Ken, thank you so much for taking the time to read the article and for your feedback. Your comments challenge me to express my thoughts more clearly. It is difficult to get to the root of this topic and express it because it is fundamentally paradoxical. Just like most everything else, coincidences are a matter of perspective. Where one sees coincidence, someone else may see meaning and connection. Where one sees choice, another may see fate. As Neo from The Matrix would say: "The problem is choice." We get caught up in some intellectual acrobatics trying to sort things out and determine whether we have free will or our destinies are predetermined. All I'm saying is that there is a space within the human being and above the intellectual stratosphere where life can be paradoxically lived without choice but with absolute freedom. This is the point J Krishnamurti kept harping on.
The limits we feel exerted on us by the world or society are all self-chosen. The world is simply the result of a relationship between you and me (and others like you and me). We can blame the government or our parents or our religions but in the end, we are responsible for the life we are living. Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my article but I am saying that you cannot just will to live an authentic life. Rather there are other "forces" within us that drive us to the life that we are living. And to that extent, we've already made our choices. We can however understand those forces and those choices and accept our lives as they are (and again this acceptance cannot be done by force). There is no method to that. So one comes to a singularity of sorts where one lets go (Jesus: "he who loses his life will gain it"). And in that letting go and in recognizing that each of us is just an act, our authenticity comes through.
In the end, it is all a fantastic, phantasmagorical drama. If you want to eat, you have to put on an act, like a suit and tie and work in an office or a factory or whatever, in order to get money for food. But most people think that this act, this mask is who they are. In the end, no words or thoughts are going to change anything. That realization itself is simultaneously the beginning and ending of our search.
