Denial is looking past the problem instead of facing it. Psychologists consider denial the most childish of the three behaviors because it is so intimately linked to vulnerability. The person in denial feels helpless to solve problems, the way a young child feels. Fear is linked to denial, and so is a childlike need for love in the face of insecurity. The underlying idea is “I don’t have to notice what I can’t change in the first place.” You can catch yourself going into denial when you experience lack of focus, forgetfulness, procrastination, refusing to confront those who hurt you, wishful thinking, false hope, and confusion. The main external sign is that others don’t depend on you or turn to you when a solution is needed. By pulling your attention out of focus, denial defends with blindness. How can you be accused of failing at something you don’t even see? You get past denial by facing up to painful truths. Honestly expressing how you feel is the first step. For someone in deep denial, any feeling that makes you think you are unsafe is generally one you have to face. Denial begins to end when you feel focused, alert, and ready to participate despite your fears.
Each of these behaviors tries to prove an impossibility. Manipulation tries to prove that anyone can be made to do what you want. Control tries to prove that no one can reject you unless you say so. Denial tries to prove that bad things will go away if you don’t look at them. The truth is that other people can refuse to do what you want, can walk out on you for no good reason, and can cause trouble whether you face it or not. There is no predicting how long any of us will stubbornly try to prove the opposite, but only when we admit the truth does the behavior completely end.
The next thing to know about samskaras is that they are not silent. These deep impressions in the mind have a voice; we hear their repeated messages as words in our heads. Is it possible to figure out which voices are true and which are false? This is an important question because it isn’t possible to think without hearing some words in your head.
Early in the nineteenth century, an obscure pastor in Denmark known as Magister Adler was fired from his church. He was convicted of disobeying church authorities by claiming that he had received direct revelation from God. While preaching from the pulpit, he began claiming that when he spoke in a high, squeaky voice he was speaking from revelation, whereas when he spoke with his own normal, low voice he was speaking only as himself.
This bizarre behavior led his congregation to think their pastor must be crazy, so they had no alternative but to fire him. As it happened, news of the case reached the great Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who asked the really crucial question: Is it ever possible to prove that someone has heard the voice of God? What behavior or other outward sign would allow anyone to tell true revelation from false? The disgraced clergyman would probably be diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic if he showed up with the same symptoms today. Kierkegaard concluded that Adler wasn’t speaking in God’s voice, but he also observed that none of us knows where our inner voices come from. We simply accept them, as well as the stream of words that fill our heads.
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 the past, the accumulation of old decisions carrying over beyond their time. Right now you are living under the burden of your past self, who is no longer alive. You must protect the thousands of choices that make up this dead self. Yet the choice-maker could live a much freer life. If choices occurred in the present and were fully appreciated right now, there would be nothing left to hold on to, and then the past couldn’t accumulate into a crushing burden.
Choice should be a flow. Your body already suggests that this is the natural way to exist. As we saw earlier, each cell maintains only enough reserve of food and oxygen to survive for a few seconds. Cells don’t store up energy because they never know what’s coming next. Flexible responses are much more important to survival than hoarding. From one viewpoint, this makes your cells look entirely vulnerable and undefended, yet as fragile as a cell may appear, two billion years of evolution can’t be denied.
Everyone knows how to choose; few know how to let go. But it’s only by letting go of each experience that you make room for the next. The skill of letting go can be learned; once learned, you will enjoy living much more spontaneously.
LETTING GO
How to Choose Without Getting Trapped
Make the most of every experience.
Don’t obsess over right and wrong decisions.
Stop defending your self-image.
Go beyond risks.
Make no decision when in doubt.
See the possibilities in whatever happens.
Find the stream of joy.
