This one of my favorite Tolle quotes. Accept what happens AS IF. you had chosen it. Now the world is not hostile. Now the world is your friend. We only choose the good. Now the world is basically good. There is no place you can go that the GOOD is not.
But we have to change our understanding of the GOOD. This GOOD that you choose has no second, has no BAD. The basic goodness is not a choice…Wait. I thought you said to choose the present moment.
Well, yes…you choose the present moment, you choose what’s happening when it has no second. The PM or present moment cannot be divided into good and bad. The PM is not Two. The PM is ONE. BAM! When you see that through and through. You have transcended the duality of choice and dropped into the non-dual choice. You have no choice but to choose the present moment.
That’s it! You have no choice but to be here, to choose to be HERE. It is quite simple really. The utterly simple cannot be divided. Your choosing Ego just throws its hands up and surrenders to the obvious.
Right now, can you sense how your thinking mind is struggling with this Zen Koan. You are trying to find a choice. You are tying to find something logical to choose. You have not reached the simple truth yet.
This post is still working in my mind, like a squirrel trying to open a black walnut. There is a great liberation when we realize that we have No Choice. It’s ironic because we base our idea of freedom on choice. More choices, more freedom we say. The movie Hurt Locker was about the question of choice: is it good or bad. More or less, which is best. But that is the wrong question.
It is not more or less choice but No Choice that Tolle is really talking about. He says accept “as if you had chosen it.” One can play at choosing the present moment, but you really can’t choose it, because there is no choice but to be present. Tolle is pushing us beyond duality, the duality of choice itself. When there is no either this or that, there is no choice. Choice means Two. When all is the same, there is no choice. And we don’t like that. It’s boring. No choices. No differentiation. No choice is like total prison in our minds. In order to be ME, I need at least one choice.
We hang our very sense of Self on having choices. Our deep seated fear of communism is that there are no choices, we believe. Our culture is the culture of choices. Choices breed like rabbits here. So Tolle wants us to ask. questions about choice itself. Who is the Chooser?
Does the Chooser actually exist, or does the Chooser rise with the object being chosen. Do they rise together like two ends of a horseshoe coming out of the water. When the two ends first appear, we think they are separate and opposite, yet with some more rising out of the water of consciousness, we see that they are One that is Two. That ONE is no choice. If you are the horseshoe, you can’t choose between one and and the other because you are both ends.
The Chooser and the Chosen are one.