We all exercise different choices almost every minute. A choice of whether to work or take a rest, the food to take, the people to meet, the work to do, the books to read, the place to visit, the experiences to go through. Some of the decisions are imposed on us, for example when we suddenly get a disease, we have to take medicines. We get different bosses and assignments that we may not have chosen. We met with different accidents and litigations in life. Our life is a sum total of our choices and chance.
However, if we see from a different perspective, each choice is a chance and each chance is a choice. Do we come across accidents suddenly in our lives or that is a choice we have made for our evolution across multiple lifetimes. When I examine my life, many sudden things happened in my life. Getting inclined towards reading psychology and neurology was just an accident. After the civil services mains examination, I went to Rajghat. I just came across the book written by Daniel Goleman named "Emotional Intelligence". Never ever in my life before that, I read any book on Psychology. With that book, my journey to read Psychology and Neurology started and that is continuing even till date after more than 20 years. I don't know whether getting interested in the book of Daniel Goleman was an accident or a choice that my unconscious made over a while.
Similarly, till around 2012, I was never interested in any technique of meditation. All the techniques of meditation appeared to me like mental imagination. In fact, I read a lot of books from the Bihar School of Yoga and the psychoanalysis of Osho and Ramakrishna Paramhansa by a psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakkar, and was really not convinced about the meditation practice. In 2012, I was traveling to the USA with one of my seniors and while interacting with him later after the tour, something clicked after around 10 years of my experiments with psychology and neurology, I somehow got convinced to try Vipassana and July 2012, I did my first camp. Then onwards, I have been regularly practicing Vipassana and have embraced it as a part of my life. I am not sure whether this was an accident or a choice made by the unconscious over a while.
Similarly, I started Astrology in 2011 due to certain developments in my family. I was actually damn against it. In fact, I started it almost as an effort to disprove it. Slowly, I grew into an agnostic and started doing experiments on hundreds of horoscopes sitting for tens of hours in a day on the research almost like a mad person. I didn't know what made me so interested in the study of the horoscopes. There are so many other accidents that took place in my life and I am really not sure whether they were just accidents or the choices made by the unconscious.
Similarly, I made many choices such as the choice of career, marriage, kids, assignments in my career, and so on. I am really not sure whether these were the choices made by me or whether the divine carried out his will through me. I am really not sure if I go back to the day when I made these decisions, or whether I will make the same decision. In fact, I am almost very sure that I will not make the same decisions.
Thus, I really don't know what is a choice and what is a chance. From a different plane, each chance appears to be a choice made by the unconscious and each choice appears to be the divine guidance to our life. I am however sure of at least one thing. Our intellect is very limited and cannot make sense of reality. Reality is like world politics to a person who has never stepped out of his home. I have somehow a firm belief about the existence of some force of nature, we may call consciousness or divine, that is directly or indirectly guiding our lives. That's why it's easy for me to accept almost every accident in my life as a divine way to take me to the next level of understanding. Probably, given a choice, we may not like to make certain decisions howsoever necessary they may be for our growth.
Somebody may say that it means a blind belief. Unless we try hard to get what we want, we will be in a vegetative state and people will misuse us. We will not be able to move forward in our lives. However, I am really not sure. One thing I am really sure of is that I have a firm understanding that my intellect is too limited to understand reality and this intellect has a keen inclination to grow. That is the reason why I have a keen interest in life which is not restricted to particular life choices. Yes, I have a resistance to experiences that are very low in richness such as shallow discussions in social gatherings. However, I love to interact with friends and soulmates at a much deeper level.
I am not sure where life is going to take me but probably there is not much concern for that as well. I am very sure that the intellect cannot comprehend the infinite possibilities that are going to unfold in the times to come. So, probably, the only option left is to let loose and dance to the tune of the divine like the Gopis dancing to the tune of Krishna. I get reassured when I look back at my life and see that 20 years back I could not have even imagined even 10% of the experiences that I have had in life leave aside planning the same. So I get reassured of the divine care and guidance in the life to come. After all, the divine, like a parent, would also be equally concerned for the growth of his child.
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