Choosing Our Experience?
Many new-age “channeled” books talk about how everything in our experience is a choice. We supposedly chose to incarnate and chose all the things that will happen to us before we were born, therefore, we are not victims of anything because we knew getting into this ride exactly what would happen, until we got born and thereby took on a veil of separation and ignorance about our choosing all of these things. Unfortunately, this leads to a severe lack of compassion regarding the suffering of others.
If each person chose all that would happen to them, then when they get tortured, or raped, or lose their child or whatever, they chose that those events would happen, therefore they are complicit and it’s their own fault and they just need to get over it.
However, since there’s also the supposed veil of ignorance, they don’t know that they chose it. Still, new-agers will say that these events are lessons to teach them about impermanence and how none of the stuff that happens here really matters in the big picture. Even if this were true, it doesn’t address a simple fact: someone is in pain and could really use some help.
I used to buy wholesale into the whole “you create your own reality” idea and anytime I heard of someone going through something terrible, I’d say “Oh well, it was their choice, so they just have to endure. Not like it matters when you take the whole universe into account.” Now, I’d like to kick the old me in the nuts and say, “Hey, before you were born, you chose this to happen to you. Stop your wincing and shrug it off, and don’t be upset, because you did this to yourself…so to speak.”
Have you ever noticed how the people who have this belief are often all about reminding others that they chose this or that, but when something awful happens to them, they are suddenly indignant?
One time, I had a bike stolen at the place I worked. This woo woo guy smugly says to me, “Hmmm…looks like you still believe in thieves!” A week later, he was shorted on his paycheck. I told him, ‘Hmmm…looks like you still believe in money!” He wasn’t happy. I think that very moment may have been the little spark that ignited my path towards atheism.
Where hypocrisy exists, reality does not.