On the Aversion to Necessary Tradeoffs
Tradeoffs in the light of value fulfillment and probabilities
It seems the world has developed an allergy to tradeoffs. A desire for harmony without the selection process of constraint.
Consciousness is optimistic in nature. It naturally organizes itself. And so when I say optimistic I mean both positive in nature and desiring of intelligent optimization.
When you think about what organization and optimization are, they’re grouping processes. Where something is selected for a group and something is deselected. Something is part of the idea, something is not. Something wins, something loses. This inherent polarity, this yin and yang, is the substance out of which harmony manifests.
The aversion to tradeoffs is a mistaken path. It is a path where someone doesn’t want an idea left unselected, a path unexplored. It’s a consciousness stuck in infinite possibility unable to actualize any concrete trajectory.
The organization process is a necessary part of fulfillment. Experiencing THIS, but not THAT, is a big part of what gives fulfillment its relative meaning. And at every level of reality these choices are being made. This is where the magic of probability and probable selves comes in. Consciousness seeks to fulfill all potentials it senses within its scope of experience. Choosing THIS, but not THAT, doesn’t mean THAT isn’t explored in other aspects of reality. It means that it is organized as a different idea construction.
In kindergarten you were handed a pile of skittles you needed to sort by colors. You organizes reds with reds and yellows with yellows. Choosing red for a pile did not mean yellow was destroyed, only that it was in a separate organization. You were aware that yellow and red existed and wanted to explore both colors and flavors, but had to choose one unified organization to suit the purposes of the activity. The pile was already “all possibilities,” mixed colors that could be organized in numerous patterns. The same is true for this reality. In organizing in one way you aren’t eliminating other patterns of organization, you are just leaving them to other probabilities that are being explored by other aspects of consciousness.
You are at a fork in the road. A decision must be made. That decision always comes with associated tradeoffs. And these tradeoffs will organize your future in a particular way. Some might say “progress requires sacrifice,” but this assumes what is sacrificed isn’t explored elsewhere. To me, if an idea exists I am in some way connected to it, it is real “somewhere” and that means it’s being explored on some level of reality. Of course I don’t want to explore all ideas here, that would make for a lot of counter creation and decay, so there must be a principle that allows selective organization and free will.
Free will is not “everything happens.” Nor is it “I can make my own choices.” Free will is an attribute of consciousness and different people have cultivated different levels of free will. Free will is someone’s ability to change and mobilize their consciousness unpredictability. For free will to exist ALL will must be free. That means free will must exist in the context of unpredictable creativity and organization. As you change the unpredictable nature of consciousness facilitates that organization. If it were predictable like the Ego tends to want, it wouldn’t be free will, it would be pre-determined and programmed. And this is where people’s limit to free will is balanced. We start with templates and programs, and as our consciousness develops it ideally changes those templates and programs. As more of the programs are changed, fewer automatic responses are available and more choices must be made. Programs help someone deal with a tremendous amount of unpredictable data, making some of it predictable so that there are constraints for creativity within the scope that consciousness can process and handle. This is an automatic organization system that organizes events and characteristics in alignment with the program, rejecting whatever doesn’t fit into those particular constraints. In this way it gives training wheels to a consciousness that is learning to interact with reality, but it is a limited form of free will. When you are programmed with identity and belief and cannot contain within your mind other possibilities for belief your free will is limited. Free will involves and ability to change, and if you cannot change a belief you do not have free will in that particular category.
This is why certain NPCs in the world, with rigid identities and beliefs, also seem to be idealists living in a different reality. They don’t want tradeoffs. They focus on morals alone as the means to create a desirable reality. But this moral imposition is just a short sighted set of programs and beliefs someone else gave them. They run these programs as if they are the only version and in so doing their reality and free will are greatly limited. The more fearful someone is made to be the less they are able to express free will and make selections for how they organize their awareness.
Because beliefs are so deeply tied to identity, and identity is what makes someone feel like they are real, it becomes difficult for some people to zoom out past their natural thinking and see it from more sides. It’s a protective tunnel vision reality. And the more fearful someone is made to be, the more concerned with safety, the more locked in their beliefs become. This naturally filters out all unpredictable possibility.
This is why we can start with adjusting our aversion to tradeoffs. To make a choice is to give consciousness a locus around which it can organize. If we come from a mindset that all things will be explored we can broaden our minds to include more than just “make the right choice or wrong choice.” Because when we are too focused on making “right” choices we are simultaneously forgetting to assess the outcomes of similar choices. In many cases the choice that feels right is an emotional one that feels familiar. And sometimes the best choice isn’t the most comfortable. And some choices need not be ruminated on at all because they will be made automatically through the mechanisms consciousness uses to organize itself.
It may seem counter intuitive that constraints actually give more room for free will, but this is readily apparent to anyone with eyes to see. A deadline is a type of constraint that recruits new forms of creativity. A choice is a type of constraint that organizes events in line with that choice and not another. And when a deadline is given “all possibilities” get limited to “possibilities within this particular context” and that allows you to work with unpredictability in a fashion suited for the activity. When a deadline fast approaches a creative vitality emerges as your consciousness reaches outward with desire and intent to find solutions to problems. The constraint of the deadline gave a particular line or trajectory for creativity to follow while at the same time what events arose, the ideas that assembled, when you wrote them down, and the way it all came together was inherently unpredictable. You merely saw the deadline and each idea-event emerged as part of the unfolding as you made the calls and did the tasks, taking for granted that those words and ideas were present just when you needed them.
