I will start with a question. How much of what you know yourself as is something you chose to be? How many skills did you freely choose to learn?

I’ve noticed that who I am is a result of my choices, but I didn’t completely know what the choices were doing to me when they happened, and my skills appear to be mostly aligned with innate traits.

I just fell into a lot of things that I think reflect who I am.

We come to accept, as part of our identity, the experiences and conditions that we for one reason or another needed to adapt to. We learn to be nice until we come to see ourselves as nice people. We learn to obey rules until we come to see ourselves as honest people. Did we freely choose to adopt these attitudes?

We don’t freely decide to go to school, at least it didn’t feel like I did. Indeed, and we come to see ourselves as educated people anyway.

Most of us are taught that nice is good and honest is good, and we should aspire to be good.

Let’s look outside of the box, at the criminal set. We can all list off traits we easily associate with criminals; selfishness, cruelty, deceit, violence. But how did they come by these traits? Did they choose them despite what we normally learn?

No. They are seeking balance in their own way.

They may not have learned right from wrong as children.

I’d say if a mental illness is making them act that way then it is not a choice.

Some traits are even not so easily set apart from each other. For example, ignorance. At first it seems like that’s just a negative trait, no? Some people see any exposure to ideas or behaviors that deviate from their default set of values as being threats to their moral integrity. From their point of view, ignorance in this regard is actually honesty.

Would that be like in the case of an atheist? Yes. They see entertaining any idea, that has the qualities of religious thought, as “an insult to their intelligence.”

To a religious person that would be sacrilege.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~