Compass of the Times 160

Ask What Should Be Your Decisive Choices

Keiko Takahashi

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What Are Your Choices for Today?

How rich the reality of our world would be if we were able to see every possibility that existed at any given moment?

Yet, we are not able to live while simultaneously observing every possibility. Just as we are not able to exist in two places at the same time, we normally choose one possibility out of many to act upon, which also means to discard many other possibilities.

Choice means to select one and discard others. Our daily lives are a succession of such Choice, and we create our lives as we connect and accumulate countless Choice.

Even if it is only a day, the number of Choice we make is far more than we can imagine. What kinds of Choice will be born in your day, today?

Half of 2017 has already gone by. To use the remaining months to actualize our blueprints, let us think this month about the choices we have made in our life, in which I mean to review the past six months as Midterm Wisdom.

Why Can We Not Have the Best Results?

Do I go right or left? Do I advance or retreat?”

We always make choices, not only for ordinary daily matters, but also those that become major turning points in our lives having enormous long-term impact.

We make choices about the school we attend, the job we take, whether we study abroad, marry, change jobs, bear children, start a business, retire, and so on. Each turning point is a crossroad in life.

What is important is that no matter what kind of choices we make, they are the best choices for us. Whether the choices is about a trivial matter or involves a critical moment in life, we are supposed to choose the best possible path.

However, what about the results? We may suppose that making and accumulating such best possible choices will bring the best results to our lives, but this is not necessarily the case. That is our reality.

What we continuously decide as our best choices will not necessarily produce the best reality for us.

The world we live in is saha¹ (the place of suffering) where we have various problems swirling around us. The force that leads every phenomenon to a negative transformation—pain, confusion, stagnation and destruction—is also at work in saha. Such a force of negative transformation can ruin our choices s at times.

However, this alone cannot explain why the “supposedly” best possible choices we make do not always lead to the best result. Then, why is it so?

I could only say that this is because our mind has lost the right measure for making judgments and the actions we take to realize the best results are not in accordance with the order of the universe.

There Is an Invisible “Decisive Choice” That Influences the Results of Our Choices

I believe that there is an invisible decisive choice that can act at moments when things do not go well. We human beings are making invisible, decisive choices without our being aware. The source of these invisible, yet decisive choices lie in our perspective of the world and the people in it that all of us form unconsciously during our lives from birth and through our upbringing.

“How do I regard what human beings are? How do I observe and accept the world? Who am I? For what reason do I live, and how do I live at present?”

We must have a perspective on humanity and the world around us in a way that encompasses these questions. Depending on what kind of perspectives we have on these, what we then see becomes completely different. This then influences what we cherish and what we respond to; and we create a totally different reality of life. The ways we perceive the world and humanity will bring about a tremendous difference, as if we live in a different world even though we live in the same space and time.

The Study of the Soul*2 will bring an unwavering central axis to such views. I am convinced that this single point alone clarifies the meaning of learning and practicing the Study of the Soul.

2020.07.01