Certain concepts can seem contradictory. How free will is amplified by constraint. That the individual is unique and that there are no limits to the self. When you are a child your identity doesn’t include old age in the usual sense. When you are an old person you do not identify yourself as a child. Your sense of identity then changes physically through the years. In a way it seems that you “add on” to yourself and accumulate experience, becoming “more than you were before.” You move in and out of probable selfhoods, while at the same time and with the greatest of ease you maintain an identity of yourself. This creates a mosaic of consciousness, like lights radiating through themselves and through a million spectrums.
Your memory appears to be your own. Yet you have a tapestry of other existences. You remember other faces, though the conscious mind may not recognize those images and often clothes them in fantasy. You are yourself and your self is secure in its own identity, unique in its characteristics, meeting life and psychological seasons in a way that has never happened before and will never happen again-- and yet still you are a unique version of your greater self. You share with this greater self certain overall patterns that themselves are original. Like sharing the same planet with the same land and lakes, you also share patterns of development, images, memories, and desires. These patterns are reflected in your physical life and elements of your life are shared with your greater self in the same fashion.
In this way your desires are expressed through the experience of your tradeoffs. And those choices lead you to the fulfillment of those purposes and intents of a psychological nature. Beyond the programmed physical desires you think you have, there are patterns of development and psychological exploration that are deeply enmeshed in all of your experiences and the significances that arise in your life. These psychological weather patterns move through you just as clouds move across the sky, giving rich and nuanced contrast to how you experience any particular event or choice.
There is an interesting contradiction here. Where this message is meant to propel you to trust your choices and let go of tradeoffs, it also encourages you to appreciate the season you are in even if you are holding on and attempting to avoid tradeoffs. Being in a place where you have inexperience and delusion causes you to attempt to “have it all.” And in this attempt you try to control circumstances out of your control, face frustrations, learn about your programs and beliefs, and experience a type of psychological spiritual fulfillment as you conduct this exploration.
You can have everything you want, just not at the same time. The interesting thing I teach about Havingness is that Having doesn’t feel like anything. So many new age teachers will tell you to “feel the good feeling you think you’ll have when you have the thing you are manifesting.” But having doesn’t feel better, except maybe for a moment. It feels normal. It’s the “distance to having” that has an intensity to it. So people get stuck in the “wanting but not having” because they rely on the emotion for one reason or another and haven’t yet figured out why they rely on it. Learning about this internal reliance is in itself fulfilling. At the same time, trying to have everything you want and either succeeding or failing are both pathways that are psychologically dense and varied.
I’ll drill into this a bit deeper. One person is stuck “trying to have everything they want” so they struggle to make decisions, reject what they want, and keep saying yes to things they don’t. Their frustration is meant to lead them to awareness about their beliefs. The next person gets everything they want and feels disconnected, lonely. They have everything and because having doesn’t feel like anything their desire reaches for something else they don’t have as it always does. This too has qualities to it that are varied and beautiful. A third person wants to have everything and fails to get it for long enough that they realize the versions of what they wanted that they already have. They learned to let go of having it all because they see that they already experienced versions of it and enjoy the change. Not one of these versions of a person are the right one. You might appreciate the orchestra of emotion of the person who loops in the same recurring problems. You might love the journey of someone who sees a bigger picture and changes their beliefs. You might understand the confusion of someone who got it all and still feels lonely. And at the same time you see how all of these themes weave into and out of each other in various ways. This is the probability explored in fulfillment.
While you think fulfillment is getting what you want or being successful, checking all of the boxes. What I see it as is the expansive exploration of personhood in all of its varieties of experience. Each version adding to the greater self. And all possibilities explored. You might have chosen the “have it all” path while at the same time can feel into and sense what the other paths are as well. And you cannot touch what doesn’t exist in some fashion.
Tradeoffs arise naturally out of life. They are significances and idea constructions that are meant to help you grow and develop. You sacrifice one thing, giving yourself constraints, and out of that new creativity and beauty is born. Most people focus only on what they are losing when they make a choice, but the power is in being open to the visionary creativity that arises naturally. You already know what you are losing, but you cannot know what you will gain. And it’s that empty space, that creative void, that vitality and energy can fill in ways completely unique and completely unpredictable. Because it’s optimistic and unpredictable, what shows up in that void is always perfect for you. Maybe it doesn’t get you where you want instantly, but it does shape you into becoming a person who has what you want. And sometimes change and growth are involved in getting you there. Sometimes letting go, self reflection, and personal challenge are involved in beneficial ways that can only be understood after you’ve waded through the muck.
It’s safe to make choices. And the more you are able to zoom out into this larger context in which your tradeoffs exist the more you will get excited about the nature of it all, seeing it in every action and interaction. You’ll trust how life unfolds and you’ll bring the divine back into your experience in ways no sunday service ever could.