Your life is nothing but the totality of the conscious choices that you continuously make.
Whether you want to or not, directly or indirectly, you are choosing everything. Someone else does not choose. It is you who chooses. Understand, continuously it is your choice, your decision. You may think somebody else decides. But it is only you who is deciding.
A small example can make you understand the basic truth.
If somebody criticizes you, you choose to get offended.
If somebody praises you, you choose to get flattered.
Because of your habit, you may choose it unconsciously. It is not someone else who chooses, it is you who choose. Because it has become your habit to think that someone else influences your decisions, you have forgotten that you are choosing.
Every time someone criticizes you, you choose to get upset. Every time someone praises you, you choose to get flattered. It is nobody else’s choice but your own. You can decide either way. When someone criticizes you, you can choose not to get offended and you can choose to remain calm and relaxed. It is just your choice to feel offended or not. All your continuous choices every minute put together decide your life. If you don’t decide and if you allow incidents to decide your life you go into a mode of ‘paralysis’. Our lives as of now are nothing but paralysis. It is only when you decide to live your life without any outside events, situations or decisions being forced on you, you actually decide to live.
As long as you don’t understand life is your choice, your living is just paralysis.
We make thousands of decisions in a day. Whether it is thinking or talking or cooking, we do for the sake of doing. When you eat, are you completely involved in the eating? While eating you plan for the next vacation or think about how to get a raise at work. The food is going inside the body but you are not tasting it and enjoying it fully. If you eat with awareness, automatically you will know the right type and amount of food you ought to consume.
Whether you believe it or not, directly or indirectly, you are choosing everything in your life.
No one else chooses for you in your life. It is you who makes the choice. Continuously, it is only your choice, your decision. You may think that somebody else decides your life. No! It is only you who is deciding all the time.
Somebody criticizes or insults you and you choose to get offended. If somebody praises you, you choose to get flattered. Because of your habit, you choose this response unconsciously. Does someone else choose this for you? No! It is purely your choice. Because it has become a habit, you have forgotten that you are choosing.
It is you who choose how to respond, what decisions to make. But you try to fool yourself and others into believing it is someone else who is responsible, who is making you do things their way.
Understand, you can decide to respond differently. For example, when someone criticizes you, you can choose not to get offended. You can choose to remain calm, relaxed and collected. It is your choice to feel offended.
We always think we have been given unfair results. This is because we are not able to connect the cause and the effect of many of the things that happen in our lives. We are blissfully unaware that we are the ones who caused the effects. We made it happen by way of unconscious living and ended up collecting more karma.
source: Living Enlightenment
KAILASA's Words of Eternal Bliss, Nithyananda! 