Making the most of an experience: Living fully is extolled everywhere in popular culture. I have only to turn on the tel
evision at random to be assailed with the following messages: “It’s the best a man can get.” “It’s like having an angel by your side.” “Every move is smooth, every word is cool. I never want to lose that feeling.” “You look, they smile. You win, they go home.” What is being sold here? A fantasy of total sensory pleasure, social status, sexual attraction, and the self-image of a winner. As it happens, all these phrases come from the same commercial for razor blades, but living life fully is part of almost any ad campaign. What is left out, however, is the reality of what it actually means to fully experience something. Instead of looking for sensory overload that lasts forever, you’ll find that the experiences need to be engaged at the level of meaning and emotion.
Meaning is essential. If this moment truly matters to you, you will experience it fully. Emotion brings in the dimension of bonding or tuning in: An experience that touches your heart makes the meaning that much more personal. Pure physical sensation, social status, sexual attraction, and feeling like a winner are generally superficial, which is why people hunger for them repeatedly. If you spend time with athletes who have won hundreds of games or with sexually active singles who have slept with hundreds of partners, you’ll find out two things very quickly: (1) Numbers don’t count very much. The athlete usually doesn’t feel like a winner deep down; the sexual conqueror doesn’t usually feel deeply attractive or worthy. (2) Each experience brings diminishing returns; the thrill of winning or going to bed becomes less and less exciting and lasts a shorter time.
To experience this moment, or any moment, fully means to engage fully. Meeting a stranger can be totally fleeting and meaningless, for example, unless you enter the individual’s world by finding out at least one thing that is meaningful to his or her life and exchange at least one genuine feeling. Tuning in to others is a circular flow: You send yourself out toward people; you receive them as they respond to you. Notice how often you don’t do that. You stand back and insulate yourself, sending out only the most superficial signals and receive little or nothing back.
The same circle must be present even when someone else isn’t involved. Consider the way three people might observe the same sunset. The first person is obsessing over a business deal and doesn’t even see the sunset, even though his eyes are registering the photons that fall on their retinas. The second person thinks, “Nice sunset. We haven’t had one in a while.” The third person is an artist who immediately begins a sketch of the scene. The differences among the three are that the first person sent nothing out and received nothing back; the second allowed his awareness to receive the sunset but had no awareness to give back to it—his response was rote; the third person was the only one to complete the circle: He took in the sunset and turned it into a creative response that sent his awareness back out into the world with something to give.
If you want to fully experience life, you must close the circle.
Right and wrong decisions: If you obsess over whether you are making the right decision, you are basically assuming that the universe will reward you for one thing and punish you for another. This isn’t a correct assumption because the universe is flexible—it adapts to every decision you make. Right and wrong are only mental constructs. Immediately I can hear strong emotional objections to this. What about Mister Right? What about the perfect job? What about buying the best car? We are all in the habit of looking like consumers at people, jobs, and cars, wanting best value for the money. But in reality the decisions we label as right and wrong are arbitrary. Mister Right is one of a hundred or a thousand people you could spend a satisfying life with. The best job is impossible to define, given that jobs turn out to be good or bad depending on a dozen factors that come into play only after you start the job. (Who knows in advance what your co-workers will be like, what the corporate climate is, whether you will have the right idea at the right moment?) And the best car may get driven into an accident two days after you buy it.
The universe has no fixed agenda. Once you make any decision, it works around that decision. There is no right or wrong, only a series of possibilities that shift with each thought, feeling, and action that you experience. If this sounds too mystical, refer again to your body. Every significant vital sign—body temperature, heart rate, oxygen consumption, hormone level, brain activity, and so on—alters the moment you decide to do anything. A runner’s metabolism can’t afford to be as low as the metabolism of someone reading a book because, without increased air intake and faster heart rate, the runner would suffocate and collapse with muscle spasms.
Decisions are signals telling your body, mind, and environment to move in a certain direction. It may turn out afterward that you feel dissatisfied with the direction you’ve taken, but to obsess over right and wrong decisions is the same as taking no direction at all. Keep in mind that you are the choice-maker, which means that who you are is far more than any single choice you have ever made or ever will make.
