Awakening to Wise Choices: How Conscious Awareness Ends the Cycle of Regret
Asleep: The past keeps repeating itself.
Awake: The present moment presents creative new choices.
The Year of Awakening is all about expanding your awareness. If you clear away the fog and fuzziness that surrounds Eastern spiritual teachings, one thing shines through with total clarity: Awareness is infinitely valuable. One way to see this is to imagine that your thoughts, wishes, dreams, and desires come to you the way water flows from a reservoir — the larger the reservoir, the more choices you have.
As people grow older, there is a sharp divide between those who look back in contentment and those who look back with regret. The central issue is the choices they made. Looking at the bigger picture, bad choices are rooted in the past, which keeps repeating itself through habits, a fixed mindset, and stubborn conditioning. Good choices arise in the present moment, which constantly renews the options that are open to you.
Ideally, your life should offer unlimited choices. But looking around, what we see are countless people who feel frustrated and unfulfilled. There could be many reasons for this state of limitation, but the spiritual answer is the most helpful: We need to draw from a larger reservoir. The flow of inspired ideas in most people’s lives is a trickle. That is not how we are designed; it is a condition we’ve learned to live with, assuming that limited choices are normal.
We can put this in terms of being asleep or awake. When faced with an important choice, being asleep manifests in the following:
You feel confused and conflicted.
You vacillate, going back and forth between two choices
The thinking mind constantly chews over the problem without getting anywhere.
Anxiety arises over making the wrong choice.
At a certain point, you close your eyes and choose blindly.
The struggle over making the right choice is exhausting. If the struggle could be solved by more thinking, it would have ended long ago. But the real issue lies deeper, in your state of awareness. Being asleep is a metaphor for unconscious behavior. If you saw yourself clearly, you would see your struggle to make the right choice in a new light. Your mind is simply shuffling and reshuffling the same attitudes and beliefs that have become habitual.
So what needs to change? Your state of awareness. It’s not a matter of not being smart enough or having good luck; spending more time and effort chewing over the problem is futile. The state of awareness that makes good choices has the following qualities:
You go inward and clearly state the outcome you want.
You no longer spend mental effort on finding an answer.
You wait patiently but alertly.
In time, the right choice emerges.
What awakening brings is trust in a process that goes deeper than the restless activity of the active mind. Instead of whirling thoughts in your head, you trust in deeper awareness. In Sanskrit, this awareness is known as Chit, which is everyone’s birthright. Chit resides in the field of pure awareness; it is the infinite reservoir we should all be drawing from.
As things stand, we idolize those geniuses who seem to draw on inspiration at will. Pause for a moment and imagine the instant before Rembrandt makes his next brushstroke, Mozart his next musical note, Einstein his next mathematical symbol. The rightness of what comes next has something in common: Genius draws from a vast reservoir of Chit. They do this effortlessly, intuitively, almost as if some higher intelligence is guiding their hand.
Instead of seeing genius as something extraordinary set aside for the tiniest number of gifted people, we should see them as models of our own potential. Genius can raise your personal expectations here and now. You are moving in the direction of awakening whenever you
Let go of a problem instead of clinging to it
Exchange obsessive thinking for open awareness
Trust that the right answer is always waiting
Remain alert for clues that might come from anywhere “in here” or “out there”
Pay attention to what others say
Stop being overly attached to an outcome
Put up less resistance to the flow of life.
These are hallmarks of awakening, not simply better decision-making. What gathers these separate elements into one process is this: You feel your way forward. Almost everyone is in the habit of assuming that they are in control of their thoughts. But the reality is that we have no idea where our thoughts come from. We can’t predict our next thought, and when it arrives, we are not good, according to psychologists, at discerning which thoughts will make us happier.
Instead of believing that you are in control of your thoughts — which includes your desires, hopes, wishes, and fears — it is more valid to admit that your thoughts are in control of you. That’s inevitable until consciousness awakens. Your access to Chit is constricted and narrow. When you expand your awareness, it’s not like blowing up a balloon. It’s like exchanging a garden hose for a pipeline.
Access is the whole ball game. Chit isn’t affected by anything you do. It remains infinite, eternal, a field of unlimited possibilities. The one flaw in using the reservoir analogy is that Chit is alive and present. It knows all that you know, but with wide-angle vision. Your limited access is what narrows the angle. At the source, your true self is the field of pure awareness. Never let go of that truth.
A Step Forward:
This week, experiment with decision-making in a new, awakened way. A good way to begin is to assume that every outcome is meant to be positive, to benefit everyone concerned. Don’t fret if you don’t believe this is true. Just try the experiment. Let go, stop resisting, quit feeling that your voice is the only one that matters, allow others their own space, relinquish control, stand back, relax.
You have probably read those things many times, but this week can be different. Your experiment isn’t aimed at arriving at a better you, psychologically speaking. You are testing a very deep proposition, that a higher intelligence is looking out for the good of you and those around you. This higher intelligence is Chit, and your aim is to give it a chance. The results could change your life, or take a significant step in that direction.
Namaste,
Deepak
Buy Deepak’s book Awakening: The Path to Freedom and Enlightenment
