By Amaya Gayle —
Sedona, a?Z –I can pretty much guarantee that few will be interested in this little secret, because it is the rather large lie, the frustrating fallacy, the charlatan concept that is ardently guarded by riveting, nearly unconscious resistance. I used to encounter that same thing when I’d write about death. That little idea doesn’t seem to be nearly as repulsive these days.
Maybe we’re more accepting of the inevitable, but I also think there was so little interest in death because I hadn’t experienced its deceit directly, and regardless of what most think, that limitation, its fraudulence sticks to the words like super glue. When someone writes something for which they hold only a mental understanding it feels tinny. It doesn’t have the depth and breadth, the smooth penetrating silkiness that is capable of expressing the lived, felt, undeniable experience.
Maybe death, and choice, the big one that we cling to like life itself, are both concepts that seem to require first-hand experience before we are the tiniest bit willing to entertain new possibilities. I love that the word ‘concepts’ begins with con … a confidence swindler. The concepts as believed swindle our confidence in our intuitive inner knowing.
Even though there will be little interest, I feel compelled to write about my first-hand experience. I don’t call it a choice, even though for all intents and purposes, it feels like one. I sit down and write about no choice, the lack of free will, right in the middle of the appearance of free will – the choice to sit down and write or go for a walk. Isn’t that fun!
So, why isn’t that choice? Isn’t that free will in action?
The appearance of something, even the felt, lived, balls to the bones sensorial experience of something doesn’t necessarily mean it is not an illusion. Illusion has a bad rap, just like duality. The illusion of choice still plays like choice. Illusion simply means wrongly perceived or misinterpreted by the senses. It doesn’t mean that it has no basis at all.
When I fall asleep at night and dream, I see intricate patterns, exquisitely detailed locations, fascinating people dressed in unique clothing that I have never seen before or since. I can often see the tiny facets that I miss in life. It’s like pinpoint focus is available in the dream. I experience aliveness on display, aliveness that is even more detailed than life in the 3D. Upon waking, I realize that I was dreaming. In awe of the creative power behind the dream’s curtain, I shake my head, blown away by my misperception of reality. My senses certainly went into an overdrive of misinterpretation. Within the dream, I took the illusion to be real.
Was it real? Is this? Did I, the dreamed character, have the power to choose within the dream? Did I have free will? The dream, not unlike a movie, gives the impression, the visceral experience of choice. That’s part of its appeal, a big part. It’s a feature not a flaw. Dreams are replete with smells, struggles, pain and suffering, joy and happiness, and sexual release at times. They are pretty damn real illusions.
How do you know this isn’t a dream too?
Sitting on the couch in the middle of the night, finally done screaming at God, or whoever, shock after shock lighting up my body, surrendered to the uncertainty of seeing the sun rise, life showed me it’s little secret. It kicked me out of the dream. Amaya was sitting on the couch, the music playing. The house’s walls, the couch and sky were still present and yet, it was clear that Amaya was in the dream called life, playing her role, a role she couldn’t help but play. She was in the living breathing full sensorial dream and I, this I that is awareness alive, infinity playing, was not. I was unlocatable, absent time or space, simple basic awareness aware of aliveness, experiencing the seemingness of experience, the precious gift of a human lifetime.
It was beyond obvious that This I Am is not leela, the divine play, and yet, is experiencing the play as if it is the only reality, a play that includes the experience of choice. Does a character on life’s stage have choice, or are her lines being written improvisationally, flowing out of all that has come before? Does the dreamed character control the dream? Even in lucid dreaming, one is still a dreamed character in the dream, but a dreamed character dreaming of control.
And what’s wrong with choice being just an appearance of choice accompanied by jazz-time improv, moment-by-moment uncertainty? If you look, you know you don’t have control. You know your choices are the natural outcome of your previous experiences. You already know that you can’t control what happens in your life and yet … you try … and that too, is a beautiful part of the illusive, elusive appearance.
You try to stop the flow, to reroute it, to dam it up, because some of the appearances that came before appeared to be controllable. You appeared to succeed. Trying to control your life isn’t wrong or bad. It too, is how infinite aliveness refines itself, how it is brought to the magnificent futility that frees the appearance of a you from the need to struggle. Trying happens, or not. It is either in your living moving adaptive blueprint, or it isn’t. For some the death of the need to try is hopelessness, for others it is freedom. Why? Because it is. It couldn’t be otherwise given the flow of experiential inputs into the blueprint.
I don’t have to tell you that you don’t have true choice. Deep within, you already suspect it. If you want to beat yourself up for all the bad choices you’ve made, salute all the good ones, and use them as proof for life being as it is, you will, but when you are willing to look closely at your life, when you are truly ready to see what you have hidden from yourself, life will let you in on its little secret.
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