The Hidden Structures & Challenges Behind Every Choice

Primary Challenges in Decision Making

Alright, so now let’s explore the primary challenges that we encounter in the decision-making process that prevent us from consistently moving along this axis we were speaking of, of possibility and probability, in a way that is conscious and participatory. Because if there’s one thing we could say, high quality decision-making is characterized by its conscious, active participation.

Although we are going to explore also the various qualities of solid decision-making in a little bit, for now, let’s look at what does not allow us to do that on a consistent basis.

Who Gets to Choose?

One of the ways I really like to frame this is: who gets to choose?

Now, as I said, most modern people are coming at the decision-making process completely asleep at the wheel, in the sense that they are not engaging consciously with the process. Because for one, they don’t have maps for it. So it’s not by any means a criticism. It’s that these maps don’t exist, and we’re not taught how to do this. And it’s just what it is.

A key piece to this is to understand that right now your system is structured a certain way. So wayfinding is about moving through a landscape. It’s a term that has to do with navigation and navigating through terrain.

So if you were to imagine a city right now, a city has a very established way through it. That’s a big part of what streets and roads and signs are all about. They are doing wayfinding for you so that you follow the established paths for the most part. Now, most people, really all of us to some degree or another, are existing in a structure like that when it comes to wayfinding. There are things already in place that frame how we will move through life for the most part.

Some of these are personal, in the sense of the responses that you as a being have had to what has occurred, or the reactions, reactions and responses.

But also, as I was saying, fated circumstances. Your ancestral line to some degree, and the body that you’ve inherited, and what that body wants to do, and how it’s orientated, because that plays a huge role in what we consider to be attractive or repellent through life.

A very genetically gifted body might feel a way stronger draw to athletic activity, in the professional athletes, for example, than someone who isn’t. Or someone who has a body very predisposed to psychic phenomenon might feel much more pulled into fields like spirituality, philosophy, therapy.

And those don’t always intersect, and often don’t. They kind of almost often lead in two different directions. Not exclusively. There are people who can have a more holistic orientation. But those contrasts do exist, just as a stark example of ancestral inheritance, just from the bodily level.

Then where you were born, what belief structures exist in your family, what stories they’re carrying that are transferred to you, that shapes this structure inside of you that has these paths already kind of laid out.

Then the culture that you were born in, and how it orientates. Western people might have a very different orientation. Even European people versus American people have these different orientations.

All of that starts to structure how you perceive. So that’s an important consideration: there’s already this structure inside of you.

But within that structure, we’re going to start to move away from that metaphor, which is just to help you understand wayfinding through architecture, and that you have an architecture inside of you already that’s been shaped by a variety of factors, to this idea of who gets to choose.

Meaning, what part of you makes a decision?

Because humans are not a singular entity, in the sense that there is one single source of decision making. There’s actually many. We are chimerical, in the sense that we have many different parts. Many different heads, so to speak, that can make decisions, and many different things that we are using as road signs to orientate in the process.

And most of these, for most people, are completely unchosen, for the most part.

And if you do have a very solidly chosen set of circumstances around this, then that’s awesome. You are in the minority.

Fragmentation and Trauma

One of the biggest roadblocks that people have in their decision making process, one of the things that most gets in the way, is fragmentation and trauma.

Fragmentation means that there are many different parts inside of you that are not communicating with each other, and that hijack you, so to speak, hijack your vehicle on the road in the process of making decisions.

This could easily be the part of you that wants one thing, to lose 30 pounds, having to continuously contend with the part of you that wants to eat chocolate cake.

That’s a super small and super simple example that can be extrapolated to the larger decision making process, in the sense that most people have parts inside of them that want different things. They are fragmented. They are not cohered as one unified whole together, moving forward as a unit.

And this is where things like parts work comes into play, and family systems, internal family systems, if you’ve ever heard of that system. And if not, it’s worth looking up. Internal family systems. It’s a way of orientating towards parts work.

Parts work in that way is something that allows the different aspects of you to start to get in line with one another.

Now, what most people don’t realize also is that each and every single part inside of you is a fractal representation of the whole. Meaning that each part has the full spectrum of what is allowed for a human to feel present, though very nuanced to them, to what they want. One way to think about this is the seven chakra model, each part has all seven chakras, and that’s for every single part inside of us.

That means that they’re all orientated a different way towards all of these things, and there’s a different configuration of open and closed chakras, of how much energy there is in either one, etc. So when you’re dealing with a part, you’re dealing with an entirety in and of itself that has its own kind of say in things, which is why they can be so difficult to deal with at times.

And in that sense, trauma is one of the layers of this.

I often think of fragmentation and trauma as very congruent with each other because trauma is fragmenting fundamentally.

Now, trauma as a whole is something that has been misrepresented a lot. There are a lot of things that get labeled as trauma, which I think is a mistake for the most part, from a purely functional perspective, in terms of labeling and identifying different phenomenon.

For the sake of this presentation, to keep this concise, when I’m talking about trauma today, we’re talking about loops stuck in the past, fundamentally. It’s stuff that’s occurring not in present time. It’s patterns that were catalyzed at one point in the past, and that have remained in a loop.

