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NO ACCIDENTS
If you stand back far enough and watch the whole process you would see you are a totally determined being.
The very moment you will wake up is totally determined. How long you will sleep is totally determined. What you will hear of what I say is totally determined.
There are no accidents in this business at all. Accidents are just from where you’re looking. To the ego, it looks like it’s miracles and accidents. No miracles. No accidents.
It’s just your vantage point that you’re sort of….. stuck in.
Commentary
Out of context of broader teachings, this page is hard to read. No one wants to be told they don’t have a choice in life. The key to understanding is in the first sentence of the page: “If you stand back far enough and watch the whole process.”
It comes down to the concept of karma. In many talks, Ram Dass seems almost apologetic for sharing the truth that karma is mechanical, simple arithmetic that always equals out. When you distance yourself from the emotions surrounding your choices, you can start seeing the mechanics.
The truth I hear here is not necessarily “THERE IS NO CHOICE,” but more that the factors that dictate what you do are so complex that when you set your alarm for 7:00 AM but end up staring at the ceiling at 2:00 AM, you can’t understand how or why that happened. But think about how much goes into your sleep cycles
- What time did you go to bed?
- How much exercise did you get that day?
- How much water did you drink that day?
- How much did you sleep the night before?
- Did you eat something funny today?
- How long did you think about that upcoming work deadline before bed?
- What time did you get up as a kid?
The huge to the minute all play into this. You didn’t choose to wake up at 2:00 AM, but you did “choose” how to feel about your day, how much food to eat, etc etc…
The logical mind simply can’t hold all the variables that lead to a choice, and each choice is compounded by all your past choices. Eventually, auto drive kicks in (you didn’t “choose” how much food to eat that day, but you followed your past patterns and relationships with food), and all the factors from your past choices start pushing on the scale to make the next one for you.
All the complexity boils down to the fact that you can’t understand why you made the choices you made. You are making these choices based on the built-up propensity (karma) you live with every day.
When choices happen that weren’t even presented as a choice, we start calling them accidents (bad) or miracles (good). Said differently, we just can’t see how the way we live our lives every day forces us into the next. It’s hard to take responsibility for the bad things and hard to give ourselves credit for the good.
Choice comes into one’s life when they are able to shed their karma. Putting yourself into situations where your past actions/choices/relationships/situations do not yet control things gives you a better chance to break the cycles.
To keep the logic going and play the other side, one can then argue that you are only able to shed karma and put yourself into fresh situations through your natural propensities/ relationships/ situations/etc. (karma), which is all out of your control. So, the whole thing really is without choice.
I like to bring this back to the middle by saying you have the choice to follow the Tao or not. The Tao is going to do what it does, and you can’t choose, but you can choose to play nice with it, and you can choose not to carry the weight of your preference in the things you can’t control.