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00:00:01
How Much Choice Do We Really Have?
349 Plays1 year ago
Free will versus destiny--it’s a topic humanity has been talking about since the invention of language. In this episode, though, Laura and Kevin drop into the middle space. What if it’s both on some level? As always, the truth seems to be a paradox, which can be liberating and maddening at the same time.
* Join us at Little Soul School, a community of people dedicated to soul growth, soul learning, and accessing the Akashic Records, a place that hold all of our souls’ histories—everything we’ve done in all of our lifetimes. If you’re looking for a deeper connection to yourself and a place to experiment and learn in a non-judgmental, open community of people, join us at https://littlesoul.school. No woo-woo, no fluff. Just fun and connection.
Come check it out at https://littlesoul.school
Follow Laura Coe:
Website: www.lauracoe.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurascoe/
Follow Kevin Kaiser:
Website: www.kevinkaiser.co
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kevinkaiser.co
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Transcript
Introduction to Soul School Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to Soul School with Laura Ko and Kevin Kaiser. On this show, we dive into life's biggest questions. Who are we? What are we here to do? And how can we fearlessly live as our truest, deepest selves? Soul School is the spiritual education you never received. So if you're ready, join us as we explore together. Soul School is in session.
Intuition Model: Red, Yellow, Green Lights
00:00:29
Speaker
Welcome back everybody and welcome to my wonderful co-host, Laura. Laura, it's good to see you. Hello, hello. How are you today, Kevin?
00:00:38
Speaker
It's been great. I love just being able to do things like this and see you and talk about this cool shit. At least it's cool for us. So in this short episode, we're going to drop in a little bit. You were sharing with me a realization that you had that was kind of an expansion on the red light, yellow light, green light, intuition, I guess model, if you want to call it that.
00:01:05
Speaker
that you teach other people, so what's the lowdown? Like, unpack what this new realization was.
Authenticity and True Personal Choices
00:01:12
Speaker
Yeah, I was, you know, I've been coaching for a decade on authenticity, how to connect into our authentic selves, what that means, what gets in the way, how our thought patterns, you know, keep us from our authentic self, blah, blah, blah. And I love it, right? I love it. And I was chatting with a client and I just had this realization, like it hit me literally in real time, right? This idea that what does it mean to
00:01:43
Speaker
interact with the world, right? We think about authenticity and we say, okay, authentically, I want to do this with my life, right? If you want to ask the big questions, like, what am I doing with my career? You know, what should I do? Who am I? What is my purpose? But this smaller thing of the red, yellow, green system that I already did a podcast on, but what is true for me in the moment, right, is where I start.
00:02:11
Speaker
But I started thinking like, wait, what's true for me in the moment, right?
Automatic Actions and Unconscious Responses
00:02:18
Speaker
Example, do I want to talk to Kevin and do a podcast? Red, yellow, green. Yes, green. This feels good to me. It's always green, by the way, folks. But if you back it up and you say, OK, wait a minute, I'm sitting here with Kevin right now and I do have this glass of water in front of me.
00:02:37
Speaker
And as we're chatting, the thought arises. And that's so important. The thought arises that I'm thirsty as I'm talking, right? There's this awareness of this thought, thirsty. Why? Well, I'm aware of my mouth being dry or my throat feeling a certain way or right, the experience of thirst begins to arise and I become aware of that.
00:03:04
Speaker
And so you and I are chatting and chatting and the thought arises and the feelings in my body arise and I have the awareness. And I don't know how many times, right? One time, sometimes, sometimes five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 times before I in fact reach over, I grab my glass of water. And then I thought, wait, what just happened? Did I reach over and grab the glass of water with intention?
00:03:35
Speaker
or the thought arises, and then at some point my hand goes to grab the water. Now, just that alone, the pressure with which I hold this glass, for those who aren't watching the video, I'm holding a glass of water, the speed with which I bring it to my face, right? And then as I begin to drink the water, which I won't do, because it stops me from talking, but if I were to put it to my face,
00:04:04
Speaker
and allow the water to go into my mouth, the velocity with which it goes in, the rate with which my swallowing starts to happen. All of this is unconscious.
Suffering and Authentic Yes/No Responses
00:04:19
Speaker
So this question of like, what is true for me? What am I doing, right? Like what, what is it that's happening in every moment where I'm actually making choice, where I'm,
00:04:30
Speaker
where I'm deciding what's deciding, how am I deciding? And then what exactly am I really doing? Because the thought came up, it arose, the feelings in my body came up, I didn't pick those. I did say, okay, yes or no to grabbing the glass. Feels like the only thing in there that I chose
00:04:58
Speaker
but I'm gonna get back to that in a second. And then I grab the water, hold it with a certain tension so it doesn't fall, put it to my mouth, and then the water starts moving in and I have nothing to do. I don't know how to swallow actually. I don't really know how to place the water everywhere it needs to go in my body, right? And so none of that is really a decision or a choice, right? And so then I started thinking, okay, wait, wait, wait, wait. Because this thought, thirsty, thirsty.
