Conscious versus unconscious living

I was walking down the road in West Hollywood when I passed a gentleman who was sitting in a folding chair and reading aloud from a huge book. As I was passing, he read a quote:

A life lived in choice is a life of conscious action. A life lived by chance is a life of unconscious creation.

I was amused, because I heard in this quote a preference for conscious action.

In my mind, everything is useful for as long as it’s useful. When someone sees themselves as victims of circumstance, it can be helpful to recognize what we actually have power over. We can make our beds. We can brush our teeth. These are things we can control, which therefore show us how we make choices to influence our lives (albeit tiny ones).

As we learn to make more choices consciously, we indeed find our lives becoming more active, more liberated.

Until we don’t.

What I see is that, at a certain point, we find that the conscious decisions we make leads us to recognize the consequences of our actions. When we do that, if we open our hearts, we come to look for the most loving of actions, to do the greatest good with the least harm.

And so, we find ourselves no longer making choices as our hearts instantly see the best choices. Timothy Freke, a writer and “stand-up philosopher,” as he calls himself, quotes the Gnostic Gospel of Phillip, which says, “Those who are free because of gnosis [self-knowledge] become slaves because of love.”

We move from a life of choice to a life of unconsciousness. This time, however, instead of living through our unconscious fears, we live through loving without thinking about it.

When I reread that quote, I realized it wasn’t stating a preference, even if the reader were. Both are perfect, for as long as they are required.