Nondual strategic decision-making BEYOND time🙇♂️💭
When "we have time," "time has us" in its net. But in a moment when we simply "have no time," "time does not have us" either: suddenly, we are in the Now. I and Self act as one—without the effort of choosing, we flow in harmony with the universe.
”All of us have felt the burden of having to make choices. Our experience of inner actions like choosing has to be taken as seriously as that of outer actions before we can investigate our world without prejudice. We need to keep this in mind when science raises the question of whether we can objectively prove freedom of choice.
Fortunately, as I have said before, we need not wait until such speculative issues are solved. The goal of our inquiry is orientation, and for our orientation, it is sufficient to be aware of well-known ground from which we can push forward into the unknown. Our subjective experience of choosing provides well-known ground indeed. Choice by definition implies freedom. With this in mind, we can explore ways of dealing constructively with our sense of free choice—quite unaffected by the debate to what extent we are free or determined. As Jean-Paul Sartre reminds us,
"We are always ready to take refuge in a belief in determinism when freedom weighs upon us or when we need an excuse."!*
Avoiding excuses, we shall squarely face our subjective sense of freedom and examine concrete situations in which we experience being free—always within limits, but that goes without saying. Let's begin with a special kind of situation in which we are credited by others as acting freely, although we ourselves aren't conscious of making any decision. These are dramatic events in which we don't have time to decide, and yet we spontaneously do exactly what the situation calls for—often with unusual strength and speed. A firefighter jumps into the flames and rescues a person; a mother pulls her child off the rails seconds before a train speeds past. Interviewed afterward, both reject all praise for acting bravely; they did it without any awareness of choice, they insist.
They didn't have "time to think."TIME and THINKING are two keys for understanding what happened. Thinking needs time. In moments of extreme emergency, the conscious process of thinking would require too much time, and we don't have time.
When "we have time," "time has us" in its net. But in a moment when we simply "have no time," "time does not have us" either: suddenly, we are in the Now.
As soon as I am in the Now, I see the appropriate course of action, which organically flows out of the circumstances, and I choose it—have already chosen it, before becoming fully aware of it, in the case of the firefighter and the mother. What happened spontaneously to them in those crucial moments happens more deliberately to anyone of us whenever we are truly in the Now:
I and Self act as one—without the effort of choosing, we flow in harmony with the universe.
"How do you mean that?" someone will surely ask. "If the decision flows as soon as I am in the Now, do I have to decide at all?" Of course you have to decide. You are the one who makes the choice. How else could it be your choice? And if it is a weighty decision, it may demand a good deal of consideration—consulting others who are affected by your decision, as well as your own deepest desire. And yet the decision is not the result of all those efforts. They are only preparations for the one decisive effort:
"Allowing Life to flow through you‼️“
*Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. H. E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 78-79.
Real strategic insight FLOWS into our connected SELF BEYOND our (5) 8 rudimentary senses: 1) touch, 2) taste, 3) smell, 4) sight, 5) hearing, 6) balance, 7) thought, 8) memory - we have known this trivial insight for 1200 years, as you can hear in this Audible link here
I always tell my coaches that I can't remember a single wrong STRATEGIC DECISION in my life that I would have regretted afterwards. Why do you think that is? 👉
Do you have a very challenging question on this topic❓
I love challenging questions and answer ALL your questions every month VISUALLY via Zoom on the 17th here.
Get to know my SELF for free
Related links
- My visual strategic talent BEYOND the duality of your strategic thinking
- Strategic transcendental sustainability BEYOND duality and time
- Creative insights BEYOND simply turning around
- Inter-independence BEYOND independence
- BEYOND “Seeing Around Corners“ - from thinking blocks to organisational flow to strategic insight
You would like to SUPPORT my free VISUAL COACHING inspirations once: 👉 Donation link
- DONATIONS support in particular my career & life strategy coaching for young people with naturally very limited financial resources - in recent years I have coached over 350 such life strategies 👉 Link
- Why donate? My visual gift is a completely automatic process beyond dual thinking. This means that the visual solution flows into me without my own conscious intervention - it is not "work" for me, I only act as a medium between the inexhaustible potential of the quantum field (see Harvard bestseller on this: 👉 Link) and the manifestation in the very limited section of reality that we can perceive with our rudimentary 5 human senses: 👉 Link