Most of us associate choice with freedom, and that’s how we’ve set up our world of separations. But in wholeness, choicelessness is freedom. This freedom flows through us, informing our actions as insights, and then becomes us, if we allow. The non-allowance is what our world looks like today.
What, then, you may ask, is a choice when we are rightly aligned and healthy?
Love gives; faith receives. Transpersonal Love includes faith. It’s a circuit within oneself. Such a one alive with this does not desire another’s faith. Such a one gives love freely, choicelessly. Love is the natural action of compassion, no choice involved. Your making the choice to love or to ask for faith is only ever you making the choice away from choiceless Love. It’s breaking the circuit into components and treating them as separate ideas. This speaks to the heart of what choiceless choice is: flow.
Let’s take a gander at some of the other ways in which choiceless choice manifests in our lives. Well… my life, anyway. I’ll use me for examples. Gotta start near to go far, as they say. Let’s jog away from me as fast as possible and in chronological order. You’ll see what I mean right after these four dots of wonder….
The Choiceless Choice of Truth In Action
Prior to the kundalini awakening I was in the flow of insights. When you grasp an issue so thoroughly, all in one clutch, it is finished. There is no issue of right or wrong, there is only clarity. When the heart is open and the mind is clear, how can you choose to do wrong? You’d have to work at it. Normally, we say the opposite–we say that doing the right thing takes work because the wrong thing is selfish and lazy. But in clarity, in selflessness,the opposite is true: it takes work to be selfish and cruel.
And let’s note here that these variations on choiceless choice parallel variations on selflessness. Perhaps another essay on the variations of selflessness is in order. For now, let us move on to the next choiceless choice.
The Choiceless Choice of Death and Resurrection
The most obvious choiceless choice came when I finally understood that I was in the way, still in the way, even though I’d become a joy-filled smiley person who knew and spoke things like, “I’m the person who is in the way.” When I really got that I was still there, still blocking the flow as a guy who gets it instead of a guy who doesn’t, there was no choice. I had to go.
I didn’t have to do anything. In fact, I would have ruined the moment if I had tried. It simply was the case that there was no more me left to pretend to be and the case dissolved me.
Dissolved me, but I came back. Resurrected. Jer 2.0: now featuring nothingness and kundalini. Back with a bang. Or more like a pop. A pop in my lower spine as the kundalini said hello. And this led me to my third type of choiceless choice: making choices in normal life that, when you look back on them, seem fated to have happened.
The Choiceless Choice of Destiny
That back popping was no joke. I slipped a disk and was stricken with sciatica. I let it go because I remembered slipping a disk when I was younger and it going back into place on its own, so I figured it would correct itself again soon. Months later, I did feel what I perceived to be the disk slipping back into place only to have it pop out the other side. Probably, that’s impossible, and when I was forced to go to the doctor many months from then, an X-ray showed that I had two bulging disks, one on each side. I couldn’t feel the one bulging to the left because the one to the right was so bad.
If you’re asking yourself why I didn’t go to the doctor in all that time, I could give you excuses that make sense if I don’t tell you how bad it got and how it was my fault. I mean, so bad that I could barely walk. I had to lean against walls and take micro steps like my back was broken and then lay on a bed of ice just to remain functional. And I mean that I could feel it getting worse and knew that it was because of the way I sat at my computer: crosslegged on my bed mattress on the floor, looking up at the screen on top of my bureau, while hunching over the keyboard and mouse, precariously perched atop a hardcover book on an opened bottom drawer.
Yup. That’ll do it.
To be clear, although I made my back so bad that I ended up hospitalized for a week, the origin of the first slipped disk was the kundalini rising. And the only other thing to come of it, to that point, was my head swiveling around my neck on its own, along with some other involuntary movements in my right hand. It was solely because I got to the point where I couldn’t move and the hospital emergency room had spit me out for lack of insurance that I thought, ‘Hmm… I wonder if this energy can somehow heal me?’
That was the beginning of unleashing it to exercise the body. At the time, it felt like I was stubbornly not taking care of myself because I was an idiot. But perhaps being an idiot is what was guiding me toward enlightenment. And if you think about it, idiocy and enlightenment go hand-in-hand. What is being unenlightened, after all? When this happens with you and people ask you, “Why you? You’re an idiot.” You can say, “Yeah, that’s why.” And if they say, “But you’re a nobody,” you can reply, “And what a relief! Being a somebody was work!”
Actually, don’t talk to them. They’re insulting you.
The point is, it may have felt like a choice to injure myself even worse than the kundalini appearance had, but this is what it took for me to unleash and trust the kundalini in full. So was it a choice? If I’d treated my back properly, would some other imperfection have been exploited to call attention to itself as a problem and also be used as a tool to keep me from caving to lethargy and routine?
It’s not rhetorical. The answer is, yes.
The Choiceless Choice of Staying In Relational Consciousness
Moving on to our last manifestation of choiceless choice, let’s go to the moment just after the big I AM experience of seeing/being nothingness exploding into everything. In that moment, I was immediately confronted with a life-altering decision that, upon inspection, was a false choice: Do I live as absolute Being or stick with relativity?
My immediate reaction to this was to stick with the relative so that I could write about absolute Being—bring this message to my people, so to speak. But truly, since this life is about one waking oneself up, I could not choose to wake me and say, “See ya later, everyone else who is also me! Eat my dust, other mes!” Because it doesn’t work that way.
If you’re wondering why these choiceless choices present themselves as choices if they are choiceless, the answer is elementary, my dear Watson. They do it… to mess with us.
Just kidding.
They have no choice! We’re doing it! Every moment we remain asleep, or even half asleep with an eye open, our oneness shows up as something separate and apart from us. We see Truth’s flow as a series of lakes and streams, the number of which depends on how many dams we’ve erected. Each moment of understanding breaks these dams and gives us a glimpse of the timeless. But when we immediately bring the timeless into time, we break the flow again into observed aspects and so one clarity becomes a stuttering, unfolding revelation through insights.
Put it this way: healthy understanding of self is the death of the unhealthy you and rebirth into the healthy you in relationship with-and-as transpersonal you. (That is the reason kundalini comes fully alive only in the absence of your will. It is the transpersonal aspect in relationship with-and-as you, the personal.)
If if that’s not convoluted enough, consider that a view of the now through the lens of time makes events. And when you look back on them, makes those events look fatalistic.
***
One wide awake understands that all is one, therefore one is only as awake as the all. It’s like when your leg falls asleep. You’re wide awake and you know your leg is asleep because it’s completely numb, but just try telling your leg that. Your leg thinks it’s awesome.
While Earth’s flora and fauna are as perfectly awake as they need to be, humans are not. There is no honest choice after awakening but to close an eye, stay relative, and communicate this with relatives using a language they can hear. Whether it has any effect whatsoever on them is not the point. The choiceless choice of Truth in action is.
And now we have, of course, come perfectly full circle.