idea to do something appears in your mind—coming from either in-
spiration or memory—you can choose to act on it or not, if you are
aware of the impulse.
According to Jeffrey Schwartz, in his powerful book,The Mind
and the Brain, your conscious will—your power to choose—can veto
the impulse that started in your unconscious. In other words, you
may get the impulse to pick up this book, but you can override that
impulse if you want to do so. That’s free will, or, as Schwartz de-
scribes it,“free won’t.”
He writes that “in later years he [Libet] embraced the notion
that free will serves as a gatekeeper for thoughts bubbling up from
the brain and did not duck the moral implications of that.”
William James, the legendary psychologist, felt that free will took
place afterthe impulse to do something and beforeyou actually did it.
Again, you can say yes, or no, to it. It takes mindfulness to see the
choice.What Dr. Hew Len was teaching me was by constantly clean-
ing all thoughts, whether inspiration or memory, I would be better
able to choose what was right in that moment.
I began to see that my weight loss came about because I chose
not to obey the memory or habit that was nudging me to eat more
and exercise less. By choosing not to follow those additive impulses, I
was kicking in my free will or free won’t ability. In other words, the
urge to overeat was a memory, not an inspiration. It came from a
program, not from the Divine. I was ignoring the program or over-
riding it.What I gathered Dr. Hew Len would suggest as a better ap-
proach is to love the program until it dissolved and all that remained
was Divinity.
I still didn’t quite understand all of this, but I was listening and
choosing to not cancel anything out because it was new. Little did I
know what was in store for me next.The Shocking Truth about Intentions 37ccc_zero_027-038_shoc.qxd 5/4/07 12:39 PM Page 37