The hand that you raise "by choice" was raised by ten thousand invisible forces.
The glass you throw "at will" was premeditated by every moment that preceded this one.
Show me the independent actor.
Show me the man who acts outside the web of causation.
Show me the woman whose choices emerge from a place untouched by conditioning.
Show me an act that stands absolutely by itself, with no prior cause.
You cannot.
Because there is no such person.
And there is no such thing.
There is only the one who sees this, and the one who does not.
The world is full of people who mistake reaction for action.
They live inside stories.
They chase images.
They believe their responses to stimuli are expressions of their will.
But what they call agency is slavery to the memes of the day.
The perceptive human is rare.
He sees his own motives.
He watches his mind impose meaning on what simply is.
He observes the self as it corrupts perception with its agenda.
This seeing transforms him.
He changes.
Not because he decides to change.
Not because he decided to imbibe an aesthetic.
He changes because seeing is its own transformation.
Desire is unquenchable.
The perceptive human knows this.
He has seen the wheel spin endlessly, returning always to where it began.
But he does not resist desire, for resistance is another form of reaction from the spiritual movie-brain.
He simply sees it clearly.
And in that seeing, his interest naturally wanes.
Society operates on shared delusions.
To succeed, you must participate in the collective dream.
To go far, you must walk with others.
But others are dreaming.
And their dreams require your complicity.
The more clearly you see, the less you can participate.
Solitude is a choiceless choice.
The wise man does not withdraw from the world because he is moral.
He withdraws because engagement has become impossible.
He does not choose solitude.
Solitude chooses him.
He does not resist society.
Society resists what he has become.
The wise man appears to do less.
He sleeps well.
His conscience is light.
His mind is clear, and not steeped in movies.
Naturally, he isn't constantly contradicting what is.
No movies cloud his judgment.
To him, what is is all that exists.
And he sees it in utmost clarity.
True virtue has no source that can be named.
It arises from devotion to truth.
But no one decides to be devoted to truth.
Devotion either is, or it is not.
When it is present, it often looks like courage.
Like standing against the odds.
But courage is not what drives it.
No idea, conception, or volition drives it.
What drives it cannot be spoken of.
There is no method to arrive at this.
No practice.
No technique.
No optimization.
Either you see, or you do not.
If you see, certain things become impossible.
Other things become inevitable.
Agency is yet another movie-brained notion.
Virtue doesn't rest within the specifics of what a man does or does not.
It rests within the depth of his seeing, wherefrom all actions arise.
What matters is the depth of his devotion to
The Truth.
This is neither advice, nor a teaching.
If it registers, it does.
If it doesn't, so be it.
Truth does not care.