They are self-contained, in a sense, of being connected to that time. So in a sense, it fragments us at the level of time. Because instead of being able to be fully present here and now, there’s parts of us that are resonating with a different time. So we’re fragmented in that way.

Often parts will have a strong resonance with these loops, in terms of what they’re trying to get us to do. A lot of parts form or are shaped by these kind of time loops that we often call trauma. So there is that: fragmentation and trauma make a major role.

So in a sense: who gets to choose when you encounter a decision in life that is big and important? Or even small decisions on a day-to-day basis. Do I eat that chocolate cake? Or do I stay to my dietary discipline?

Who’s making that choice, fundamentally?

Is it a super traumatized part who sees the chocolate cake as some kind of strategy for something that makes sense to it, for whatever reason? If I lose a bunch of weight, then I’ll lose my partner, or something like that, because then I’ll look good, or something. Or vice versa. I don’t want a partner, because that’s dangerous. So let me keep 30 pounds extra on me. Whatever the case may be.

So who gets to make the choice? This is going to tie into what we’re going to explore as we continue. But keep that in mind: fragmentation and trauma are huge.

Incoherent Worldview and World Sense

Now, moving on to incoherent worldview and world sense. Cosmologically, most of us have cobbled together cosmologies. Because the world today is very cobbled together, in the sense that it’s very syncretic and eclectic in terms of perspective.

We all encounter narratives that have to do with Christianity and Catholicism and the Abrahamic traditions, without a doubt. You also encounter stuff that comes from scientific perspectives. If you watch TV, if you listen to songs, you encounter so many different philosophies and worldviews. People often grab on little metaphors. This metaphor, this, or this line here made sense to me. Or this perspective about life.

You encounter these little ideas that people share in movies and TV and all that stuff all the time, and your other than conscious mind will grab onto those and will start to build a worldview. We’re patching together our sense of a cosmology.

Then there’s scientism. There’s the left-leaning philosophies, the liberal philosophies, and then there’s conservative, right-leaning philosophies in America. There’s different political parties everywhere that people exist. Then, for people like us who are practitioners, if you’re watching this, you likely are, you’re also exploring different philosophies from different traditions. Taoism. Tantra. Psychology in modern Western depth archetypal explorations of the psyche.

And you might be encountering magical traditions of different kinds. You’re encountering so many different things that are all patched together often. And a lot of these things actually don’t cohere with each other. They’re not congruent with each other. They’re not all creating a unified whole. They’re more like a Frankenstein style system. That’s nearly unavoidable to some degree in today’s world.

But what is valuable is to recognize that that’s happening, and to realize that the worldview, which is very visual in the sense of how we see the world, carries with it a corresponding world sense. It’s how that view is represented somatically inside of our being and what that feels like to us.

And the incoherence that exists at that level of philosophy of life: there’s perhaps parts of you, parts of your worldview, that feel and perceive that certain things are available to you, like thriving, flourishing, blossoming.

And then there’s other parts that actually have a very cynical aspect to them, in the sense that you’ve gathered pieces from some philosophy that the world is hard, the world is difficult, and you can’t have those things. So then those philosophies, those worldviews, those world senses, they start to clash with each other.

And this is a big part of what’s happening: which path are you taking at any given moment that will compound into a particular outcome?

Reactionary North Stars

Then something called reactionary North Stars. North Star is something that I talk about a lot, and I’m also going to do a presentation on North Stars soon and how to establish them. Specifically, what a very congruent set of North Stars is for modern humans, from my perspective.

But for now, reactionary North Stars are the things that...

Actually, let me step back.

A North Star is something that we choose to establish direction. It is something that allows us to create a compass of orientation. And if we’re heading North, for the sake of this example, or this metaphor, it’s useful to think, hey, I’m heading North, then it helps us orientate towards something, to head towards something.

We never arrive at a North Star, though, because a North Star is in space. It just helps us move in a particular direction and orientate. So the point being that a North Star is something that we are heading towards, and that helps us orientate.

Many people have reactionary North Stars that result from fragmentation and trauma, and possibly we could say incoherent worldviews and world senses. Really, they could emerge out of anything, out of all these different layers that we’re exploring now, for the most part. It’s not helpful to try to tease apart these exact things, just helpful to know that they exist.

Reactionary North Stars, meaning that they’re not chosen, they’re reactive.

Chocolate cake example. For whatever reason, a person can’t seem to get in line with not eating the chocolate cake. Some part inside has taken over that part of the decision-making process for you, and its North Star is reactionary, probably, in the sense that something happened at some point in the past that created some kind of an inner structure where what makes sense to do is to head towards having more weight on you than not.

This is not a criticism of anyone who does have more weight on them. It’s just an example of how decisions are made at a very practical level. Small, practical, day-to-day stuff that we all kind of deal with to some degree.

You can extrapolate this to anything that you continuously are having trouble with engaging with. Where one part of you wants something, another part doesn’t, and the part of you that doesn’t takes over. We’re full of these. These reactionary North Stars.

Even stuff that comes from culture and civilization, and ancestral patterns. These things that are unconsciously chosen as orientations.

