The Choice Is Yours
We are flung from the amniotic sea into this life — tied to matter, to gravity, to mortality. A fire burns in each of us, a tungsten intensity that flares and flames awhile and then departs. From whence and whither to remain mysteries. And who we are on this planet, and for what purpose, remains a mystery as well. Although the world is full of people who will tell you who you are, what you are, and what you are to do and not to do, they wander amid their unaddressed confusion, fear, and need for consensual belief to still their own anxious journey.
Whether you show up as you in this brief transit we call life or are defined by history, or context, or shrill partisan urgencies substantially depends on you. No greater difficulty may be found than living this journey as mindfully, as accountably, as we can, but no greater task brings more dignity and purpose to our lives. Swimming in this milky sea of mystery, we long to make sense of things, figure out who we are, wither bound, and to what end, while the eons roll on in their mindless ways. It falls then to us to make sense of this journey.
So what could be more obvious than point one: the choice is ours. And yet, is it? We survive in this life by adaptation. We learn from our world — families of origin, popular culture, world events, religious training, and many other sources — who we are, what is acceptable, what is not, and how we have to behave, perform, in order to fit in, gain approval from others, and prosper in this world into which we were thrust. Historically, all cultures have claimed that their values, their institutions, their marching orders come from the gods, sacrosanct scriptures, and venerated institutions. These “givens” are laden with presumptive powers and punitive sanctions for transgressions of any kind. A child raised today in the world of virtual reality and video games is just as susceptible to these acculturating and directive images. We become too often a servant of our environment, given our need to fit in, receive the approval of others, stay out of harm’s way.
When I was a child in the 1940s, for example, there were pretty clear social definitions of gender, of social and economic class, of racial, ethnic, religious identity, and defined acceptable choices. To deviate from these prescriptive templates was to trigger sanctions of enormous proportion. The most common socializing sentence my contemporaries and I heard was, “What would people think?” A familiar proverb in Japan declares, “It is the protruding nail that gets hammered.” In the face of such sanctioning power, what child does not begin to adopt the prejudices of his family and tribe, fear the alien values of others, and stick close to home in almost every way?
Since the 1940s and ’50s, all of those categories, reportedly created by the gods themselves, have been deconstructed. While sex is biologically driven, gender is socially construed, and constricting definitions for men and women then have proved still another of many frangible fictions. Today we know that the range of choices for any of us is infinitely greater. We know that all races are mixed, that genetically we track back to a few progenitors in central Africa. We know that religions are mostly mythosocial constructs that arise out of tribal experiences that are institutionalized to preserve and to transmit and that the ontological claims of one tribe are no better, really, than the mythosocial constructs of other tribes. We know further that social practices, ethical prescriptions, are subjective value percepts and have no authority outside our tribe. Such a thought would have led any of us to the stake in an earlier era, and still will in many quarters.1 When an idea occurs as an alternative, forces within the psyche rise to combat it, for our egos are very insecure and prefer clarity, authority, and control at all costs.
To say that any of us has a choice, really, is still a dubious statement. While we celebrate social license, revel in eccentricity, and accept changing social structures, reports from the behaviorists and the neurologists and the geneticists narrow the window of freedom more and more. In fact, the older I get, the narrower that window has become, despite having spent a life in education, in study, travel, and reflection. The powers of the unconscious cannot be underestimated. Our ego consciousness — namely, who we think we are, or what we believe real — is at best a thin wafer floating on an iridescent sea. In any moment, we view the world through a distorting lens and make choices based on what the lens allows us to see, not what lies outside its frame.
The more conscious we become, the more we become aware of unconscious influences working upon our daily choices. Why did you make that choice and not another at a critical juncture in your life? Why hook up with that person? Why repeat those family-of-origin patterns? These are disconcerting questions, but unless we ask them, we remain at the mercy of whatever forces are at work autonomously within us. These confrontations with the ego’s fantasy of sovereignty are truly intimidating, but they remain a summons to greater awareness. How haunting is Carl Jung’s observation that whatever is denied within us is likely to come to us in the outer world as fate? (That thought alone keeps me at this work.)
I am not in any way suggesting that our cultural values, our religious traditions, our communal practices are wrong; that is not for me to judge. Many of those values link us with community, give us a sense of belonging and guidance in the flood of choices that beset us daily. I am saying, however, that the historic powers of such expectations, admonitions, and prohibitions are to be rendered conscious, considered thoughtfully, and tested by the reality of our life experience and inner prompting. No longer does received authority — no matter how ratified by history, sanctioned by tradition — automatically govern. We are rather called to a discernment process. We are summoned to ask such questions as: Does this align with or make sense of my experience? If not, it may be well intended and right for someone else, but it is not right for me. Does this value, practice, or expectation take me deeper into life, open new possibilities of relationship, and accord with the deepest movements of my own soul? If not, then it is toxic, no matter how benign its claim. Does this value, practice, or expectation open me to the mystery of this journey? Jung said in a letter once that life is a short pause between two great mysteries. Beware of those who offer answers. They may be sincere, but their answers are not necessarily yours. Adaptive loyalty to what we have received from our environment may prove an unconscious subversion of the integrity of the soul.
