Freedom of Choice

As you sit here with your eyes closed, you can choose to stay with the breath or you can choose to think about something else. But you ask yourself, “What’s accomplished?” When you stay with the breath, you develop powers of mindfulness, alertness, ardency, concentration. When you think about other things—well, you can think about things all day long. It’s time to do something really skillful.

We have these choices in the present moment. They’re not totally determined by things in the past, but there are some limitations on these choices. So you want to figure out what’s the most skillful thing you can do, given the choices you have. And try to be sensitive to how many choices you do have. This is one of the reasons why we listen to the Dhamma. It gives us some ideas of what we could be doing in the present that we might not have thought of before, but it also warns us that there are some limitations. If free will meant that you had no influences on your choices at all coming from the past, that would mean that your choices would be meaningless because your present choices wouldn’t influence the future.

The Buddha’s image is of a field of seeds. Your past karma is like seeds. If you totally had freedom of choice with no constraints at all from the past, there would be no seeds in the field. You have to figure out which seeds are worth nourishing, then stick with them. As for the ones that are not worth nourishing, you can let them go.

You can sit here and develop a strong sense of ease in the breath. There is that potential in the way you breathe, to be really comfortable. You can explore that in the body. Or you could focus on the pains in the body right now and complain about them. Or you can focus on them in a way that allows you to understand how you relate to your pain. There are lots of choices in the present moment.

So think about the different seeds that are sprouting right now and ask yourself, “Which ones do I want to encourage? Which ones do I want to water?” Those are the plants you’re going to be feeding on.

So try to give yourself some good food. When there are large restrictions on the range of choices you have, well, do your best. There are times when doing the skillful thing is easy. Other times when it’s going to be hard. Get used to doing it when it’s easy so that when the time comes when it’s hard, you’ll find it more and more part of the habit you’ve developed.

And you can look back on your actions with pride. There were times when it’s hard to be generous, but you were generous. Times when it was hard to hold the precepts, but you were able to hold to the precepts. Times when it was hard to meditate, but you meditated. There’s a sense of self-worth that comes with that, that you’re not just giving in to circumstances. You’re holding to your principles.

In that way, your range of choice here gets broader and broader. More and more choices get opened up. More and more good choices get opened up as you keep pursuing the best choice you can think of.