The movie that is a metaphor for The End of Choice is Avatar. Jake Sully reached the No Man’s Land where he did not know which reality was real, the Sky People or the Navi. He could not choose. And when you cannot choose, there is no Chooser. The Chooser is our Ego, our sense of a separate self. Without choice, that sense of self does not exist and we have a panic attack. 

We all experience these existential dilemmas when choice is divided into opposite but equal value choices, so we cannot choose one over the other because they are ambiguous, they are both the same value, opposite but equal. The dilemma is that we must choose but cannot. When that happens we run to someone who can choose for us, some stable trusted authority. 

In Avatar Jake jumps on the Last Shadow, which is a metaphor for death, the death of choice and the Chooser. When the act is madness, there is no safety net, no insurance. That’s why it’s mad. 

The end of choice is the end of sanity because sanity is based on making a rational sane choice. Freedom, we believe depends on having choices. The more choices, the freer we believe we are going to be. 

Zen is the end of choice and the beginning of true freedom. I think we have all had the experience when we realize that we have no choice and that the situation is absurd, and we just fall on the floor laughing or dancing. When our best choices bring us to collapse, and we have no more choices, we dance. 

We rediscover our original mind that is prior to choice. This doesn’t mean we cannot choose this pair of shoes over that. It means that you are whole and free before the choice. You cannot be better than you are right now, and no choice will improve your inner peace and joy of being who you are. You don’t exist because you can choose. You exist, therefore, you can choose. 

We have to have a new logic, the Logic of Ambiguity. Life is ambiguous, which means life is One that is Two. The Logic of Identity which is our common sense logic, the logic of science and thinking is ON/OFF logic. The light is either on or off. The cereal is either good or bad. We choose the better. We calculate which is the better choice. This is our common sense. We don’t question it. 

But Zen is just a question: is this true? Can I create a better me through a better choice? I can choose better circumstances, but the ME that lives in these circumstances is still me. I cannot choose a better me, because I would have to divide ME into this or that me, and weigh which was the better. Can you do that? 

When we deconstruct our labyrinth of choices, we put the projector mind in reverse, we came back to the Original ONE before choice chopped me up into fragments. That original One is choiceless. It is just choiceless action, spontaneous action that is fearless. Fear is the product of choice, of the Chooser. Before choice I AM.