Decisions Matter, Just Not Very Much

I welcome questions that I can answer here on this blog. You can use the contact form on here to reach me. Here is a question someone asked:

Q: Something rose up within me last night and that is when I wrote my message about going to law school. But that part of me is subdued this morning and I don’t feel it. It comes and goes. When it arises, I want to do more with my life. When it abates, I am content being a monk, and the effort required for the extra action seems too much. Without mastery over all these states and their meaning and significance, and not knowing whether they are good or bad, right or wrong, I am at a loss as to how to respond to them. 

A:  I would point you to part 2 of my free ebook, Living from the Heart. It points to a way of discriminating how true a thought, feeling, desire or intuition is by sensing how expanded or contracted you feel. It helps to remember that all there is, is truth. So all thoughts, feelings, and desires have some truth, but most are not very true, kind of like a lottery ticket: it is true that if you buy a lottery ticket, you can win. It just is not very true.

In sensing how true something is for you, it also helps to ask how true it is over time....especially when it comes to major decisions. So for example, in making your decision whether to go to law school, it is important to track how true that idea feels over time. Because life is full of duality, we sometimes focus on just part of the truth. But with time, we naturally also become aware of other aspects of the truth of a situation or potential decision.

In general, thoughts, feelings and desires are not very big containers of truth. That does not make them wrong or bad. They are still part of the truth, just a fairly small part of the truth. It can help to ask questions that point to bigger truths. Instead of asking what do I think or what do I feel, you can ask "What is really true about this situation?" and "What else is true that I am not thinking about?" When it comes to desires, you can ask "What do I really, really want?" or "If I got my desire fulfilled, what would that allow?"

Often what we really want is to experience our essence as joy, peace or love. But those qualities are not dependent on getting our more superficial desires met. Instead you can just focus on the joy, peace and love that are always already present. When we are in touch with these much bigger truths of our essence, then our decisions still matter: They just don't matter very much!

I hope this is helpful.