00:05:28
Speaker
I didn't choose that, right? The thought is arising. So at some point I say yes, but let's just be honest, I could just keep saying no. And I could say no until I dehydrate and I could say no until I am not living, right? I mean, I could just deny my body.
00:05:49
Speaker
In this case, you can easily see how quickly that leads to the experience of suffering, like suffering. People go on starvation kicks for various reasons, for sports, for work, for medical issues, or perhaps for political statement. It's admirable to think somebody starves because it tortures them.
00:06:17
Speaker
to say no to what is arising over and over and over. And so at some point you suffer and suffer and suffer and then perhaps you do die, right? And I thought, oh my God, right? Isn't this really a metaphor for life? Can't you actually start thinking about what is arising
00:06:38
Speaker
What is arising in front of me, around me, within me? And how do I respond to it? Yes, no. Yes, no. And then if I pick yes when it's a no, I don't drink the water.
00:06:54
Speaker
And so in the broader sense, spiritually, when I say no to what is true in a soul level, what is true in my heart, what is true in my gut, I say no, no, no. We start suffering. We start suffering. Life gets harder. It gets heavier. Things don't feel easy. They don't feel good, right?
00:07:17
Speaker
And so I'm not saying that when you say yes to the things that are, quote unquote, meant to be or aligned in truth for you, that it's not
00:07:28
Speaker
It doesn't require work, right? It can't be a lot to do, right? So grabbing the water, holding it, swallowing it, right? There's a lot of things happening actually, right? Like everything in life has a certain amount. Yeah, it's a lot. So it's just the suffering really got clear to me, the suffering, right? Because pain is inevitable. Pleasure, right? It doesn't stay. But suffering is avoidable. Suffering is avoidable. And that idea is
00:07:57
Speaker
So rich for me and something I come back to constantly is I I can't have a pain free life and I can't have a pleasure seeking life but I can avoid suffering and so the story about the water really hit me like a
00:08:14
Speaker
Wow, there's so little that I'm choosing and there's so little that I'm doing. I'm just doing these microscopic yeses and nos. And when I'm microscopically picking no when it should be yes or yes when it should be no, I begin to suffer. And isn't that just true in my life, right? And how do you think about this little bit with the water in terms of your life? And then the last thing I'll say is that
00:08:40
Speaker
these thoughts that are arising and the feelings that are arising, who is the I, right? Like I'm not making my thoughts happen, so I'm not my thoughts. I'm not making the thirst happen, so I'm not my thirst. So where the hell am I? So this awareness self is the one that's saying yes and no, yes and no, and yes and no, right? That's all that's happening all the time. So I don't know, it just dawned on me if I really don't want to suffer,
00:09:08
Speaker
And I want my life to have a certain sense of ease, you know, to just pay more attention to the subtlety of what's arising around me and then the simplicity of this little yes or no. And if it's starting to feel like I'm suffering, think about whether I should grab the glass of water.
00:09:28
Speaker
I love that. So all of this comes at a really interesting time because as I told you before we started recording, I was watching this Nova episode the other night. And I'll link to it in the show description. It's called Your Brain, Who is in Control?
Free Will and Consciousness
00:09:48
Speaker
And the show is mostly about what you just talked about. They do all of these studies, neuroscientists are doing these studies, you know, hooking EEG sensors up to people's heads and like timing the different, it's a really short amount of time, but, you know, so pick up, you know, pick up the glass of water.
00:09:56
Speaker
And
00:10:11
Speaker
But there is this signal in the brain that is a certain number of milliseconds that happens before they even register the thought of picking it up. And so there's like this.
00:10:22
Speaker
It is so confounding to them, right? It's so fascinating because there's what's happening and then there's the consciousness that is seeing it happen, like what you're talking about. That's right. And this is actually the very thing that confounds the scientific community right now because they believe that that awareness, that consciousness, actually arises from the matter, actually arises from the brain itself, but they're like, how does this work?
00:10:54
Speaker
There's something beyond that that is perceiving it, that is witnessing it, which is everything that sages and mystics have been talking about for thousands and thousands of years. And it becomes really important when you start getting into this conversation around, well, there's personal conditioning, there's cultural conditioning. I didn't choose English as my first language.
00:11:21
Speaker
But yet the world thoughts are just language and language is learned and it divides up the world based on stuff that came before. So it's all based on history. So the mind is this pattern recognition and pattern repetition machine that is always trying to create a predictable world, which actually doesn't exist, but it's the soul. So it's all about preserving and perpetuating the known.
