Here Is the Choice
The Teaching
“Here’s the choice: are you going to trust it or not? If you do trust it you may get let down. And this ‘it’ is yourself, your own nature, and all nature around you. There are going to be mistakes. But if you don’t trust it at all, you’re going to strangle yourself. You’re going to fence yourself round with rules and regulations and laws and prescriptions and policemen and guards — and who’s going to guard the guards, and who’s going to look after Big Brother to be sure that he doesn’t do something stupid? No go.
Any time you voluntarily let up control — cease to cling to yourself — you have an access of power, because you’re wasting energy all the time in self-defense, trying to manage things, trying to force things to conform to your will. The moment you stop doing that, that wasted energy is available.”
Commentary
Watts doesn’t soften the choice. You may get let down. The traditions don’t either.
The Bhagavad Gita’s most famous verse, “You have a right to perform your duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions”, is not a comfort. It is a confrontation. It says: act fully, love fully, give everything you have, and release the outcome entirely. That is the hardest thing the Gita asks, and it asks it in the middle of a battlefield, which is exactly where most people actually live.
Rumi’s Guest House arrives at the same threshold from the direction of feeling rather than action. Whatever comes, joy, depression, meanness, sorrow, welcome it. Each may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, meet them at the door laughing. This is not positivity. It is something far more radical: the complete release of the insistence that experience be other than it is. Which is, quietly, the same release Watts is describing.
The Tao Te Ching has been pointing here for eighty-one chapters. Chapter 48 states it with the compression of a koan: “In pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In pursuit of the Tao, every day something is dropped.” The manifestation conversation is, almost entirely, about acquisition. The Tao points the opposite direction. The grip loosening is not the obstacle to what you want. It is the practice itself.
And Paul, writing from prison with no apparent reason for peace: “The peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds.” Not the peace you understand. The peace that is prior to understanding. Prior to the effort to achieve understanding. Prior to all of it. That peace is not earned by holding the right intentions. It is what remains when the holding finally stops.
The choice Watts names is real, and it is not easy. The grasping for control has a logic to it, it has worked, partially, some of the time, enough to keep the pattern going. The unfamiliar feeling of releasing it is genuinely frightening, because the ego correctly perceives that it is being asked to step down from a position it has held for a very long time. What it cannot yet see, cannot see from inside the vicious circle, is what is waiting on the other side.