The Trap in Choosing

Choice is one of the great gifts of being human. A stone cannot choose. A tree cannot choose. We can.

But there is a trap inside choosing. The trap is not in choosing itself. It is in how we choose.

Two words must be kept apart here: choice and compulsion. A choice is made when we see more than one way open and take one of them freely. A compulsion is made for us by old memory while we believe we are choosing. From the inside they feel the same. The test is simple, and hard to apply honestly: could I just as easily have done the other thing? If the answer is no, the warehouse chose.

Most of the time we choose from liking and disliking. I like this, so I reach for it. I do not like that, so I push it away. The old teachers called these two movements raag and dvesh, attraction and aversion. They look like opposites. They are the two faces of one coin, and both are struck in the warehouse, from old memory.

The trap works like this. We like a thing and choose it. The choosing makes the liking stronger, and the path wears deeper. Now we like it more, so we choose it again. Meanwhile everything we did not choose begins to seem strange, and a little worse, and we begin to dislike it. The world narrows.

Anyone who scrolls a feed has watched this happen from the outside. Watch a few videos of one kind and the algorithm serves up more of that kind, and more, until almost nothing else appears. The other interests were never refused. They were crowded out. The mind does exactly this, and it needs no algorithm to do it.

The subtle part is that it still feels like freedom. No one feels forced to follow their own tastes. Yet the old memory is doing the choosing, and the one who chooses is only riding along.

The old teachers called this karma vriddhi, karma that breeds more karma. Every choice made from compulsive liking or disliking puts a new box in the warehouse and makes the same choice likelier tomorrow. That is how the warehouse keeps filling.

It is not only true of things. It is true of people. I like her. I do not like him. We choose friends and sides and enemies this way. Once someone has been put in the box marked dislike, everything they do looks bad to us. The trap has closed.

Guru Nanak described the trap five hundred years before anyone scrolled a feed.

Guru Nanak, Raag Maru, Ang 990

A bird pecks at a seed it likes. The seed tastes good. It pecks again, and again, and does not see the net until the net is on it. The seeds are not the trouble. The trouble is a bird that follows nothing but its taste.

The question at the end is a hard one. By what goodness of your own will you ever get free? The bird cannot untangle itself by being clever. Something more is needed, and it must come from outside the net.

In Japji Sahib the Guru shows how a narrowed world is opened again.

Japji Sahib, pauri 28

Count everyone as your own. Not only those you like. Not only those your warehouse approves. Everyone.