The only free choice in life is to choose alertness

 There is no freedom in thought. if there was any freedom in it, you could decide what you will think next. Don't trust me, try it. Choose your next thought and think it. Maybe you will wait and concentrate on your inner state and no thought will appear until you lose this awarness. Maybe you will look around the room for some inspiration, but that too is already some kind of influence. Clearly our surroundings influence our thoughts. First come the things we take in through books, news or the words and voice of our parents and friends. Later come the thoughts created from these information. From thoughts become the words that you say and from the words you say emerge the activities you take part in, your actions. There is always one thing we can decide however. It is whether we turn our attention to the bodily sensations or not. Most people don't see anything interesting in the thousands of bodily sensations they get every second. I mean vision, smell, breath, light, touch, pressure, noise, voices, vibrations, drones of frequencies in the everpresent semi-silence. "Why would I care about my senses?" one could think. There are thoughts and feelings. Thoughts bring me new information I need to survive in this world and create a happy life for me. Feelings tell me whether I am happy or not, whether I am doing it right or not. But senses? They are just a mere practical tool to get around. However the senses are different from feelings and thoughts. Even when you feel anxious and think about commiting suicide, you can still feel a light pressure in your stomach or air coming into your lungs. These sense perceptions are free of information and feelings, they are a different realm of reality. You can always come back into your senses when you obssesively think or feel too much and you will always find new and fresh sensations. These sensations take place in your consciousness and all of them, things, feelings and thoughts included are happening in your consciousness. Without it, you wouldn't be there, without it those things wouldn't be there for you. This being seen opens new door for sensing yourself in everything you see. Sensing the fact that you are alive when you walk, think or feel. Sensing the world through our body is a valuable source of information of a different kind from feelings and thoughts. It cannot be put into words or transformed into a feeling. What is evem more surprising is that it doesn't bring us more and more into the world that surround us but rathee introduces a new dimension for us to be in. It means to sense the world we live in in a new way.