Free the mind

When it comes to making choices we tend to agonize over every detail of the situation instead of letting them come spontaneously. Somehow we have overlooked intuitions in favor of a more labored (and seemingly logical) process, even though we knew these flashes gave us greater clarity and the ‘knowing’ what to do.

Choice should be a flow. Your body already suggests that this is the natural way to exist. Each cell maintains only enough reserve of food and oxygen to survive for a few seconds. Cells don’t store up energy because they never know what’s coming next. Flexible responses are much more important to survival than hoarding. From one viewpoint, this makes the cells look entirely vulnerable and undefended, yet as fragile as a cell may appear, two billion years of evolution can’t be denied.

Everyone knows how to choose; few know how to let go. It is the letting go of past experiences that we have allowed to define us. And it’s only by letting go of each experience that you make room for the next, allowing ‘fresh water’ to flow into you. The skill of letting go can be learned; once learned, you will enjoy living much more spontaneously.

Deepak Chopra shared these guidelines in helping us to make choices without getting trapped:

Make the most of every experience. Living fully is extolled everywhere in popular culture. What does it mean to fully experience something? Instead of looking for sensory overload that lasts forever, you’ll find that the experiences need to be engaged at the level of meaning and emotion. Meaning is essential. If this moment truly matters to you, you will experience it fully. An experience that touches your heart makes the meaning that much more personal.

Don’t obsess over right and wrong decisions. If you obsess over whether you are making the right decision, you are basically assuming that the universe will reward you for one thing and punish you for another. This isn’t a correct assumption because the universe is flexible – it adapts to every decision you make. Right or wrong are only mental constructs. The universe has no fixed agenda. Once you make any decision, it works around that decision. There is no right or wrong, only a series of possibilities that shift with each thought, feeling, and action that you experience.

Stop defending your self-image. Over the years you have built an idealized self-image that you defend as ‘me.’ In this image are packed all the things you want to see as true about yourself; banished from it are all the shameful, guilty, and fear-provoking aspects that would threaten your self-confidence. But the act of banishment creates the chaos of your internal dialogue, and thus your ideal erodes even while you are doing everything to look good about yourself. To really feel good about yourself, renounce your self-image; all self-images have the same pitfall: They keep reminding you of who you were, not who you are. The whole idea of I, me, and mine was erected on memories, and these memories are not really you. If you release yourself from your self-image, you will be free to choose as if for the first time.

Go beyond risks. As long as the future remains unpredictable, every decision involves some level of risk. Risk is mechanical. It implies that there is no intelligence behind the scenes, only a certain number of factors that result in a given outcome. You can go beyond risks by knowing that there is infinite intelligence at work in the hidden dimension of your life. At the level of this intelligence your choices are always supported. The point of looking at risks would be to see if your course of action is reasonable; you wouldn’t rely on risk analysis to override far more important factors, the very factors that are being weighed at the level of deeper awareness. People who can assess their choices at the deeper level of awareness are aligning themselves with infinite intelligence, and thus they have a greater chance for success than does someone who crunches the numbers.

Make no decision when in doubt. It’s hard to let go when you don’t know if you have made the right choice in the first place. Doubt lingers and ties us to the past. It’s important not to make critical decisions when you are in doubt. The universe supports actions once they are begun, which is the same as saying that once you take a direction, you are setting a mechanism in motion that is very hard to reverse.

See the possibilities in whatever happens. It would be much easier to let go of outcomes if every choice turned out well. And why wouldn’t it? In the one reality there are no wrong turns, only new turns. But the ego personality likes things to be connected. Coming in second today is better than coming in third yesterday, and tomorrow I want to come in first. This kind of linear thinking reflects a crude conception of progress. Real growth happens in many dimensions. What happens to you can affect how you think, feel, relate to others, behave in a given situation, fit into your surroundings, perceive the future, or perceive yourself. All these dimensions must evolve in order for you to evolve. Try to see the possibilities in whatever happens. If you don’t get what you expected or wished for, ask yourself, “Where am I supposed to look?” This is a freeing attitude. On some dimension or other, every event in life can be causing one of two things: Either it is good for you, or it is bringing you what you need to look at in order to create good for you.

Find the stream of joy. In your own life there is a stream of joy that is just as elemental and unshakable. A worm knows nothing but itself, so it cannot deviate from the stream of joy. You can disperse your awareness in every direction, and by doing so distract yourself from the stream. You won’t really let go of your self-image and your restless mind until you feel, without question or doubt, a palpable joy in yourself. J. Krishnamurti, a renowned spiritual teacher, made this moving comment: “People don’t realize how important it is to wake up every morning with a song in your heart.” The song stands for a sense of joy in existence, a joy that is free of any good or bad choices. To ask this of yourself is both the simplest thing and the most difficult. But don’t let it slip your mind, no matter how complex your life becomes. Keep before you the vision of freeing your mind, and expect that when you succeed at doing this, you will be greeted by a stream of joy.

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