Things on different levels can all be true. For example, you exist as atoms and electrons and so on. At the same time you also exist as, say, a web of electro-chemical reactions. And you also exist as a personality, a social being. All of these things are true at the same time.
In a similar way, it can be said that we experience making choices and yet we're completely determined at the same time.
On the ultimate level, it's all happening by itself and none of it is personal. It's all on automatic, it's all being done. Energy is just playing itself out in myriads of ways, some of which we call "you" and "me."
The thing is, all of this can be completely determined in the sense that it can't play out any other way than it does—and yet, because of the immense complexity of this playing-out process, it can be essentially unpredictable at the same time. Unpredictable and yet completely determined.
At another level entirely, we're weighing alternatives and making decisions. We have the subjective experience of making choices among alternatives. And this is also true at its own level.
How can this be?
Imagine that someone had a computer so powerful that it could hold the entire electrochemical state of your brain, including all of the connections and strengths among its nodes. And all of the external phenomena that could possibly affect your brain in the next instant too. Obviously, the computer would have to be almost incalculably large.
But if such a computer existed (it does; we call it "the universe"), the state of the brain at the next instant could be reliably predicted, and the next and the next. In other words, your next "decision" could be predicted, even though on a conscious level you might be going through an agonizing process of "making the decision".
What's the practical value of this discussion? Just this:
That at the deepest level we can feel the let-go and the surrender of it all "being done," of the One moving through us and doing everything—and at the same time, at another level, be "choosing" our path through life and making "choices" that support our well-being. Both are "true" on their own level.
—jim sloman, fall 2000 for Aug 6
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