Conscious Choices
For me, this small insight turned out to be huge. Had there been other situations in which I’d been hurt by blindly following a leader? Had I ever made a mistake by following instructions without checking how they felt to my internal feeling sense? Had I ever assumed that because I was following a boss’s orders (regardless of whether I agreed with them) I would somehow be protected from negative personal karma?
In that moment I realized that this event was a clue to an inner attitude that was asking to be changed. In other words, the lesson here wasn’t just to look before you enter an intersection. It was to remember that you are always responsible for your own choices and that you can’t rely solely on some supposed expert to ensure your safety. In the end, it is all about responsibility—or the recognition of our part in the contribution system.
The price of innocence is impotence. Our potency comes from the ability to take responsibility for making choices based on the highest and best understanding of the truth in any given moment. So, for yogis, being responsible for our inner state doesn’t just mean doing our best to feel good. It means being conscious of our part in the web of causation and making our choices with the intention that our contribution be as clear, as positive, and as skillful as we can make it. For us, there is only the trying, as T. S. Eliot famously wrote. The rest is not our business.
