The Best Possible Decision

"The basest of all things is to be afraid." - William Faulkner.

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I'd like to share the best decision I've ever made. The best decision I will ever make. The best decision I could ever make.

I made the decision at about nine o'clock yesterday morning. It turned out to be much easier than I had anticipated.

Because I've always known how important it was, I had built it up to earth-shaking proportions in my mind. After I made the decision, I wanted to take out a front-page ad in the New York Times to announce it.

And it wouldn't have been bragging. I acknowledge that the decision was as natural as the choice to sit down to a home cooked meal. And I acknowledge that the heavy lifting was done by a power I don't understand or control.

In my defense, it was a decision no power on earth could have forced me to make before I was ready. I had sensed the need to make the decision for a long time. But I just couldn't bring myself to do that.

A lot led up to that decision. Over forty years of feeling that existence, which God supposedly created, had abandoned and betrayed me. Four fifths of my life spent unable to fully trust anyone or anything, including myself. Or else blindly giving my trust to the undeserving in desperation.

Before I made the best choice of my life, I recalled the worst choice I had ever made: the fully conscious, aware, free will and determined choice, almost forty years before, to turn against the God I felt had abandoned and betrayed me on the most intimate, visceral, subatomic level.

I turned against the God I believed was responsible for the sexual abuse I had suffered since the age of ten. The God I blamed for the perpetual confusion and shame permeating my being.

Before I made the best choice I could ever make, I thought of how I had no idea whether the coffee I had sipped moments before would poison me. There was no way to really be sure.

There was no way to be absolutely certain of much of anything.

Before I made the best choice I could ever make, I thought of the appearances of this almost all-encompassing and unavoidable uncertainty: It appeared that a God so many people claimed was loving had created a world in which I don't control even my next heartbeat. A world I ultimately don't control at all, but feel the need to control in order to just survive, let alone prosper.

A world in which it is not possible to function without implicitly trusting in something.

This Higher Power, the universe, this uncontrollable and incomprehensible Beyond, whatever you want to call it, did give me the choice to trust in anything I choose: a slot machine, a woman, a political ideology, a statue of the Buddha ... myself.

But the universe did not give me the choice not to trust.

I realized that God was not asking me to trust. God was commanding me to trust. My only choice has ever been: What is it I place my faith in?

The game is rigged.

After a lifetime of trusting everything and everyone for all the wrong reasons, alternating with being afraid of trusting anyone or anything - after a lifetime of trying to trust my own puny powers and disappointing myself again and again - after a lifetime of feeling nothing was trustworthy, I made the best choice I could ever make.

The best choice I could ever make was to say in my heart, then write on paper, then say to the Divine Beyond,

"I trust God completely. No ifs, ands or buts.
"And I act accordingly."

I'm not sure of everything that means, but I know I mean it.

I know this, my best possible choice, implies I keep taking the next right step as I understand it; that I keep listening to the mysterious Beyond for guidance; that I keep taking the risk to act on what I hear from the this unseen Something Divine so that I grow in unpredictable ways, moving myself into the exciting but terrifying unknown, the Beyond control and Beyond understanding ... the new.

The wisest thing I've ever heard said about God comes from Isaiah 55:8:

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord."

Putting that wisdom together with my best possible choice gives me the mission of accepting, no matter how hard it may be, that while God is the Beyond my control or understanding, I still must listen carefully to the silence so that His thoughts become my thoughts. Implied in this mission is also that I have the courage to make my ways conform to His.

Not conform to what some preacher or holy book says are His ways. Conform to what my conscience - the God within - tells me directly.

The next day - today - I sent out a group text to some of my friends and family. It explained my new understanding of existence:

"Even the sky can't limit the spirit armed with faith in its source, the Almighty Beyond we call God. Fear and the resulting despair, loss of hope, and mistrust of the goodness within and all around are the true roots of all evil."

Thanks be to God.

Fact Or Falsehood?

The most important characteristic of facts is that they don't care who believes them.

Facts just are.

That's why the best way to honor the truth is to constantly question whether you really have as much of it as you think you do.

Who Are We? Who Should We Be?

     Urges are not convictions. Though we may follow our urges rather than our beliefs at times, urges do not reveal the real person. They are one aspect of us, but not the defining aspect. Our chosen values define us more than any genetic predispositions or conditioned urges.

     Convictions, however, are not beliefs. We are convinced of many things we don't really believe. Some people feel certain they're not afraid to die, yet they continue steering their cars away from danger and gathering the money they need to survive. In reality, these people are so terrified of death that they cannot even admit their fear to themselves.