The American dream. Consumerism. Whatever the case may be.

We’re told that we’re supposed to want these things, and then parts of us choose these stars based off these reactions. They’re not consciously chosen stars to focus on. They emerge out of these worldviews and world senses that are incoherent. So these are happening all the time. And exploring those is super helpful.

Limited Scope of Perception and Blind Spots

Now, let’s go to another one, which is limited scope of perception, that means you have blind spots.

Fundamentally, within the context of what we’re already talking about, fragmentation, trauma, incoherent worldview and world sense, reactionary North Stars, you also have a limited scope of perception. There’s stuff that you’re just not noticing and not seeing that exists. There are things that you just don’t know are occurring. It’s just that simple.

Or how your choices will interact with all the other choices that are occurring around you in this ocean of choices. They’re called blind spots too. There’s things that are occurring underneath the surface of your awareness. And that is an important consideration, especially when we get to one of the main wayfinding things that I suggest in terms of practice, which is divination.

Because divination means that you’re stepping outside the scope of your perception in order to encounter forces and beings that have a broader or different mode of perception than you do, and can see blind spots that you can’t.

A Populated Universe of Competing Agenda

Now, let’s get to the next piece, because that ties into what I just shared about divination and beings and forces that have a different perspective than you do.

That’s a populated universe of competing agenda.

Modern world would have us believe that there’s just a bunch of random forces that are materialistic and have no consciousness, and the spirits and entities don’t really exist outside the context of what’s physically visible, etc. The very materialistic modern sense of the world.

If you go back to a tribal and indigenous context, that’s actually not the way that the universe was apprehended. More so, we were dealing with a populated universe of different agendas. This is represented in the cosmology of all the pantheons of gods that you encounter in the old world, where different gods want different things, and they’re arguing with each other, fighting with each other, and getting into dramas and jealousies and all this stuff.

At one level, that’s simply showing you that the creative forces of the universe are not particularly singular, and that the universe is populated with agenda. Now, aside from gods, setting that aside, you’re talking about all kinds of entities, from ancestral forces, to parasitic beings, to dark beings, to light beings that have a more benevolent agenda on humanity, to forces of nature, to the earth itself, and its consciousness, and its choices. And your choices exist in the context of all that.

Not to mention, because more obvious, but sometimes not even remembered, there are 8 billion people on this planet making choices. So your choices are occurring in the context of all of those choices too. More important, I think, for this discussion is the non-embodied entities that are making choices on this planet, and that you are a part of one way or another, whether you like it or not.

The fact is, these choices are being made, and you exist within the effect of those choices, within the ripples of the ocean of the choices being made by many different kinds of entities and beings in this world.

So divination is a way to begin to factor in those types of choices with your choices.

Because you might want something, but you’re inside an ecology or a ripple effect so strong that you can’t get out of it, or that the way to surf these ripples is not going to be obvious to you unless you divine.

Divination is definitely a big one, and it’s also a reason why pretty much every single indigenous and tribal culture that has existed, and even traditional cultures, agrarian cultures, had divination systems.

Humans today don’t divine, and that’s fine, you don’t have to, but human civilization as a whole, human society as a whole, has often congregated around divination, and that’s been the case for a very, very, very long time. So, just putting that out there.

Fate, Destiny, Probability

With that said, there is also taking into account fate and destiny, and whether or not you are working within the scope of that. Again, this goes back to probability in terms of fate being what’s super high probability and low probability for you, and understanding that. And then which stream of possibility is available to you within the context of that?

Because again, infinite possibility doesn’t mean you can do anything. It means anything can be done. It’s a different kind of orientation. But within that, there’s still always probability occurring within it. So the stream of what’s possible, if you want to say there’s this vast field of possibility, the roads into it are shaped and limited to some degree of what is possible with a connection to what’s probable. So keep that in mind.

But if you’re fighting fate and destiny, that’s a tough thing to do. Believe me, I know, because I have done it a lot, and more than I wish, more than I would like to admit. I have really tested the boundaries of that, and I can tell you that they are a factor, and they are worth keeping in mind.

Timing

And then, finally, timing.

You might want to do something, or not want to do something, but timing is a role. Timing is a huge factor, because some things are just not ready to occur at certain times. When you take astrology into account, for example, the understanding that astrology is time-space animism means that different times and spaces, wherever we are right now in time and space, have different things that are more congruent in those times and spaces.

Because each time and space is ruled by a different kind of energetic force.

This shows up in all different forms of astrology around the world. People hear the year of the dragon. From a Chinese perspective, they have mapped that cyclical time-space, that chunk of time and space in the context of a cycle, as the dragon of a particular element.

That means that time and space all over us has a particular kind of energetic charge that it is congruent and resonant with, and certain actions can occur within those time-spaces more easily for some people, or not, and be much harder for some people.

So that is a factor: timing. Even your own timing is your own unfolding. Certain things can be accessible or blocked at certain times, and that’s just a factor to take into account.

Just because something isn’t available now doesn’t mean it won’t be available later.

These are the challenges that we are dealing with, and that’s already a pretty broad scope of things to take into account in the context of decision making.