Spontaneous, or Carried Away?

Questioner: Why think so much about decisions? Shouldn’t our decisions be spontaneous? I like to decide in a free flow.

Acharya Prashant: So the questioner is stressing on the spontaneity of decisions. He says that he likes to decide in a flow. It's a good thing, your intention is good. But we have two flows within us: one is the flow of conditioning and the other is the flow of freedom. And both these flows in many ways can appear similar or identical.

When you are in a flow, a stream, then movement is effortless; you get carried away. So, you have to be very careful of which stream you have chosen to be in - the conditioned stream or the free stream.

You see, you are angry and you are saying a lot of things. In that moment, have you seen how the inner flow operates? In a sense, you are quite spontaneous at that moment, aren't you? But is there freedom in that spontaneity? Or is it just a kind of conditioned inner reflex? You are standing in a barren place, barren and dark, and somebody approaches from behind and taps on the shoulder. And you respond with a jerk, shocked. You didn’t have to think about this response, right? But is there freedom in this response or is this a totally conditioned response? The response was instantaneous, wasn’t it?

So, that brings us to thought and time. Operating without thought - deciding without thought - is a great objective to have, but you have to remember that there is a stream that flows above the zone of thought and there is a stream that flows below the zone of thought. Thought requires time. When you decide using time, when you decide thoughtfully, then you are in the middle zone. But your objective is to decide without using much thought - you don't want to bring time into the picture. Your objective, as you have mentioned in your question, is spontaneity. So, that can happen in one of two ways: One, you become a totally conditioned machine. You start belonging to the stream below the zone of thought and there, no time is needed.

It's like switching on an electric bulb or a fan. The moment you switch it on, the response from the machine is instantaneous. It's like bringing together two reactive chemicals. You bring them together and the reaction is instantaneous, but there is no virtue in this kind of spontaneity. Because it is a totally conditioned spontaneity. And to a great extent, as human beings, we are conditioned. We, however, have the freedom to choose whether we want to decide from the place of, from the stream of, conditioning, or whether we want to decide and operate from the zone and the stream of freedom.

So, you have to be very careful. Remember, spontaneity by itself is not a virtue. In fact, it is better to be thoughtful, it is better to take your time, and it is better to reflect, meditate, and contemplate. However, if your thought process is honest then there comes a point when there is no need to think any further. When your inner faculty is trained to an extent that the need to think keeps continuously diminishing and a point comes when the time required to think is so small that you could claim that you are spontaneous. However without training yourself fully, if you are spontaneous then it is a thing to be warned of.

Spontaneity has to be earned. Otherwise, all that you will have is the spontaneity of machines or animals. They don’t have to earn their spontaneity. A machine really did nothing to be spontaneous. It was designed that way. Similarly, animals are quite spontaneous in many ways. They don't really have to think or reflect or introspect. But there is little worth in that kind of spontaneity. Much better, therefore, is to be thoughtful.

The faculty of thought is a very important power of the human mind. It must be utilized fully. However, that does not mean that one must keep thinking endlessly because - as you have mentioned in your question - a decision has to be made. And if a decision has to be made, you don’t really have unending time.

Thought must have the objective to come to completion. Thought must not become an end in itself. That is very important. When you are thinking, then you must continuously be aware of whether thought is just a tool to come to an ultimate end or has thought become a self-serving machine.

Remember, the possibility of thought becoming a self-serving machine is significant. It happens with many people; most people rather. We just keep thinking endlessly in some kind of a wasteful loop. You think about something and that induces fear or anxiety in you. Because it induces fear in you, so you are compelled to think more and that leads to more fear, and then this kind of needless cycle continues. And you find that you are going over the same thoughts again and again. Going through the same kinds of imaginations, options, choices, and logic again and again. And all of that is leading to nothing. When you find that you are caged in that kind of a circuit, then you should know that thought has become self-serving.