00:11:50
Speaker
right? But the soul is the domain of the unknown, which is where we really want to be, which is the release, letting go of the known, and like stepping into that, you know, what is the unknown? What is the new? And when we suffer is when that's our soul, from my perspective,
00:12:11
Speaker
Like it starts bumping up against the guardrails going, no, it's not this, no, it's not that, like it's this, you know, down the middle. That's right. And you find that ease, you find that tranquility because it's like when you stop trying to assert the mind to control your life and to pick the patterns and the recognitions and
00:12:34
Speaker
to find the safe path that it thinks it sees.
Conditioning and Spiritual Journeys
00:12:38
Speaker
And you release into the fact that there's so little that you're kind of really picking, so much is arising in every moment that you do then have the ability to have your free will and say yes or no, but how much free will is there exactly? Because I start to suffer when I don't, right? And letting that just be life, right?
00:13:01
Speaker
Exactly. And there's so much that's preconditioned. We don't like to think of it that way, but I grew up in Indiana. I have ketchup and mustard with my hot dogs and not kimchi.
00:13:15
Speaker
But so if kimchi and ketchup were placed on a table with hot dogs, I would pick up the ketchup. I have free will, but I'm so conditioned I didn't grow up with kimchi, although kimchi is amazing. So my set of choices, set of preferences is just kind of hard-coded in me, which is why so much of this spiritual journey, the soul's journey, is the one of unlearning or going beyond the mind because
00:13:45
Speaker
the mind can never know reality. It will eventually run out. It's just chasing its tail because it's always looking to confirm the stories that it's already been told about reality. This is where the felt sense of, like you said, it's intuitive and that's the way.
Meditation and Pain Anticipation
00:14:08
Speaker
Yeah, and it's reminding me of a Netflix that the Dalai Lama was just recently in and he set up a scientific experiment with a university that I forgot which one, but they had people who don't meditate and then his monks there and they put them up to an MRI and they said, listen, here's what's going to happen. We're going to put a band around your arm and this band is going to have very hot water.
00:14:37
Speaker
And when you hear this bell, you're going to feel hot water and they showed them and it was like painful. It's not going to burn you, but it's painful. And then they said, we're going to show you another bell and then you'll know that you'll receive a cooler water or something like that. I don't know. So they showed both sets of participants. They put them in the MRI machine.
00:14:59
Speaker
The normal people, you know, the non-meditators, they started to anticipate the hot water, right? I think before the noise, or at least the moment that the, no, it was before the noise. And then the bell rings and they start to anticipate it and there's no hot water yet, and their brains are firing as if they're already in pain.
00:15:20
Speaker
Then the hot water hits, pain reaction, just like you'd expect. But then after the hot water's gone, they're still firing like crazy in their brains because they're anticipating when the pain's coming back again.
00:15:36
Speaker
The meditators, nothing happened. The bell rang. Nothing happened. When the hot water hit their arm, they had a normal reaction to the pain. They felt it. And their brains were aligned to the actual moment of pain. And then the moment that the water was gone, their brains went back to a normal state.
00:15:54
Speaker
So, right, it's like, yeah, if you think about that, right, in this conversation, it's like, if you just allow life to happen, which meditation helps a ton with, and you just like experience everything, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, you're not pre-planning the pain that's coming that you're trying to avoid, or after it's happening, panicked that it's going to happen again, and not living in the state that maybe it's not happening.
00:16:22
Speaker
then you can actually start to just experience what happens as it happens for what it really is, you know? And so, A, like a little plug for meditation in there, but B, like I just can't get over the simplicity of the experience of being alive if we understand, right, to just allow things to arise, be in the moment of it, continue forward, right?
Experiencing Life Through Present Moments
00:16:47
Speaker
And that's free will meeting the realities of our day-to-day.
00:16:51
Speaker
And there it is. We just solved the riddle. It really is that simple. Hard to live. Hard to live. Well, there you have it, friends. Thank you for sharing that. This has been a wonderful conversation. And I'll drop some links into the show notes.
00:17:12
Speaker
I'm going to find that Netflix show. And so for anyone who wants to watch it, they can go check it out. So I guess I guess friends will see you next time. Laura, as always, thank you for sharing your heart and what's happening in life. Thank you.
Invitation to Little Soul School
00:17:29
Speaker
Thanks for listening to this week's episode, and I really hope that you consider checking out the Little Soul School, LittleSoul.school, where there's a community of people dedicated to soul growth, soul learning, and the Akashic energy, a space that holds all of our soul's histories, everything we've ever done in all of our lifetimes.
00:17:52
Speaker
Because they're looking for a deeper connection to themselves, a place to experiment and play with spirituality in a non-judgmental, vulnerable, open community of people. No woo-woo, no fluff, just fun and connection. Come check it out, littlesoul.school.