How do you determine someone’s choice?

The obvious answer is to ask them. However, this implies that they know what they are being asked. Ask an atheist whether he wants God, and he’ll say “hell no”. On the other hand, ask that same person what they want and they’ll start to talk about happiness, love, fulfilment, knowledge and so on, basically lesser manifestations of God. Basically, such a person suffers from avidya, which is a very useful term from Vedanta, which poorly translates as “ignorance”, or “lack of knowledge”. In fact, a better translation would be “anti-knowledge”, things you think you know and you hold on to them as if they are important and you would be diminished by their absence, and they are merely nonsense that would have to be removed in order to make place for real knowledge. Basically, there’s too much shit occupying space in your head for reality to compete. So, how do you know what a person suffering from avidya actually wants and chooses?

Ask a woman what kind of a man she wants and she will start about all kinds of nonsense – he needs to be tall, good looking, fit, wealthy and powerful and so on. Then you make an online dating service that allows women to choose men that fit that profile, and they will all compete for the same 1% of arrogant whoremongers who will fuck and dump them, after which those women will complain that there are no good men left and all men are trash. No; you just created a superficial criterion that selects for good looking trash.

The problem those women have is that they are checking their instincts and they seemingly tell them what will trigger the feeling of safety and fulfilment. The problem is, they don’t know themselves and their true nature enough to predict. For instance, they can’t predict what will happen when they sit at a table across a person who is of average height, casually dressed, doesn’t have much money, but her soul clicks to him because he’s her actual partner. What she thought would be triggered by a tall, muscular guy driving a Lamborghini is literally nothing compared to what would happen when she meets her matching Lego brick. Also, when she would imagine a romantic evening with her partner, she would imagine nonsense such as a dinner in a fancy restaurant, or a bubble bath with candles and roses, and if she had all of that with a wrong person she would feel the wrongness, as if she were a caged animal. With the right person, she’d be doing absolutely anything, and she would have the feeling she expected from a romantic bubble bath with candles and hundreds of roses. The thing is, people have stupid, superficial, materialistic ideas about how happiness is caused; they think it comes when all the physical stuff is set up just the right way, as if the matter will cause them to be happy. In fact, that’s the exact opposite of how things actually work, which is why people predictably fail in their search for happiness. No, happiness doesn’t happen when you meet a tall, muscular, rich guy who buys you flowers and takes you out for dinner. It’s the opposite – when you meet the right person, you are so happy you don’t even perceive the physical matter, it can be whatever and it doesn’t matter in the slighest.

Biljana recently asked me how I felt about the new lens that I bought, the FE 135mm f/1.8 GM. I told her that I start caring about lenses once I make great images with them, the ones that make me feel great about the equipment that allowed me to take them. Until then, a lens is merely glass, plastic and metal, a piece of gear that means nothing to me regardless of how expensive and optically perfect it might be. Then I take a few nice pictures and start feeling good about the lens, or I take great pictures with it and have a feeling that it set me free and allowed me to create exactly what I meant to, and I start really loving it. I used to have lenses that were absolutely inferior to my modern gear, but I loved them because they allowed me to take pictures that were exactly what I wanted to create. On the other hand, the modern GM lenses are absolute optical jewels, but I hardly even started using them. I did create some nice pictures with them, but nowhere near what I made with Minolta MC 50mm f/1.4, MD 35-70mm f/3.5, or Canon EF 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5.

Emotional and spiritual significance has nothing to do with nominal material metrics, it’s like comparing the person you love to a better looking person you don’t care for. The better looking person is just a nice looking piece of furniture to you, a bag of meat with no significance. Sure, if you ask someone what they want, those objective material metrics will for the most part be what they are talking about, or they will talk about intangibles without knowing what they are talking about or how realistic those expectations are.

So, how does God know what you actually want, when you yourself can’t tell? Well, first of all you need to have options to choose from. If you choose God and heaven because they are all you know, is it a real, informed choice? If you choose hell because it’s all you know, is it an informed choice? If you choose men or women based on how certain physical attributes trigger your sexual instincts, are you making an informed choice, or are you merely manifesting ignorance of what you actually need? You can look at pictures of women all day and pick parts from each that look best thinking you could merge them all into one person and get the ideal woman, or as a woman you can look at pictures of men and think how tall and muscular your ideal man should be, but in reality, what will actually make you click is a soul connection, and you can’t get that by putting all the superficial stuff into one person and magically expect to get something ideal.

Also, people who have no knowledge of God will talk about how God needs to be this or that – omnipotent, omniscient, the only one etc., and they never understand and expect the most important thing that makes everything else irrelevant – how God makes you feel. They expect to see something great or magnificent, but they don’t expect their sense of self and reality to change in his presence. They don’t expect that God makes you realize your true self when you’re in his presence, they don’t expect to not care at all whether he’s omniscient and omnipotent once they see him, because the what happens to them is something they never expected, something they never knew to expect, and something completely different from anything they would describe beforehand. You expect to be awed from the outside, and instead the cage for your soul shatters, and you are no longer small, limited, afraid, ignorant and alone. The presence of God isn’t about how you perceive God, it’s what presence of God does to your sense of self. It’s like living your life like a black and white photo and then not only growing colours, but photo shatters completely and you are the reality of the captured moment, not only visual but emotional, perceptual, everything.

How do you know whether you want that beforehand? You couldn’t know enough to say anything meaningful about it. However, once you have such an experience, how do you know whether you chose it? Let’s say you can’t just repeat it at will. But you can choose it by choosing to make it precious to you, by choosing to make other people feel like that, making them feel that the chains around their soul shattered, that they are no longer in a small dark room but in a wide, endless space within. You can choose to give light, love, happiness and knowledge to others. That’s how you choose God – by being to others what God’s presence is to you. You don’t become happy by wanting to be happy and collecting all the things you associate with happiness. You become happy by removing limitations from others the way God would remove limitations from you, were you in his holy presence. You truly choose things by doing them to others.