Thought has to be a useful tool, a servant. Thought must be used to come to something beyond thought. Because thought is a movement. Thought implies a lack of settlement. Thought is like a journey. You have not yet come to the destination. Journeying, obviously, cannot be the objective. It cannot be the objective because, in your heart, you want to settle down and reach a destination and that destination is a decision. You cannot feel relaxed unless the several options have been closed and when thought proceeds, obviously, it has several options to choose from, and all the mental activities are going on continuously.

Thought feels empowered when there are options, but you feel discontented as long as there are options. For thought to continue there must be uncertainty. For you to be relaxed there must be certainty.

Therefore, in a position of uncertainty, in a situation of decision making, use thought to come to certainty, to closure. Obviously, it should not be a forced closure or an artificial closure. It has to be an honest closure. Thought has to be diligently applied so that natural closure is attained. But the intention has to be clear - you just don't want to keep thinking.

When you apply thought this way honestly, then the tendency of the mind to keep ruminating, to keep thinking diminishes over time. And slowly, you come to a stage where decision-making starts consuming progressively less and less time. You find that certain options don't appeal to you anymore. So, you don't have to think about them. Since you don't have to think about them, the time that would have been spent in thinking about them, considering them, and accepting or rejecting them, that time is saved. Because that time is saved, so the net time consumed by you in coming to the decision is small. Do you see what is happening? You are approaching spontaneity. And then a point can come when you are truly spontaneous.

So, it's great to feel in control, it's great to not have to go through the time consuming and laborious process of thought in decision-making. But that kind of luxury, I repeat, has to be earned. You have to earn your spontaneity. If you do not earn your spontaneity then, I again repeat, your spontaneity is of the machine or animal type; they too are spontaneous.

We want spontaneity that is associated with freedom. In complete freedom, there is complete spontaneity. But at the same time, in complete bondage also - because there is no freedom - things are instantaneous. A slave has no option to disobey. Therefore when the master calls or commands, he has to instantaneously obey. Looking from a distance, you could call this as spontaneity. But is this the kind of spontaneity we want? Not really. So have the spontaneity of a free person, not the spontaneity of a slave.

Questioner: What bondages are we talking of? If we are indeed enslaved, who is our master?

Acharya Prashant: Good question. It would clarify a lot of things. Our own innate physical primordial tendencies are our slave drivers. They command us. We talked about the machine and the animal. Let's take it forward from there. Who commands the animal? The animal is commanded by its own physical constitution. The animal really has no free will. The animal hardly has even any possibility of thought. The animal is not given that luxury or freedom. The animal does as the physical instincts of his self command him to do. If the physical instincts say run, it runs. If the instincts say eat, it eats; sleep, it sleeps. It does not really think over anything. So, that's the first kind of bondage - the physical bondage, the very inner bondage.

And then there is the machine. We said the animal and the machine. The animal we have seen is commanded by its physical instincts. And the machine - who commands it? The machine is commanded by the persons who designed it, who made it. The machine is commanded by a force outside of its physical self. In that sense, you could say that the machine is commanded by the society. The machine has no free center within itself. The machine, in fact, does not even have its commanding master, its slave driver within itself. Who or rather, where is the master of the machine situated? Somewhere else, outside of the machine. The master of the machine stands at a distance from the machine and holds the remote control. In the case of the animal, the master of the animal is situated within the body of the animal - though the animal is the slave, slave to its own body. The machine is worse; the master of the machine is situated at a distance from the machine. Nevertheless, both the animal and the machine are enslaved.

This is the condition of every human being; we have two masters: One is our own body, and the second is the society outside of us. Our body rules us from within and the society rules us from outside. We do not want either of these slaveries. Neither do we want to be ruled by our body nor do we want to be ruled by society; that is freedom.

So, when we talk of the conditioned flow and the free flow, the conditioned flow includes two currents: the physical-biological current and the social current. The free flow includes none of this. In the free flow, there is just freedom. There is true spontaneity. So, that's the aim of living. That's the aim of all genuine decision-making.

Decide in a way that your decision is uninfluenced by your physical tendencies and your social conditioning. Only then would your decision bring joy and liberation to you.

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