The ‘No Choice’ Paradigm: Freedom and Human Design

NO CHOICE – Fact or Fiction?

In the ‘No Choice’ paradigm, this discussion has taken place millions of times over thousands of years to no avail. It’s never resolved.

First, I always try to remember that anything said about this subject is pure speculation – meaning it’s not possible at this time to verify either point of view empirically. I will do my best to recognize that any discourse on this subject is best served by a collegial approach. The following are my well-considered thoughts – not statements of inescapable fact.

I am starting with an example of what I consider to be a major conundrum to the proposition that there is NO choice.

Unlike pure, mechanical laws of physics comprised of discrete separate pieces, we are orders of power more complex. Our brains contain over 100 billion neurons with trillions of possible links and connections. We run millions of complex processes every second of life. And the potential combinations of how we run them ensure that they play out in millions of different ways, each one of which subtly alters the process. And it all happens at an incredible speed. You just can’t correctly predict very much of human behavior.

What actually makes decisions inside of us?

Ra says “Everything we think and say and do, and that is everything, is initiated. in areas of the brain that we have no access to, that in fact our entire lives are ‘dictated’ by deep gray areas in the brain, which we respond to microseconds or seconds later.”

Ra used the word “we” in the quote above, but I have substituted the word “I” in the next paragraph because it is more useful.

Think about that for a moment. The deep gray areas that initiate everything I do are in my brain. I respond to something (which he doesn’t describe) in those areas microseconds later. So, I have a brain and in my brain I have responses. To whom does the brain belong? Who has something that happens? I do. This is the typical schism that mechanics creates. In fact, there is no separation. I make decisions because “I” am an integral part of the whole thing that makes and executes decisions, and the decisions of today are influenced by the decisions made yesterday, and today’s decisions influence tomorrow’s.

If we were actually as mechanical as Ra says, I would not be able to change my behavior on the fly – but I can. I can use consciousness to interrupt the behavior chains that originate deep in my gray area. Consciousness, in humans, serves the purpose of enabling us to modify our behaviors in the moment, on the fly. We are not doomed to repeat behaviors ad nauseum. We can recondition ourselves.

If we look at the universe as a duality of equal and opposing opposites, then the schism is made whole.

Now, there are many ways in which I don’t have a choice. I don’t have the choice to become an eagle right at the moment, but I do have the choice to fly.

If I rely on my mind to make decisions, can I choose not to rely on it whenever the mood strikes me? If I cannot choose that, am I thus forever stuck with using my mind to decide? If I am stuck with that, then I have NO choice and will never live my design and strategy.

If we look at the universe as a duality of equal and opposing opposites, then the schism is made whole. Yin and Yang constantly move with each one, over time, becoming the other.

Without the attribute of being able to embrace dualism, we can’t navigate in the world. We are forced to choose the inhale/exhale rhythm of life. It’s not possible to simply hold your breath until you die.

NO CHOICE – Part 2

Previously, I looked at how serious examination of the proposition of “No Choice” is logically faulty. Here, I want to talk about what it is about that proposition that resonates with so many and how factual it is.

There are only two major ways in which we are shaped. The first is by genetics, by our ancestral bloodline from which we descend, and by our connection to the entire lineage of primates.

We are each the product of a genetic heritage that goes back more than 65 million years. I had no choice about my bloodline, my ancestors, my parents, where, when, or even whether I was born.

This is “OUR NATURE.” No choice.

After birth, I had no choice about my environment or what people were in my proximity. I had no choice about my food options, my school, teachers, classmates, what I had to learn, or how I had to behave.

This is “OUR NURTURE.” No choice.

Until democracy, very few people could choose their kind of government, their religion, their spouse, morals, ethics, and neighbors. All civilizations were ruled by a system that dictated everything to its subjects. The punishment for disobedience was usually slow torture and a grisly death.

This basic structure is so old that it is now part of our DNA in terms of the Human Design circuit groups of Tribal, Collective, and Individual. We are basically wired to accept that we have no choice, to believe that it is better to follow rules to be safe and alive than to make a free choice and wind up dead or suffering.

It’s not so much NO CHOICE as it is NO CHANGE – until change is inevitable (Gate 49).

A lot of us have benefitted from good “NURTURE” while others have suffered from poor “NURTURE.”

The church, the emperors, kings, princes, etc., have all benefited immensely from the dynamic application of “No CHOICE.” Today, of course, it is politicians, corporations, and special interest groups that mostly decide how we should behave and what we should have.

Not choosing works quite well.

Not choosing works quite well. It’s really just a variation on Taoism which came to prominence through the work of Lao Tse around 475 BCE, a time of great turbulence in China known as the Warring States Period. The advice of the Tao Te Ching was basically to surrender and float downstream like a leaf.

If you spend any time studying the I Ching, you will soon see that the I Ching rarely counsels such action. As an example, Hexagram 16 – Enthusiasm follows “the law of movement along the line of least resistance. Which in this hexagram is enunciated as the law for natural events and for human life. The judgment on that is: It furthers one to install helpers and to set armies marching.”

P.S. The Beatles made a very popular song “Tomorrow Never Knows” on their Revolver album released in 1966 when Ra was 18:

“Turn off your mind
Relax and float downstream
It is not dying”

NO CHOICE  – Part 3

I can make logical point after logical point about either side of this disagreement. I can expound experience after experience to prove either side, but doing so is just a headlong rush down the infinite rabbit hole. Just the mind entertaining and enjoying itself.

There are those who say everything is an illusion yet they pragmatically refuse to walk down the middle of a busy freeway.

Ra makes much of the concept of the binary universe, comprising two different aspects of the same situation. In that reality:

I am the chooser, I am the choice, and I am the not-chosen. I am my past, my present, my future.

I am my awareness, I am my conscious, my unconscious, and my subconscious.

My mind is not separate from my body. My body is not separate from my world. My spirit is not separate from anything.

When I say “I choose”, I am saying the WHOLENESS of me makes the choice.

When I say “I choose”, I am saying the wholeness of me, the WHOLENESS of me makes the choice, not just one part of me. Not just my body (the cognitive senses) or my mind or spirit but ALL of me.

Not just my past, or my future, or even my now. Not just my DNA, but also my insights, opinions, ideas, thoughts, memories, instincts, intuition, emotions, drives, problems, desires, biases, etc. They all participate. My self makes the final choice. There is no other agency to do the choosing.

Descartes said, ‘I think, therefore I am”, but that’s dysfunctional. Thinking means “to cause to appear to oneself” – internally. All he has said is, I imagine, therefore I am. The act of imagining anything precedes the existence of the “I”. But what then creates the “I that does the imagining?”

I am this and that but sometimes I am more this than that, and sometimes both this and that in the same moment.

I think the task in life is to recognize and accept the coexistence of all parts of myself as a cohesive whole. I am this and that but sometimes I am more this than that, and sometimes both this and that in the same moment.

Soren Kierkegaard (the father of Existentialism) said, “The self is a relation, which relates to itself, or is precisely that in the relation that the relation relates to itself; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates to itself. Man is a synthesis of infinitude and finitude, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis.”

Kierkegaard is hard because the subject matter is opaque. Nobody truly knows whether there is a choice or not. The hidden gem, if you will, is that it doesn’t matter whether we have free will or not.

Photo credit: Jon Tyson