Grayscale

Isn’t just as important to look for the darkness in someone or something as it is to look for the light? Can a thing have darkness. I think that allowing a thing to have darkness reduces the notion of darkness in people to something beyond their control. It’s possible that is true. That we have no choice but then this entire post won’t be worth writing. 

Let’s assume for the moment that each person can make a choice in their life about what they are going to do next. Let’s also assume there are competing urges (impulses, imperatives, desires, needs) inside the person’s mind. There’s speculation that you adaptive subconscious makes the decision before your consciousness is aware of the choice, but that doesn’t get to the why one of the competing urges wins out over the others. It don’t think it’s binary. When I starting writing this I wanted to say darkness v lightness. It’s not that. There’s a spectrum of choices. It’s not a linear scale though. Some choices are more likely than others. It would be interesting to chart all the choices a person makes when faced with similar issues. How often do they choose one thing or another.

So the scale in its most extreme might show a person making a choice that destroys the world or a choice that saves the world. Highly unlikely and more the domain of fantasy / action stories. Religions of course have these kinds of moments as foundational components of their belief system. He died for us, etc..

So again lets assume the person is a human being only capable of choices that have actual consequences in the world.  Many choices can seem trivial at the moment. We have begun to realize that even small choices can have big impacts. There are a range of therapy’s that attempt to trace back events to the source point of where things went wrong. We tend to see those moments as the person being victimized and as a result of them being a victim of someone else’s choice they proceed to make certain choices until they victimize someone else. It’s an interesting notion that if taken to the logical conclusion will find the first malicious act responsible for all of humanities woes. Again religion addresses this idea in many different ways. People find solace in those explanations as a way of understanding their current situation. 

Modern therapy attempts to recreate this notion that there is a source using non supernatural means. Confining the explanation to the lived experience of the person. This is interesting in that it almost immediately dismisses the possibility that something beyond the physical world exists. To be sure there is also an entire class of healers who attempt to bridge the gap and include the ephemeral explanations. 

I guess what I am getting at is that all these attempts to explain why we make choices depend on the notion there is a history that can be traced back. That the history is somehow fixed and measurable. That those physical and spiritual descriptions are true. That the accumulation of all these past moments has influence over the next moment. That there is a continuous timeline that always brings us to this moment yet somehow we still have a choice. That the past is fixed and our only issue is to discover the truth about it. What if it’s not fixed. What if the past continues to change?