Defending your self-image: Over the years you have built an idealized self-image that you defend as “me.” In this image are packed all the things you want to see as true about yourself; banished from it are all the shameful, guilty, and fear-provoking aspects that would threaten your self-confidence. But the very aspects you try to push away return as the most insistent, demanding voices in your head. The act of banishment creates the chaos of your internal dialogue, and thus your ideal erodes even while you are doing everything to look good and feel good about yourself.
To really feel good about yourself, renounce your self-image. Immediately you will find yourself being more open, undefended, and relaxed. It’s helpful to remember a startling comment from the renowned Indian spiritual teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj: “If you notice, you only have a self when you’re in trouble.” If that seems unbelievable, imagine yourself walking through a dangerous neighborhood in a bad part of town. All around you are people whose stares make you nervous; the sound of unfamiliar accents reminds you that you are different from these people, and in that difference you feel danger. The perception of threat causes you to withdraw by contracting inside. This builds up a wider gap between you and what you fear. Yet this retreat into the isolated, constricted self doesn’t really defend you from anything. It is imaginary. By widening the gap, you only ensure that what might serve you—looking confident and at ease—can’t occur. Maharaj’s point is that what we call the self is a contraction around an empty core, whereas in reality we are meant to be free and expansive in our awareness.
Much time is spent in self-help trying to turn a bad self-image into a good one. As reasonable as that sounds, all self-images have the same pitfall: They keep reminding you of who you were, not who you are. The whole idea of I, me, and mine was erected on memories, and these memories are not really you. If you release yourself from your self-image, you will be free to choose as if for the first time.
Self-image keeps reality away, particularly at the emotional level. Many people don’t want to admit what they are actually feeling. Their self-image dictates that being angry, for example, or showing anxiety is not permissible. Such feelings don’t accord with the “kind of person I want to be.” Certain emotions feel too dangerous to be part of your ideal image of yourself, so you adopt a disguise that excludes those feelings. Deep-seated rage and fear belong in this category, but sadly so does immense joy, ecstasy, or freewheeling spontaneity. You stop being ruled by self-image when:
• You feel what you feel
• You are no longer offended by things
• You stop appraising how a situation makes you look
• You don’t exclude people you feel superior or inferior to
• You quit worrying about what others think about you
• You no longer obsess over money, status, and possessions
• You no longer feel the urge to defend your opinions
Going beyond risks: As long as the future remains unpredictable, every decision involves some level of risk. That’s the story that seems to be universall
y accepted, at least. We are told that certain foods put one at risk for heart attacks and cancer, for example, and therefore the rational thing is to quantify the risk and stay on the low side of the numbers. But life itself cannot be quantified. For every study that shows a quantifiable fact about heart disease (e.g., men who drink a quart of milk a day are half as likely to suffer a severe heart attack), there is another study to show that stress raises the risk of heart disease only if you are susceptible to stress (some people actually thrive on it).
Risk is mechanical. It implies that there is no intelligence behind the scenes, only a certain number of factors that result in a given outcome. You can go beyond risks by knowing that there is infinite intelligence at work in the hidden dimension of your life. At the level of this intelligence your choices are always supported. The point of looking at risks would be to see if your course of action is reasonable; you wouldn’t rely on risk analysis to override far more important factors, the very factors that are being weighed at the level of deeper awareness:
Does this choice feel right for me?
Am I interested in where this choice is leading?
Do I like the people involved?
Is this choice good for my whole family?
Does this choice make sense given my stage in life?
Do I feel morally justified in making this choice?
Will this choice help me to grow?
Do I have a chance to be more creative and inspired by what I am about to do?
It’s when these things go wrong that choices don’t work out. The risks may be relevant, but they aren’t decisive. People who can assess their choices at the deeper level of awareness are aligning themselves with infinite intelligence, and thus they have a greater chance for success than does someone who crunches the numbers.