Chipping away at Choice by Carter Smith

Making choices when I think I’m a separate self, an ego, is often a painful struggle. I feel I must make the right choice, the logical choice, the best choice. But that idea has been chipped away at over the years.

The Course in Miracles teaches that “every expression of anger is really a call for love.” Upon reflection, I always find this to be true. All I ever wanted in expressing my anger was to be loved, to be understood, to be noticed. In my emotional craziness, I knew no other way.

Some years ago, I heard in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, “When I was drinking I had no choice but to drink, and now that I’m sober, I still have no choice but to not drink.” In my experience that was true. Years of beating myself up over the consequences of drinking never stopped me. And now the very idea of drinking evokes a hellish existence of never ending agony of self-hatred. No choice.

More recently, I read a book by Jeff Foster, a beautiful nondual teacher, who said that after we developed a sense of separate self, we became little love warriors, looking for love/happiness/peace outside ourselves – and we were not wrong to do so. We were not wrong in looking for love, but we were looking in the wrong places. It can only be found, as AA teaches, deep inside ourselves.

When we couldn’t find love/happiness/peace, then in our desperation, we did strange, even terrible, things. We got angry, sad, confused. We hurt the people we loved. Or we tried to reduce the emotional pain by hiding or avoiding or blaming or drinking or using drugs or overworking, or seeking the adrenaline rush of death-defying experiences or the ego death of orgasm.

When I do therapeutic inquiry with a new client, I often start by talking about this search for love outside ourselves. And how unskillful it has been – how we hurt people and hurt ourselves in our search. And then we must recognize that this was the very best we could have done at that time. The very best we could do was cut ourselves in our agony, or hurt the person we love the most, or destroy our career or job. We had no choice – if we had, we would have done differently.

When we truly and compassionately understand that confused and desperate search of the child/adult that we were, we can forgive ourselves. And in truly understanding that each person searches for love in that same unskillful way, we can forgive others. And perhaps then we can start looking for love where it can only be found, deep within ourselves.

It may seem like a choice, to now choose love, peace. But what brought us to that choice? And why is it that some choose this and some don’t? Why does Love/Awareness/Source/God sometimes find itself, and connect, and sometimes the capricious currents of Love just swirl?

This morning I really saw that I am not the one making choices. Just as I had no choice but to seek love in all the wrong places, and then eventually deep within myself, I have no choice, period. Oneness or loving awareness swirls or flows this way or that way, and Carter’s egoic separate self sits up and says, “I chose that.” Scientists have even demonstrated that action precedes thought: The action of reaching for a glass, for example, slightly precedes the thought, “I will pick up that glass.”

The relaxation into this natural flow of choicelessness, the total acceptance and even loving of what is, is where true love, true happiness, true joy abide.

Much love. Be love.

Carter

Carter Smith is a long-term student of The Living Method of Spiritual Awakening. He lives in Los Angeles.