Choices

You Choose, or Do You?

By Carl Bozeman

Life is not really about the choices we make.

It is, rather, about repeating what actions to take which we have been conditioned to take.

The so-called knowledge we gather is nothing more than an adding to the base of criteria we are taught to use to create our so-called choices.

When we are born into this world, we are born without conditions of any kind. Some of us even remember, as small children, that our lives were lived, not as a decisions to make, but more as taking in as much as we possibly could, without have to decide if something was good or bad.

We lived our passion, and moved from one thing to another, driven only by curiousity, wonder and awe!

Life was not about choosing.

Instead, it was a series of experiences, unjudged by any set of rules or guidelines.

We simply experienced our experience.

What happened?

Why did this non-judgmental experience go away?

From the moment of our birth, the human process of conditioning us begins. With that conditioning, we are taught preferences and the reasoning behind those preferences. We become so adept at that reasoning that, in time, we no longer really choose.

Of course we say we do, but the reasoning we are taught to judge between things always steers us to make not real decisions, but more a series of the same actions with only circumstances and scenery being different.

In reality, what we think are choices are really nothing more than a repetitive sort of a variation on a theme. A theme we enact every day as a way to confirm over and over again that the choices we make are well thought out and correct.

When we look out at the world at large, what we see confirms this to us, when, in fact, we haven't really chose anything at all. All we have done is what we have always done before.

All of it is based on conditioning that took over our minds so long ago that most of us have no memory of it.

Day by day, we simply act out what we think we know without deciding anything.

Most of us, regardless of how we define success or failure, or the levels of human experience we achieve, always move in the direction we have always moved in.

We may raise the bar and achieve so-called greater heights, but it is, more or less, variations on the same reasoning theme we have always used.

Who among us turns down a job or promotion so that the job can go to the individual we know could perform it so much better?

Our reasoning, the so-called intelligence and knowledge, we claim to possess practically forbids us from ever making that kind of decision, and yet among the truly real decisions, that one really is a choice!

Most of us have forgotten how to live spontaneously, guided only by our intuition and sheer appreciation for every exhilarating moment life has to offer. Instead of living and enjoying each breathless moment in time, we try to control it with our reason.

We have reduced an expansive, endless experience to a small, little place we uphold with our minds.

We play it safe by our reason and our so-called choices become nothing more than barriers holding us back from the larger reality we knew as children but have completely forgotten as adults.

We think we choose but we do not. We repeat over and over again what our conditioning tells us is acceptable, and in so doing we stay confined within that tiny, little world we have created for ourselves.

Life was never meant to be about choosing.

Life is about living - living without fear of our decisions.

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