The Only Choice There Is Is The Only Choice That Matters

There is a philosophical debate going on about whether free will exists at all. Sam Harris, Robert Sapolsky and others make compelling arguments that much of what we experience as choice is simply the unfolding of genetics, conditioning, neurobiology and prior causes. Maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re not. Their conclusions also depend on assumptions about what consciousness is and where it comes from. 

In the name of applied wisdom, I’m much more interested in the part of this question that is actually useful in lived experience: when awareness is present, what choice becomes available to us?

Most of what we call the ego is not really choosing anything. It is a collection of conditioned thought patterns organized around survival, protection and maintaining a separate sense of self. Thoughts arise. Feelings arise. Impulses arise. Something happens and the organism reacts. When we are completely identified with that process, there is very little meaningful choice taking place.

Then something changes. We become aware.

We notice the thought instead of simply being lost inside it. We feel fear arise without automatically becoming the fear. We see an old pattern beginning to run. In that moment, a space opens between awareness and what is appearing within awareness.

And that is where the only choice that matters becomes available:

Where do I place my attention?

We may not choose the next thought, feeling, sensation or event. But when awareness is present, we can notice where attention has gone and consciously redirect it. That is the level of free will I care about.

Free will, as I’m using the term here, is the capacity to consciously orient attention. Agency is our ability to act from that orientation rather than merely react from conditioning. Sovereignty is the increasing freedom not to have our attention automatically hijacked by those conditioned patterns.

A Course in Miracles describes two fundamentally different thought systems—the thought system of Love and the thought system of fear and separation, or lack of Love. Each thought system is coherent unto itself with no overlap between the two.

By Love, I don’t mean romantic emotion or sentimentality—that which I call “Disney love”, the ego’s drama or that which keeps therapists in business. I mean the natural expression of unity, truth, openness, connection and alignment with the Whole.

So once awareness is present, the practical choice is always the same: do I turn my attention toward Love, or away from it? In a life where most choices are far more complex than either/or, this may be the most fundamental binary choice we make. With profound implications. This is the whole game.

Bob Dylan put the same binary choice in earthier terms: “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” He framed it as the Lord or the devil. I would frame it as Love or the turning away from Love. Either way, attention is never neutral. It is always serving, feeding, and strengthening one orientation or the other.

It sounds almost ridiculously simple. It is. Simple does not initially mean easy. But as we continue to consciously choose, it becomes increasingly easy.

Where attention goes, energy flows.

Energy creates. What we repeatedly attend to, we strengthen. The more we turn our attention toward Love, the more aligned we become with Love, and the more coherent the field becomes with that orientation. The more we default away from Love, the more the field organizes around fear, separation and fragmentation. Coherence itself is not the goal. The question is always, coherent with what? In this model, coherence with Love is coherence with the Whole.

One’s energy field aligned with Love

The field becomes increasingly coherent with Love—more integrated, stable, and less internally conflicted. This creates a deeper sense of safety and draws experiences that increasingly reflect that alignment.

Because the dominant human conditioning on this planet is fear-based, when we do not intentionally choose Love, we default to fear. The more we default to fear, the more coherent we become with fear, and the more automatic a fear-based orientation becomes.

One’s energy field turned away from Love

The field increasingly organizes around fear, separation, and fragmentation. As coherence with Love decreases, the system becomes more reactive, less stable, and more susceptible to experiences that reflect that fragmentation.

As I experience it, each of us is not fundamentally an ego or personality, but a locus of awareness forming the center pole around which the energy of localized consciousness organizes itself.

The energy itself has no agenda. In this model, it organizes according to where attention is placed. Attention to fear organizes the field around fear. Attention to Love organizes the field around Love.

This, to me, is the practical operation of free will. We are learning how to be in conscious relationship with the energy of consciousness itself through our choice of attention.

This field expresses through perception, nervous-system responses, behavior, relationships, choices and the way we meet the world. Life reflects that organization back to us. What we call physical reality is, in this sense, a feedback system—a mirror through which consciousness encounters the consequences of its own orientation. This may also be what karma is pointing to: not reward and punishment, but the lawful return of the patterns we repeatedly energize and enact.

Fear organizes one kind of world. Love organizes another. Each draws to itself experiences that reflect its own nature.

Fear, then, is not an equal and opposite force to Love. Darkness is not the opposite of Light in the sense of being another substance or entity. When you turn off a lamp, you do not turn on darkness. Darkness is simply what appears when Light is absent.

Likewise, fear arises as attention turns away from Love.

And why does attention turn away? Because the egoic mind does not want to see what the Light reveals: pain, shame, guilt, grief, vulnerability, the feelings we once believed we could not bear. The strategy then becomes: don’t look. Defend. Project. Blame. Distract. Control. Numb.

But turning away comes at a great cost. It creates fragmentation and the experience of separation. Separation generates fear. Fear strengthens the need to defend. And defense turns us farther away.

That is the vicious cycle.

The way out is not to fight the fear. Fighting fear still gives fear our attention. Nor is the answer to suppress it or deny it. Fear arises. We see it. We feel what needs to be felt. And then awareness asks: where do I place my attention now?

Do I continue feeding the fearful story? Or do I acknowledge what is here and turn my attention toward Love?

Yes, fear is here. Love is here. And we get to choose.

This is agency. And the more consistently we exercise it, the more it becomes sovereignty.

When we are unconscious, however, there really is no choice. Attention follows conditioning. Fear is particularly good at capturing attention. Just look at the world. Look at the news. Threat, grievance, conflict, scarcity and outrage all shout some version of the same thing: look here and nowhere else. This is known as “the attention economy.”

So unless awareness intervenes, attention falls back into its conditioned orientation. I would not call that an unconscious choice for fear. Where there is no awareness, there is no meaningful choice. It is an unconscious default orientation.

This is why the movement toward Love is initially intentional. Again and again and again. Not because Love needs our effort in order to exist, but because our attention has been trained elsewhere.

Over time, something changes. The more we choose Love, the more we choose Love. The more we default to fear, the more we default to fear. Each orientation strengthens itself.

But Love has one profound distinction. Awareness itself is the Field, and reflecting upon Itself is its natural state. Love reflecting upon Love. This is infinitely more powerful than all fear combined. 

Each of us, when aligned with the Whole, becomes like a unique harmonic of the fundamental vibration 🕉, expressing according to our most natural design. In Federico Faggin’s term, each of us is a part-whole: distinct, yet inseparable from the Whole.

Resistance to that movement creates friction, and that friction is experienced as suffering. Suffering, then, is not punishment. It is feedback. Through that feedback, consciousness learns to recognize misalignment, choose differently, and return attention toward Love.

This is how the capacity for conscious choice strengthens. And perhaps this is exactly why this level of choice is necessary in the first place: it is part of what we are here to learn. We are learning to choose Love. That is the entire point of our curriculum. 

As we do, Love gradually becomes less a choice we have to make and more the natural orientation of the system. Eventually it becomes the default. At some point, there is no longer any meaningful choice between Love and turning away from Love because the lesson has been learned. Choice is no longer necessary. We return to what we truly are.

In that sense, we have merged with Love—not by losing our individuality, but by no longer resisting our deepest nature. We have mastered what we came here to learn: to fully become Love.

School’s dismissed.

And this is why there really is no other choice necessary.

We do not need control over every thought, feeling or event. We need awareness enough to notice where attention has gone, and willingness enough to redirect it.

Toward Love, or away from it?

Everything downstream follows from there.

The only choice we have is the only choice that matters.

Where will I place my attention now?

🙏 🙌 🕉
Eric