I copy from a text of the digital book I have on my laptop:
C H A P T E R 2 The Unexamined Life
Everyone has free will, but there’s a catch: your software. Because your software is capable enough of keeping you alive, you don’t need to exercise free will to stay alive. From the standpoint of your animal nature, free will is an unnecessary luxury. Your software allows you to operate on autopilot, so to speak. It steers you with its thoughts, desires, and aversions. Unfortunately, although this is enough to maintain life, it is not enough to have the happy, fulfilling, peaceful, and creative life that human beings long for beyond merely surviving.
The extent to which you will have a happy and fulfilling life depends on your exercise of free will. However, there is a catch to that as well, as exercising free will can just as well bring suffering and unhappiness until you learn to choose wisely.
Given this, the course of human evolution generally goes like this: People adhere to their software, then they begin to exercise more free will and create a lot of suffering (as did their software), and then they learn to be happy and at peace. They go from being a human animal to being a mistaken human to being an enlightened human.
When your software is guiding your life, it feels like you have free will because you feel yourself making choices. But what are these choices based on? What is your basis for choosing? The basis is the programming, the conditioning. You may feel like you are choosing, but your software is actually choosing for you, for until your thoughts have been examined and questioned, your thoughts are what run your life.
You may think you are running your life, but if you haven’t examined your beliefs, fears, assumptions, conclusions, desires, and aversions, then they will determine your choices and therefore your experience of life. Your thoughts lead to predictable, almost preordained, choices, which result in somewhat predictable experiences and outcomes.
You may think your experience of life is how life actually is, but you create your experience of life by what you believe and what you do. You think a certain way or do something, and those around you respond accordingly. You may not be aware of how your beliefs or behavior shape other people’s responses to you, but they do. When you are nice, others are nice; when you are unkind, others are unkind; when you are angry, others are angry; when you think badly of yourself, others think badly of you. Others mirror you back to yourself, at least much of the time.
Even if others don’t comply with this shaping, how you react internally to whatever is happening determines your experience of life. For instance, if someone responds angrily to some kindness of yours, you can create the internal experience of forgiving them or the internal experience of feeling angry or victimized by them. You get to choose, although you might not be aware that you have a choice or feel you have one. In this way, you create your experience of life, if not your external experience by shaping it, then certainly your internal experience by how you choose to perceive whatever is happening.
When people do not question their thinking, which is the case when their software is running them, they are not free and their will is not free. Their free will is strangled by the programming, and they are caught in a groove of reacting without questioning those reactions. For example, if you don’t question your thoughts, then you’ll probably react angrily whenever someone is angry with you, without realizing you have a choice, even though being angry doesn’t feel good.
This reaction is understandable, since anger is part of the fight or flight programming of the human animal and is therefore an automatic response in the face of what seems to be a threat. If you get angry often enough, that response feels all the more natural and right, in its own way. The more often you respond angrily to situations, the easier it is to respond that way, because that programming has been reinforced. The groove has gotten deeper. Getting out of that groove will take awareness and a conscious choice to do so.
If certain behaviors are repeated often enough, they become automatic and even addictive. The feeling of being compelled to act a certain way and having no choice about it is how the unexamined life feels much of the time. People feel compelled to respond the way they usually respond, as if there is no other choice. Their thoughts and feelings tell them to respond a certain way, and they believe their thoughts and feelings are what is true for them, even though the results are unpleasant. Because they don’t examine their thinking, they don’t consider responding any other way.
Life is very difficult, indeed, for those who do not examine their thoughts. They experience so much suffering and no way out, since the only way out would be to become aware of their thoughts and question them. They don’t realize that they are the one creating their suffering because they trust something that does not deserve their trust— their thoughts. They trust something to guide their life that is not up to the task.
In a way, those who are so deeply in the grip of their conditioning are not responsible for what they do. They have given over control of their choices to the primitive aspect of themselves, the ego. They follow the dictates of their conditioned mind and the minds of others without questioning or examining their choices, without even seeing that they have a choice. They have fooled themselves into thinking that they are making choices, when in reality they are being controlled by the ego, by the thoughts that run through their mind. They are not exercising their free will.
