You “think” you make decisions, don’t you?

The first of my pieces into a lifelong journey of correct decision making

It is a salutary lesson that at the age of seventy something I discover that I have made very few correct decisions in my life (although getting on that train and meeting Bambaji was one of my best!) and you may not want to believe it but most of you out there are in the same leaky boat. Along with my “opinions” on the investment world, coloured mainly in the past by my conditioning, this series will step into a new reality that can change not just my outlook on the world but I hope yours too.

This can be a very hard concept to grasp, especially by people who are so rooted in the past and their sense of separation. I am somebody separate from everybody else, and I have my opinions and my experiences, and I am right and you're wrong. It's everything, everything, all the problems in the world that result from that separation from the whole we are part of one enormous organism that beats to the rhythm of the universe. We are not individuals. I am right, you're wrong. I believe this you believe that, we all input, we are all part of the whole.

So we can't deny our past experiences they just are. They are there. But the point is that they don't need to affect us. Now, in this present moment we can do anything. From this point on what happened in the past is a story. It happened. We move on. We are in the now, we are in the present moment. And this is where creation of a next move actually happens. And it happens, it's not a choice. We don't actually have a choice. but we may think we do. And action happens. And then the mind says, Oh, I chose to do that. But the action has already happened. The mind thinks it's in control. It wants to be in control. The ego knows what's best. It knows what you need to do next, and it makes decisions. But in reality, it doesn't

Conditioning is ever present if let it be, from birth. We are conditioned by our parents and by our siblings. Then by our contemporaries, our colleagues, by the media, by government, there is conditioning everywhere you look and conditioning ultimately turns into propaganda. But dealing with the past, everything that we attached to the past are really only thoughts. We have thoughts about what happened in the past. But in the present moment, in the now, if you take a second to just be here now in the moment, there is no past there is just this; this is it. And it has always been so in every moment in the past. This is it. A moment ago, it was this is it. And now this is it. That's all there is.

We will be looking separately at the past, the future and the present moment. In reality, there is only the present moment, being in the now. But we have to deal with our past experiences, our conditioning, and our beliefs and opinions about the future. We hold these beliefs and opinions in the mind which thinks it can make choices, but we actually make correct decisions by feeling what is right for us; there is no mental construct in decision making; no logic. Logic can always formulate both sides of an argument, which just confuses the mind further.

Beliefs and opinions are almost always part of conditioning that we've received throughout our lives, as well as before we were born. There is evidence that conditioning occurs in embryo form. As the body is developing in the mother's womb, a mother's traumatic experiences can be transferred to the embryo and thus to ourselves and this is something that we may be vaguely aware of. It's generally unconscious, but there can be blocks there and we can find ourselves in a position where we feel unable to do anything. Whereas in fact, in reality, we can do absolutely anything if we take the first step and that’s what we will be doing in the next episode.