again, these behaviors seems to be derived from my “physical life” ancestry.
I don’t really know how much, if any, “transcending and including” is going on in my “pre-physical” ancestral existence. Transcending seems to infer that one is “getting over” or above something. In my energetic experiences I feel more blended with other energies. There are no hard boundaries in those spaces like there are with bodies so there is more of a sense of being somehow entwined, less separate, less “exclusive”.
Since we arise ultimately from the single entity of the Earth, it is my supposition that individuation came during its evolution so the various WE split off at different junctures during that process. The “soul” of the Earth is more unified, so in any of that less physical strata, I don’t feel like there is anything to necessarily transcend. It is a more integrated state already.
As with much of what I write, it’s supposition derived from exploration.