“Forgive them for they know not what they do†applies to so many across the planet, who have not yet recognized their inherent right and responsibility to consciously choose their responses to life. And yet, life will hold them accountable by creating circumstances that will demonstrate to them the power they have to shape reality, which they have been endowed with through the gift of free will.
When the will has been subsumed or taken over by the software, then life is being run by what I will call the small will, or my will as opposed to Thy will. The funny thing is that what people think of as my will is, in most cases, not free will at all but the will of the software, of the human animal. It is the will of the ego.
Something needs to happen to break out of such automatic and often dysfunctional programmed responses. The will to choose differently needs to be awakened. But how does that come about? How is the will to go against one’s conditioning ignited or developed? The only reason one would choose differently than the software is if the results were unpleasant or undesirable—and if you were not willing to accept those results.
If living the programmed life worked and was satisfying, then everyone would keep living that way. But the programming doesn’t deliver the peace, happiness, and love that everyone longs for. Instead, it delivers suffering. That is the bad news, but it is also the good news. This suffering is the prod that wakes people up out of the trance of ego domination and awakens free will, although many endure suffering for a very long time before waking up.
How long suffering continues depends in part on how effectively the conditioning itself keeps one from seeing a way out of that suffering. For example, if you were taught that suffering is everyone’s lot in life or if you were conditioned to believe that you deserve to suffer, you might never seek a way out. Or if you are busy blaming others for your suffering, you aren’t likely to discover the real cause of it.
The ego copes with suffering by blaming others, giving up and playing the victim, accumulating material possessions, overindulging in sensual pleasures and escapist activities, or trying to become successful, wealthy, famous, beautiful, or anything else that the ego believes will deliver happiness. Of course none of these coping mechanisms works for very long because such strategies do not address the root cause of suffering.
Is there a way out of suffering? At some point, this question dawns and, if pursued, will eventually lead to freedom from suffering, because the answer is yes! You were never meant to suffer endlessly but to realize the truth about your suffering and then wake up out of it. That is how benevolent Life is. It wakes you up out of the nightmare produced by your software, and it does this most effectively through suffering.
When going along with the ego’s choices turns out badly, as it so often does, people begin to see through the illusion: Thoughts are not always true and wise. The I that is represented by thoughts is not so smart after all! It makes a lot of poor choices and causes a lot of suffering. It talks a good game, but the results cannot be counted on. This is extremely humbling to admit, which is why acknowledging this can take so long.
The thoughts that run through your mind were never intended to run the show, nor are they needed to run the show. The computer-mind is just a tool and quite an outdated one for the modern world. The computer-mind serves survival and nothing more.
Many see that the thoughts that run through their mind are not what they pretend to be, and so they try to fix their thoughts. They try to get better, smarter, and more positive thoughts. But a tool will always be just a tool. You can create a more positive ego, but the ego will still be an ego. The creativity, love, peace, and wisdom of your true nature— the vitality behind all life— does not flow from your ego. Creativity, love, peace, and wisdom cannot be found there, in the thoughts that run through your mind.
The only way out of the predicament of having thoughts that are not wise but pretend to be is to stop allowing such thoughts to run your life and to put something else in charge instead. The ego’s replacement is not hard to find. It is the very thing that realizes the need to replace the ego. It has been present all along, although dormant to some extent, waiting for you to notice that you have a choice and waiting for you to notice it. Until then, life remains largely unexamined.
The unexamined life may not seem unexamined, however, because it is highly examined by the mind itself— by the ego. The mind, in fact, obsesses about I, me, mine and particularly about my life. This obsession with ideas about oneself and one’s life is quite the opposite of examination; those ideas themselves need to be questioned. Thinking about me and examining my life only reinforces the conditioned self and does nothing to deconstruct or see through the conditioning. The examination needs to come from something beyond the conditioned mind, and many people do not even consider that there is such a thing.
