The Power of Conscious Choosing

Opting for Entirely New Game of Living

After the last card seems to have been dealt to us in this whimsical game of life, we still have a chance to ask ourselves if perhaps we are in a wrong game -- rather than if we are playing it right.

Namely, do we really have to feel at the mercy of that hand that is dealt to us?

Could we just yank ourselves out of that fatalistic attitude and try something like our own conscious choosing? What I mean is an intention where nothing is left to the whims of star under which we were born, meaning our horoscope sign, and Lady Luck.

Something like moment to moment insistence on how we want to feel, how we want to process our intimate and outer reality.

Would you be willing to believe that any feeling imaginable is available for us to be retrieved from our nervous system -- regardless of the situation?

It's only that nobody is talking about it, simply because the great majority of people, especially those that we are having a chance to meet throughout our lives, are spending their entire lives switched to their automatic, unconscious model of functioning.

Surrendering their reactive abilities to the whims of the outer stimuli, people are letting their lives "happen to them". So that their autopilot is choosing for them the most "appropriate" response from their memory bank of past experiences.

So some of us may be experiencing a sudden anxiety episode while waiting in a lineup at a store -- just because the person ahead of us has a mustache similar too the one of our elementary school teacher, who once made the whole class laugh at us.

And all along we are completely unaware of all those tricks that our unconscious mind may be playing on us.

Unconscious Social Copycats

We started being molded into acceptable social beings very early in life, and all those "strategies of psychophysical survival" were neatly registered and cataloged in our autopilot to serve us for the rest of our lives.

What we are less aware of is the fact that along with all those social skills we also memorized "what are the appropriate emotional patterns of responding to a variety of situations".

So, among so many other things, we know that feeling good on Monday morning at work, or feeling happy on a gloomy, rainy day, or smiling when someone calls us a "village idiot" -- is equal to a heresy.

Yes, we learned to be social copycats, and we promptly get called "weird" if we forget what's the "appropriate" way to reason about things.

I should know -- being an out-of-box thinker. In more situations than I would care to remember, it was people's eyes that were giving me all those attributes of an oddball. Of course, that never affected me at all, because, if the whole world -- minus one person, myself -- would see something as insane, then that's what it would be for me, insane.

Well, my mind is the only one that my life ultimately depends on, so I might as well trust it -- which doesn't mean at all that I won't adopt an opinion that intuitively makes more sense to me than what I am coming up with. But the ultimate choice is always mine, not a result of someone's ability of persuasion.

But here we are not only talking about intellectual self-reliance, but much more about "living consciously", not being a social copycat, not merely replaying programs from an autopilot.

We CAN Choose Our Emotions

How do we wake up?

First of all, by realizing that we have been asleep. Then the next step would be much harder, as we would have to junk so much of our comfort zone, one that kept us lulled into security of a predictable future.

Even our worries about uncertainties of future outcomes have become the "regular features" of that comfort zone. So we bitch about the same politicians, and it's all just something of a familiar crap that we are used to.

And that's also something that's hard to break, no matter how conscious we may want to become. Only an enemy could expect from you to stop being bothered by politics -- they just wouldn't understand how big of a "concerned patriot" you are.

And then, the next big obstacle on the way of becoming conscious would be this pretty clear impression that choosing our emotions consciously would be pretty much "damn unnatural".

Really, they say, what normal person would choose how they feel? So they give up struggling hard in life in their pursuit of happiness -- and instead just choose to be happy as a lark, no reason needed. How normal can that be?

All of a sudden, they realize how they have so little in common with other folks of their life, that including the topics of all their conversations.

As if catapulted into some other dimension of reality, things are left to them to process in their head -- not anymore evaluated by a "common sense", reality meaning sense that's common to everyone, or consensus.

Nope, they say, it's O. K. to be different -- after all, they are different that those of opposite political and religious convictions -- but this is something "too much".

And this is exactly the kind of reasoning behind why we don't have more people waking up from the slumber of mental automatisms, why we have this uniformity which is preventing that next baby step in consciousness evolution.

People don't like abandoning their inner programs.

Or, at least, most of them don't -- to exclude myself.