Choose to Choose

Choose to Choose


We so easily becomes absorbed in the routine, the frantic pace of life with all its obligations, technology allows for ever increasing levels of productivity, but what is it that I am producing? We quite naturally fall into stimulus-response mechanisms, conditioned responses, relating to others as objects (I-it) rather than as individuals (I-Thou) ¹, a means to an end rather than an end. Easily manipulated, influenced and swayed by profiteers on all levels, political, economic, career, personal and religious. We make thousands of choices every day, we are so conditioned in whatever automatic response we no longer see them as choices and as such we no larger are the active agents in our own lives, we can become automatons in a repetitive loop of mediocrity. “Copper Tops”, only the system is not built and controlled by computers as in the movie The Matrix but rather a system designed and built out of the depths of our own alienated psyche. And unlike the movie it is not the system that needs to change, (paradoxically in that it is both difficult and easy) the change must take place within us individually. The first steps of change are to take back your choices, on all levels. Someone cuts you off in traffic, you get angry – conditioned response - you are not the active agent, you chose the response, will I choose to be angry or will I choose to remain calm. We can treat others as merely a means to an end (conditioned response) rather than an end in and of themselves, an “it” rather than an individual. The examples are many because most of us live the largest portion of our lives in this “automatic” manner; we set the cruise control and go. We isolate ourselves when we live automatically, keeping only a small portion of our lives where we are actively engaged, usually with some family, and a few friends (yet often even in these relationships we operate a large part automatically). Often (not always) our disengagement, and alienation with jobs, and life in general is a result of our lack of conscious choice in our lives. Conscious choice is the ultimate engagement in life. I discussed in an earlier post (“Mental and Social Short-Cuts”) the reason we follow this pattern both from a psychological and sociological perspective. Chopra writes in his book “Our reactions seem to be automatically triggered by people and circumstances, and we forget that these are still choices that we are making in every moment of our existence. We are simply making these choices unconsciously.” ² Begin to live life with a fresh perspective one of an active agent, become conscious and aware of the many decision points you encounter daily, and make those decisions consciously. In relationships to others and to God, relate as I to a Thou, a relationship without bounds rather than to an “it” and object you have defined and quantified in your mind, or a mere means to some end.

GWG

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1 Martin Buber the Jewish existentialist said that we experience our existence in one of two ways that of I-Thou and individual in meaningful relationship to another individual or God in an active relational dynamic, connected and unbounded. The I – It is the context of relating to an object, separate and defined, and static. We relate to individuals as “it”, when we objectify them, define them they are to us

2 Seven Spiritual Laws of Success