Tea or Coffee: Who is the Chooser of a Choice? (Rupert Spira Summary)

This is a short excerpt from Rupert Spira about a seemingly simple choice between tea or coffee.

But, who is the chooser of the choice?

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Tea or Coffee: Who is the Chooser of a Choice? (Rupert Spira Short Excerpt)

The Experience of Choice

“Take a very simple example of choice. It’s breakfast time. Somebody asks, ‘Would you like tea or coffee?’ You just hear the question—pause—the thought appears, ‘I would like tea.’ It just appears like all thoughts. That thought is not chosen—no thought is chosen. All thoughts just appear.”

1. You hear the question, ‘Would you like tea or coffee?’

2. Next thought: ‘I would like tea.’

3. Next thought: ‘I chose to have tea.’

“During the question, the choice has not yet been made. By the time you’ve answered, the choice has already been made. So, the choice takes place in between those two thoughts. What is present between two thoughts? Just awareness.”

“Thought #3 creates a chain of causation between thought #1 and thought #2 and calls it ‘choice.’ And then has to find an agent of that choice which equals ‘I’—’I’ made the choice. But, there is no agent of the choice.”

“All that the three thoughts have in common is the background of awareness. But, the 3rd thought creates the ‘I’ which is supposedly present throughout each of the three thoughts. That ‘I’ is not present. The true I is the background of awareness.”

“The separate self is created with that 3rd thought. That thought is the separate self, the chooser … It’s an afterthought. Nobody actually chooses the thought, ‘I would like tea.’ Choice is an interpretation of an experience in which there is actually no choice.”

“We have to make a clear distinction between what is actually something quite subtle: there is a choosing thought, but there is no chooser. There is a thought that says, ‘I’d rather have tea than coffee’. That thought contains a choice between two drinks, but there is nobody there choosing that thought. The choice is the thought. There is no chooser of the thought.”

“Was there an entity that somehow manufactured that choice or selected that choice from two different possibilities? No. There was the question, ‘Do you want tea or coffee?’ Pause. There was the answer, ‘Coffee’. There was no hearer of the question. There was no thinker of the decision. There was no decider of the choice … The thought comes in: ‘I heard,’ ‘I chose,’ ‘I decided,’ ‘I enjoyed,’ ‘I tasted,’ etc, but the ‘I’ is always an afterthought. It is never present in the action itself.”

“The ‘I’ that chooses or decides is not there.”

The Thought of a Chooser

“There really is no such thing as choice.”

“In retrospect, we look at the succession of thoughts … We look back and imagine that there is a ‘chooser’ in the system between each thought … It’s not actually there in between each of the thoughts. The chooser itself is not there in between each thought choosing each time between a range of possibilities: ‘I’ll have that thought next, and then I’ll have this thought.’ That chooser is not there. The notion of a chooser is simply itself a thought which appears retrospectively. The thought says, ‘I was there in between each thought choosing it.'”

“The separate self is always the one in between—it’s like a filler thought that is either considered to be the initiator of our actions, thoughts, choices, etc, or the subsequent enjoyer of them. It’s never present in the actual thought itself. It’s imagined in between. The ‘I’ thought is like a filler that seems to be both the initiator that’s prior to the action and the enjoyer of it after the action.”

“The separate self is an activity, not an entity … There is no entity called ‘the separate self’. The finite mind is the activity of infinite consciousness, not an entity in its own right. So, the decisions we make are the activity of this finite mind, but there is no actual independently existing self that performs those choices or decisions.”

“There’s no individual agent inside the body orchestrating the activities of that particular body and mind … Obviously, the first thing we would do if we could control our thoughts would be to choose for our thoughts to be totally okay with what’s going on … Just that should be enough to persuade anybody, everybody, that they don’t control their thoughts … There’s no entity that is responsible for a behavior. A behavior is a response that has been conditioned. The thoughts and feelings that lead to a behavior are just a result of that person’s conditioning, plus genetics, plus whatever it is that conditions any single action. But, there’s no individual responsible. There’s no personal responsibility. And, strangely, understanding this doesn’t make us behave in irresponsible ways. It’s when we believe there is personal responsibility that we find ourselves behaving in irresponsible ways. When we feel, ‘I am a separate person,’ it is that feeling that gives rise to irresponsible behavior … When the sense of separation goes, our behavior is in line with the totality and serves the totality.”

Bonus

The clown who takes the bow:

“Jean Klein likened the separate self to the clown that comes onstage after the curtain has fallen to receive the applause. It’s a very nice analogy of the separate self … That chooser is not there. The notion of a chooser is simply itself a thought which appears retrospectively. The thought says, ‘I was there in between each thought choosing it’. It’s the clown that takes the bow. It wasn’t actually present, but it claims responsibility afterwards.” — Rupert Spira
“My teacher (Jean Klein) used to say the mind is like a clown taking the bow after the ballerina’s performance to claim the applause … In fact, the clown didn’t dance. The thinker thought didn’t think … There is no local chooser. Obviously, things get decided somehow or happen. So, in a poetic way, we could say that the universe makes a decision.” — Francis Lucille

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