     Our convictions are what we tell ourselves. We are truly convinced of our convictions ... on a conscious level. Convictions speak to who we want to be and who we think we are.

     Our real beliefs, on the other hand, can only be determined by observing our actions.

     So urges speak to our genetic inheritance and our conditioning. The conditioning comes from many sources: culture, physical environment, and habits growing out of past choices are a few.

     Convictions speak to our self image.

     Beliefs - the values underlying our actual actions - speak to who we are from a dry, dispassionate, third person perspective.

     But who are we really?

     I don't have a God's-eye perspective on humanity. But I feel my "essence" is a combination of pure awareness and free will choices (within the bounds of the possible).

     If true, then "being true to myself" means staying in touch with reality and adopting attitudes and choices and behaviors in harmony with my highest, noblest conceptions of my potential (again, within the bounds of reality).

     But this presupposes I know what exactly I mean by noble, worthy choices and actions.

     As I've discussed before, the desirability of joy and the undesirability of suffering are absolute facts that can be experienced directly. They are neither theoretical constructs nor matters of opinion or taste. I explained in a previous post that a life spent pursuing happiness and preventing suffering for oneself and others is demonstrably a worthy life.

     Thus "noble" and "worthy" are equivalent to "healthy" in its broadest sense: psychological health, financial health, the health of society, and the health of the planet. Choosing and acting in healthy ways is living a noble life.

     Finally, If I am right that the most important feature of being human is having a greater range of awareness and a freer will than other life, then you cannot be a human "being" without stagnating.

     Free will choices and fully conscious awareness change and evolve and respond second by second. So a human being is a stillborn person. To actualize our highest, noblest potential, we must embrace our true natures: We are human becomings. Let's become healthy.

God and Ego

I have said that as soon as we accept that we cannot control nor understand everything, we have made a little space in our hearts for a Higher Power. This inexorably implies that our egos separate us from God.

Full Commitment To Realism Is Always Commitment To God

Many people reject religion. Some go so far as to deny that they have any faith. They dismiss spirituality as superstition.

Yet unless a woman rejects all of existence or pretends that she is in complete control of the universe, she already has a little bit of God in her heart whether she admits it or not. That's because acceptance that some things - like gravity - are out of our control is already acceptance of a Higher Power.

Ditto for mysteries; So long as you accept that you don't know everything, a bit of magic, a bit of Divinity, dwells within you.

The next steps are submission to, and love of, this intransigent, mysterious existence. That is, we move into closer contact with the reality we can never fully control or understand when we feel gratitude to the universe - when we embrace the new - when we grow - when we open our minds and souls - when we give our hearts to God.

You can only be realistic if you commit to and trust in the Beyond.

Real Suffering, Joy And An Objective Ethics

     Joy and suffering are immediate realities to all of us. The desirability of joy and undesirability of suffering can be experienced directly. There is nothing theoretical about them. The status of suffering as bad, and the status of joy as good, are not matters of opinion. Suffering and joy are right in our faces, slapping or caressing our cheeks.

     Pain and pleasure and their benefits and drawbacks are certain. Pain has its benefits in warning us of danger, or showing us the costs of growth. But those benefits are not desirable in themselves. Pain is a means to the end of a happy and prosperous life.

     You might argue that some people enjoy pain. To call these people authentically happy wallowing in their pain, however, seems rather absurd to me. I have been in their position. Abusing myself and others was not a truly fulfilling life.

     Good and bad experiences - all experiences - are objective realities. Most of what goes through our heads, on the other hand, is interpretation of these experiences. What we can be sure of is that something is happening, and that this happening appears a certain way to us. We cannot be sure of causes or a host of other things. But happiness and unhappiness are happening. And they really do appear a certain way to us.

     Objective reality starts with facts. The happenings and their appearance to us - our perceptions, like satisfaction and dissatisfaction - are such facts.

     So a life spent fostering true happiness and reducing suffering in ourselves and others is - objectively - a good life. There is nothing mystical or relative about it. Spreading authentic cheer, creating happiness in ourselves and others, preventing and treating suffering: this is demonstrably good.

     It is not a matter of taste. It need not be a commandment from God. We don't need a long line of reasoning, such as that I just gave, to justify battling evil harms and pursuing prosperity for all.

     I believe we all intuitively sense that this should be the ethical code that guides us. Let's stop listening to the "philosophers" and religious leaders who tell us otherwise. Philosophy literally means love of wisdom. Denial of what's right in front of our eyes is not wisdom.

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    A final thought: All of life is literally life and death. Since we don't control even our next heartbeat, there may be only seconds of this life left for us. So let's define our lives carefully.