The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [37]
A deeply religious person might even claim that every inner voice is some version of the voice of God. One thing is certain, however: We all hear the inner voices of a clamoring chorus. They nag, praise, cajole, judge, warn, suspect, disbelieve, trust, complain, hope, love, and fear—in no special order. It’s too simplistic to say that we each have a good side and a bad side—we have thousands of aspects formed out of past experiences. It’s impossible to sort out how many voices I am actually listening to. I sense that some are buried from childhood; they sound like orphans of my earliest experiences begging me to take them in. Other voices are adultlike and harsh—in them, I hear people from my past who judged or punished me. Each voice believes that it deserves my whole attention, heedless of the others that believe the same thing. There is no central self who rises above the din to quell this riot of opinions, demands, and needs. At any given moment, whatever voice I pay the most attention to becomes my voice, only to be crowded offstage when my attention shifts. The unruliness that pulls me this way and that is living proof of how fragmented I have become.
How can this clamoring chorus be tamed? How can I retrieve a sense of self that fits one reality? The answer once again is freedom, yet in a most peculiar way. You must free yourself from decisions. The voice in your head will die down once you stop making choices. A samskara is a choice you remember from the past. Each choice changed you by a tiny fraction. The process began at birth and continues to this day. Instead of fighting it, we all believe we should keep on making choices; as a result, we keep adding new samskaras and reinforcing the old ones. (In Buddhism, this is called the wheel of samskara because the same old reactions keep coming around again and again. In a cosmic sense, the wheel of samskara is what drives a soul from one lifetime to the next—old imprints impel us to face the same problems time and again, even beyond death.) Kierkegaard wrote that the person who has found God has freed himself from choices. But what does it feel like to have God make your decisions for you? I think you would have to be deeply connected to God to even come close to answering that question.
Yet in a state of simple awareness, the most evolutionary choices seem to come spontaneously. While the ego agonizes over every detail of a situation, a deeper part of your awareness knows what to do already, and its choices emerge with amazing finesse and perfect timing. Hasn’t everyone experienced flashes of clarity in which they suddenly know just what to do? Choiceless awareness is another name for free awareness. By freeing up the choice-maker inside, you reclaim your right to live without boundaries, acting on the will of God with complete trust.
Have we become trapped simply by the act of choosing? This is a surprising idea because it runs counter to a lifelong behavior. For all of us, life has been lived one choice at a time. The external world is like a huge bazaar offering a dazzling array of possibilities, and everyone shops the bazaar, cannily seizing what is best for me and mine. Most people know themselves by what came home in their shopping bag—a house, job, spouse, car, children, money. But every time you choose A over B, you are forced to leave some part of the one reality behind. You are defining yourself by selective (and completely arbitrary) preferences.
The alternative is to stop concentrating on the results and look to the cause. Who is this choice-maker inside you? This voice is a relic of