The Expansion of Agency

What I mean when I say “conscious agency” is straightforward: it is that you can make real choices based on your will, not just those that are automatic, given your genetics and upbringing. I am quite certain that, irrespective of the nature of consciousness, the more we can develop our attunement to it, the more we have this agency. I have lived this experience in both positive and negative directions, repeatedly.

When I brought my attention to understanding the root causes of a frequent trigger in a relationship, I became better equipped to make choices that I would not automatically make, and in fact, which I simply did not make before. Sometimes, these choices are encouraged by therapists or mentors. Other times, they are realized through self-reflection. But it is clear that more awareness leads to more choice. And I, for one, strongly prefer to have more agency over myself than less.

The good news is that this is not a vertical cliff to climb. It’s a gently inclining, and decently paved road. What begins with small shifts in awareness grows into a different way of living. More aspects of daily life will come under the influence of conscious free will. And this is the crux of the matter: you don’t simply make better choices. You become someone who, by nature, chooses. This is an exalted way to be.

One of the main ways that attunement increases autonomy is via the pause. We previously mentioned ACT and CBT, conventional psychological techniques that encourage pausing and observing before engaging. And in the last chapter, on action, we repeated a closely related point. But it is important now to emphasize this in the context of an ongoing, sustainable change in character. We can reliably pause, with willful restraint, before responding – reacting can be a thing of the past.

Here's how this looks, practically. Internal phenomena, such as cravings, impulses or automatic reactions, become objects of awareness first. We become less attached – fused, really – to our thoughts and urges. Pausing is not suppression, but rather observation. Cravings and impulses will still arise. We will still crave a sweet treat after a bitter disappointment, and we will still have the impulse to check what someone we’re interested in has posted on social media. But we begin to have a breath, a beat, between that impulse and the acting on it.

And this breath turns out to be the heart of the matter. In that brief moment of reflection, a whole universe of choice is revealed. We can reflect on why we felt that impulse: fear and greed are leading candidates, always. We can acknowledge that, in accepting this impulse, we would be identifying our true selves with this base, automatic response. We can witness and acknowledge the ways in which our choices will affect others, and the ways these choices will affect our future selves, our immediate and future families. In short, we offer ourselves the opportunity to make better choices than those that are automatic.

I have been engaged in public speaking since high school, first as a member of Mama Saw’s debate team, and now in my profession. I’ve grown into a very informal, casual speaker, regularly sprinkling profanities into my formal talks, just as I do in my everyday conversations. As I became more comfortable with myself, and this style of speaking developed, I was often complimented for my straightforwardness and for saying whatever I was thinking. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I began to lean more into that trait.

But I realized at some point that I had taken these compliments without consideration of where they could lead me. I envisioned a future in which I was so blunt and inconsiderate in my speech as to genuinely become an intolerable jerk. I decided I needed to be more intentional with my speech, rather than just blurting out whatever (possibly extremely rude) thing came to mind. But how?

I decided I had to stop cursing for awhile. This would force me to pause before I speak, to self-censor. I found that it did far more than that. It caused me to think more about what I actually wanted to say, not just to avoid using profanities. The experiment didn’t last forever – I fervently enjoy cursing still. But it clearly demonstrates the power of the pause.

Here’s the thing. All of us live mostly in automation. Our “choices” of consumption – food, drink, content, relationship, speech, action – are mostly not really choices at all. We are, somehow passengers on our own flight. I don’t know if this notion incites you. It does me. I cannot abide anything else making my choices for me, unnecessarily. I would much rather shape my life than have it be shaped on my behalf – least of all by some mega-corporation’s unmitigated greed. And much, much more importantly than my personal preferences, the survival of our species may well depend on this kind of awakening, personal responsibility and agency. Almost every one of us is contributing, actively or passively, to the demise of humankind.

But doing something about it isn’t especially hard. It’s mostly about building new habits, accepting our own power and capabilities and owning the responsibility to use these to help ourselves – not once, but more and more frequently, and over the long run. Jesus talked about being “born again,” which sounds instantaneous at first reading. But when you read the rest of what he had to say, it is a practice, a daily battle with our default mode. It is good and reassuring that Jesus’ words are closely related to the way the Buddhists talk about enlightenment. It’s not that it’s easy to do—it’s fighting a key aspect of our nature as often as we can muster the fight. But we each can choose to start to fight.

