Upāsaka Cattasallā (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cattasalla) wrote2023-10-16 09:06 am
cattasalla) wrote2023-10-16 09:06 am
Deepening Choice
One of the teachings of the Buddha is that we play an active role in shaping our experience, to a profound degree that most of us don’t fully understand.
This unfortunately leads to a tendency for people to say things that imply that all one has to do is make different choices, or somehow otherwise magically change their mindset, to be free of difficulties in life, as if that’s an easy task. That attitude belongs on r/thanksimcured. While it is true, in some sense—we do to a large degree create our own realities and then inhabit them (within the limitations of the physical world)—it is quite simply the case that most of these processes of choice and reality-construction are outside the deliberate control of most people. To gain this control, to even fully see how these dynamics operate, a great deal of training is needed…and often medication, as well.
I don’t think the language we have surrounding this is inadequate. Can we meaningfully be said to be choosing our experience and attitudes when we are incapable of consciously making those choices? If they are being decided by parts of ourselves that we may not even know about? Is intention something that has to be conscious, or can we have intentions that we are not conscious of? I don’t think anyone can or should say that this is the case—that we have a choice in something we are not capable of consciously choosing. I would say that the practice of the Dhamma creates choices where none previously existed. Perhaps as a nitpick one might insist that what it’s actually doing is revealing that there was already a choice that we were making and we just weren’t making it deliberately, but I don’t think in really matters. Maybe we can be said to have unconscious intentions, rooted in attitudes we may only be dimply aware of. Furthermore, for many of us, we have a brain condition that needs to be addressed with medication in order to make it possible to make any choice that is healthy and liberating. If I need medication to function in a stable way, can I be said to really have agency over these subtle and deep actions?
At any rate, the notion that we actively participate in the construction of our experience can be helpful or it can be harmful. It can be helpful because, for one thing, it’s true, and knowing that and working to unearth the ways in which we do this active participation without knowing gives us a gread deal of power over our own minds and our lives. On the other hand, it can be used as a bludgeon, as a way of blaming someone for a difficult life and saying they are somehow morally inferior or deficient of character. This has multiple harmful effects, including creating or exacerbating the self-loathing that a person may feel that prevents them from feeling even worthy to do the work that would give them that control, and creating a reaction in a person against this notion and thus preventing them from seeing it’s possible to do that work.
So, yeah. We have more choice than we may realize in what we experience and how we experience it, but we may not have access to the ability to make that choice, and that’s where Dhamma comes in.
This unfortunately leads to a tendency for people to say things that imply that all one has to do is make different choices, or somehow otherwise magically change their mindset, to be free of difficulties in life, as if that’s an easy task. That attitude belongs on r/thanksimcured. While it is true, in some sense—we do to a large degree create our own realities and then inhabit them (within the limitations of the physical world)—it is quite simply the case that most of these processes of choice and reality-construction are outside the deliberate control of most people. To gain this control, to even fully see how these dynamics operate, a great deal of training is needed…and often medication, as well.
I don’t think the language we have surrounding this is inadequate. Can we meaningfully be said to be choosing our experience and attitudes when we are incapable of consciously making those choices? If they are being decided by parts of ourselves that we may not even know about? Is intention something that has to be conscious, or can we have intentions that we are not conscious of? I don’t think anyone can or should say that this is the case—that we have a choice in something we are not capable of consciously choosing. I would say that the practice of the Dhamma creates choices where none previously existed. Perhaps as a nitpick one might insist that what it’s actually doing is revealing that there was already a choice that we were making and we just weren’t making it deliberately, but I don’t think in really matters. Maybe we can be said to have unconscious intentions, rooted in attitudes we may only be dimply aware of. Furthermore, for many of us, we have a brain condition that needs to be addressed with medication in order to make it possible to make any choice that is healthy and liberating. If I need medication to function in a stable way, can I be said to really have agency over these subtle and deep actions?
At any rate, the notion that we actively participate in the construction of our experience can be helpful or it can be harmful. It can be helpful because, for one thing, it’s true, and knowing that and working to unearth the ways in which we do this active participation without knowing gives us a gread deal of power over our own minds and our lives. On the other hand, it can be used as a bludgeon, as a way of blaming someone for a difficult life and saying they are somehow morally inferior or deficient of character. This has multiple harmful effects, including creating or exacerbating the self-loathing that a person may feel that prevents them from feeling even worthy to do the work that would give them that control, and creating a reaction in a person against this notion and thus preventing them from seeing it’s possible to do that work.
So, yeah. We have more choice than we may realize in what we experience and how we experience it, but we may not have access to the ability to make that choice, and that’s where Dhamma comes in.