The mind also carefully examines its choices, deliberating over the pros and cons before coming to a decision. Surely, such a rational decision-making process could pass as examination! However, in making decisions this way, the mind is simply sifting through the information in the computer and making choices based on conditioning, including what happened in the past and what it believes will happen in the future.
This information is somewhat useful, but too much is expected of the thinking mind. These thoughts are presumed to be what they are not: wise guides for how to live your life. If you examine the mind for answers to how to live your life, you will get answers, but they will be the conditioned mind’s answers. You are still operating in the mind’s world. You are still in the domain of the software.
These thoughts about yourself are assumed to represent who you are and what you believe and stand for. But do they? Do your thoughts represent who you are, or do they represent a character that you call yourself, that you define yourself as, that you see yourself as, and perhaps that others see you as? Is that who you are? Is that even who you want to be? And who is it that might want to be different?
Most people do not want to be who their thoughts describe themselves to be. Many people believe that one way to be more like what they want to be like is to have more positive thoughts. So they try to redesign their thoughts and self-images to reflect what they think they would like to be. But according to whom? According to whose values?
For the most part, people want to be and be seen as smarter, more attractive, richer, more successful, and more competent than someone else, because these things put them on the top of the heap, ahead of the game. But it is only the ego that wants to be and be seen in these ways. This is just the ego doing the self-improvement thing. The ego tries to improve itself for the same reason it does everything else: to survive better, to get what it wants, and to be better than others.
What is rarely appreciated is that even achieving these things can be a source of suffering, because you can never be smart enough, attractive enough, rich enough, successful enough, or competent enough to satisfy the ego. Whatever you accomplish, it is never enough for the ego. The game is rigged. You never arrive at these or any of the ego’s goals, at least not for long, even if these things would be enough to bring lasting peace and happiness, which they aren’t.
The real issue is, what is this self that is being improved upon? Isn’t it just an image of yourself? Aren’t you just trying to improve the character that you are playing— your image? Aren’t you more than this character? What are you, anyway? Who are you? And who do you want to be? And who is it that wants to be something? These are the questions that make for an examined life. These questions hold the keys to the prison of the unexamined life, the keys that open the door to the possibility of a life without suffering.
What do I mean by a life without suffering? The mind imagines this to be a life in which every one of its desires is met to its fullest. But that would not be a life without suffering and that is not even within the bounds of reality. What I mean is that it is possible to experience life and all its challenges, indeed hardships, with peace, acceptance, and grace, without closing your heart to life and without feeling victimized or angry by the vicissitudes of life.
How is this possible? It is only possible through a transformation of your relationship to your thoughts, a transformation of perspective: You begin to see out of the eyes of your true being rather than out of the eyes of the ego. This transformation is happening every day to many, many people. And, if it hasn’t happened to you already, it is happening to you right now.
C H A P T E R 3 The Small Will
I am calling the ego’s will small, not because it is not powerful, but because there exists a greater will within which the ego’s will operates, although the ego is not aware of this greater will, what I will call Thy will or divine will. Whether the ego is not aware of divine will or whether it just doesn’t trust it matters little, as the result is the same: The ego rejects the possibility that something wiser than it is in charge. The ego doesn’t see or doesn’t wish to see that it is not the center of the universe and that its will is not supreme. So you cannot count on the ego to point you to this great mystery at the core of life, only away from it.
The ego distracts you from noticing that a greater will exists by presenting you with its will as a replacement and confidently touting its benefits: “Follow me, and you’ll be happy,†it says. “Follow my beliefs, ideas, fantasies, desires, drives, and goals and you will attain happiness. Believe my fears, and that will keep you safe,†it promises. Its certainty is convincing. But what the ego claims is a lie.
(Etc.)
~Lake, Gina (2013-12-06). Choice and Will: New Teachings from Jesus, Kindle Edition.
The above should be more than enough to make you use your will by choosing to get the book or not. There are 8 chapters in the book, so this was only 1/8 of it plus a tiny piece.