And what it looks like is magnificent. We can begin to make choices the prior versions of ourselves would not have made. We can choose alignment, because it is right, not because it is convenient. We can notice that our stories are just stories. They are not ours in the sense of identity, just as the breakfast, or the success, or the failure you last made is not you, but something you made. We can escape the trap of living inside of our stories. It is within our reach, and it is not easy, but every one of us can do it.

An area of speculation, but practical nonetheless, is whether we can actually influence the character of the thoughts that occur to us in the first place – the menu of thoughts from which our volition can choose to attend. There is solid evidence that this is imminently possible, including studies showing that mindfulness reduces activity in the brain’s default mode network—associated with self-referential thought loops and mental noise. A study by Garrison et al. found this explicitly:

“The reduced DMN activity observed in experienced meditators during meditation, even compared with another active cognitive task, suggests that meditation may alter the default functioning of the brain and reduce the tendency toward spontaneous, self-referential processing.”⁴⁷

A study by Tang et al from 2007 found that even five consecutive days of relatively easy, doable meditation practice improved executive attention – the brain’s ability to regulate thoughts and actions in alignment with goals, particularly by managing overriding automatic responses. It also increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is a region of the brain involved with monitoring attention and enabling self control.⁴⁸ This is not the only study showing that even brief mental training improves cognition.⁴⁹

Studies also show that experienced meditators can select the objects of their attention more effectively as well. A clever study entitled “Visual Sensitivity and Mindfulness Meditation found that:

“After the retreat, practitioners could detect shorter single-light flashes and required a shorter interval to differentiate between successive flashes correctly. The control group did not change on either measure. Phenomenological reports indicate that mindfulness practice enables practitioners to become aware of some of the usually preattentive processes involved in visual detection.”⁵⁰

In other words, an intensive, long-term meditation practice can help focus attention effectively. This seems small, but it’s huge: it’s the root of all other acts of attunement to consciousness. It also correlates directly to the Buddhist goal of non-attachment to thoughts.

These benefits include the way that our brain handles emotional triggers (among other benefits). Hölzel et al, wrote of “Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction” (MBSR, a fancy term for certain meditation techniques): “We found increases in gray matter concentration within the left hippocampus... These results suggest that participation in MBSR can alter gray matter concentration in brain regions involved in learning and memory processes, emotion regulation, self-referential processing, and perspective taking.”⁵¹

What the mindfulness techniques that provide these benefits have in common is very simple: they train us to recognize the following deep truth: “I am not my thoughts.” Whether those thoughts are heavily emotional (“I am not worthy”), or action-oriented (“I will get him back for what he did”), we must understand that we are simply receiving these thoughts neutrally, as a World War II radio might have received signals from Nazi Germany without identifying itself with those thoughts. The difference between ourselves and that radio is that we have another kind of technology that allows us to move the dial on the receiver, and not just passively receive every message equally.

Lest it is not clear already, embodiment is never complete. It is cumulative. Setbacks are part of the process and should not be discouraging. Attunement to consciousness does not require perfection. It demands persistence, the same as excellence in any other pursuit. But unlike a sport, for example, where inborn physical attributes play an enormous role in determining who can succeed and who cannot, every single one of us has the ability to realize these benefits for ourselves and everyone around us. This is, for me, very closely tied to Jesus’ command in Matthew 5:14-16: “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house.”

And like training any physical or mental muscle, the more you act from attunement to consciousness and alignment with your inner compass, the easier it becomes to do it again, and again. Thus, we can see that free will is itself not binary, as we are tempted to assume. Its capacity develops recursively – the more you exercise it, the more you can exercise it. By default, we happily allow our automatic reflexes do all of the deciding for us. But we have seen now that this is far from ideal. And the more you act as if you do have the ability to choose, the more that capability grows. Each consciously chosen action is practice for the next. This is how freedom grows.