So, to say blandly then, “The choice is yours,” is not as simplistic as you may have thought at first. Amid the plethora of voices imposing themselves on you at any moment, which voice amid that cacophony is yours? Which voice rises from the depths of the soul, which from complexes and cultural templates, and how can you know the difference?
This mélange of messages is so profuse. How can we ever choose? And yet, we make choices on a moment-to-moment basis, and not to choose is of course a choice with consequences. So, then the task of this carbonized bit of matter we call our bodies, this tungsten spark we call our soul, is waiting upon us to realize that we serve life when we step forth and begin to take on that responsibility, that accountability, and choose a life that makes sense to us. The choice is ours, and if we are not exercising that choice, someone else is choosing for us — if not the splintered personalities of our complexes, then the perseverating voices of our ancestors, or the noisy din of our cultural tom-toms.
Our life begins twice: the day we are born and the day we accept the radical existential fact that our life, for all its delimiting factors, is essentially ours to choose. And the moment when we open to that invitation and step into that accountability, we take on the power of choice. Perhaps the world as such is meaningless — atoms assembling, disassembling, in a random concatenation of proximities. Perhaps everything is guided by a supreme being whose powers are absolute and whose thought process strikes us at best as arbitrary, surely as inscrutable. Whatever the case, we are the animal that suffers disconnect from meaning. Our system produces a complex series of interactions — feeling responses, dreams ranging from the turbulent and troubling to the transcendent, symptoms, patterns, sudden jolts, insights, recognitions, regressions — and then ineluctably surges forward again and forges new connections. And somewhere in all that complexity is the fantasy of, the possibility of, choice. The argument of whether we are actually free or not goes back into the mists of primal human imagining. But, as Jean Paul Sartre argued, we must act as if we are free, take on the “terrible” burden of choice, and be accountable. Whether free or not, we are obliged to act as if we are free, and all systems, philosophies, moralities, and juridical dicta expect accountability.
Years ago a very thoughtful woman who had been raised in a conventional religious setting asked the question that had awakened her at the hour of the wolf: “What if,” she said, “Jesus is not divine, not the son of God?” Respectfully, I replied, “What difference does it make?” Of course I knew it meant a great deal of difference to her. But I continued: “You still are accountable for your life. You still have to make choices on a daily basis, and you still are a person who must decide which values, which choices, are worthy of your election.”
What stands in the way of the exercise of that power of choice is essentially two things. First, we learned early that trying out who we are in the world often produced negative reactions. So we learned to curb our desires, adapt, perhaps even hide out, and fit in. It is so much safer that way. Tiny in a world of giants, we reason that surely the world is governed by those who know, who understand, who are in control. How disconcerting it is then when we find our own psyches in revolt at these once protective adaptations, and how disillusioning it is to realize that there are very few, if any, adults on the scene who have a clue as to what is going on. Our projections and expectations dissolve in time and are replaced by confusion, dismay, cynicism, and sometimes a frenetic search for trustable authorities.
To say that the choice is ours is both simplistic and profoundly difficult. Sorting through the thicket of admonitions, prohibitions, agendas, and adaptations is neither easy nor common. And yet, each of us has an appointment with ourselves, with our own soul. Whether we keep that appointment and step into the largeness of the summons is another matter. Rilke describes this dilemma in his enigmatic poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” The speaker in the poem is examining a battered classical sculpture of Apollo. Each crack and crevice is examined, until the examiner gets the uneasy feeling that he too is being examined. He ends by breaking off into a seeming non sequitur: “You must change your life!”
My understanding of Rilke’s poem is that once the observer has been in the presence of the large, the timeless, the imaginatively bold, he can no longer be at peace with his own small purchase on life. When we have had our lives reframed and see them as they often are — fear driven, petty, repetitive — we either anesthetize ourselves, distract ourselves, or realize that something has to change. It is usually through numinous moments, as the poet describes, or moments of desperation, or moments when the world gets in our face, forcing us to show up, finally. If we are to show up, we must make choices and stop whining. In those moments, something shifts inside. We experience our life as more fully alive than it has been at any other hour. We realize that we cannot remain bound by fear, convention, or adaptation. We realize that we now have, and have always had, choices. We can say yes or no, but we cannot say we have no choice in the matter.
Can any of us really argue, despite the terrible powers of fate and the impact of others upon our lives, that we are not also the central character in our life drama and that we are making choices every day, whether consciously or not? Can any of us seriously argue that at the end of the journey we have not played some substantial role in the outcome of the journey? Can we continue to argue that our lives are an unfolding novel written from afar, the meaning of which will be revealed to us on the last page only or in some cloudy afterlife? Are we not, on that last page, dead? Are we not writing the script interactively throughout this novel, page by page by page? In the end, are we not impelled to acknowledge the choice is ours, and life waits for us to show up and lay claim to what wishes to be expressed through us?