Who Determines the Course of Your Life?

To live a self-determined life is the essence of consciousness.

A self-determined life is fundamentally different from a life that’s determined by our ego. When the ego is in charge of running our life, we only have an illusion of determining our life, not the actual experience of doing so.

To be able to determine our own life requires us to be free, a state that few on our planet yet enjoy. Even those of us who think we are free are so heavily programmed by family and society that we don’t even know we aren’t free.

To live a self-determined life is to be awake as we move through life.

Instead of deluding ourselves with our projections of what life ought to be and what we hope it will be as the vast majority do, we are actually aware of everything that’s going on within us and all around us.

In the movie Feast of Love, starring Morgan Freeman, the statement is made that everything we need to know to chart our life is already right here, available to us this very moment, if our eyes are open.

Most humans sleepwalk through life. They really have little comprehension of what causes them to do what they do. People tend to blunder their way through their average day.

To become present in our life—to be conscious as we proceed down life’s path—isn’t some otherworldly experience. It’s to have our eyes open to what’s in front of us.

The 2007 movie Feast of Love shows how we lurch from one bad situation to another much of the time until we open our eyes.

Consciousness is that simple—living with our eyes open, attuned to what’s really happening within us and all around us.

There’s a nice touch at the close of this movie. Individuals who have gone through some messy situations are able to accept each other, realizing that what they went through was all intended as part of their awakening.

Acceptance, leading to forgiveness of those who have hurt us, flows spontaneously once we realize that everything in life is seeking to awaken us.

In other words, things aren’t about what they so often appear to be about on the surface. All of the emotional entanglements and moral mazes we get ourselves into aren’t what life is about. They are just scaffolding for what’s being build inside us—a manifestation of the divine Presence uniquely expressed as us.