Discover-Choose Your Future

This is the next installment in the process of gaining clarity on what you want. In this chapter I’m going to lay out the distinction between “Discover-Choose” and “Seek-Find”, which is going to help you narrow down the list of things that you want to just a few that you can work with right now. Then we’ll cover how exactly to make those happen.

Work with What’s Right For Now

If you’ve done the first two exercises you now have a list of the things that you want in life, the beings that you want to become, the deep feelings that you are aching to experience. And, you might have quite a few of them. If you’re feeling pretty stuck in life in various areas then that list might be long. So we need to narrow it down to the most important ones.

Something important to remember as we do this is that this is just for now. You don’t have to pick just one for ever, you will come back to the rest of them later, but we have to choose. This is a really important part of the spiritual path, is choice.

Seek-Find vs Discover-Choose

To explain, I’m going to distinguish two different approaches: Seek-Find is one, and Discover-Choose is the second.

Seek-Find

Imagine you’re in a dense jungle, holding a machete. You’ve heard that somewhere in this jungle, there’s a hidden treasure—a temple filled with gold. But you have no real idea where it is or what it looks like. So you start hacking your way through, trying different paths. You go left, then forward, then right, searching for the quickest way to find it.

This is how many of us approach finding purpose, or trying to find happiness, or what we want. We believe happiness, purpose, or fulfillment is somewhere out there—in the next job, the next relationship, the next city. We assume that since we don’t feel fulfilled now, we must seek something different, somewhere else, in order to find it.

But this approach keeps us searching endlessly, hoping that the next thing will finally be “it.” We chase external things, always looking for the missing piece that will make us feel complete.

It’s a natural response to being unhappy: I’m unhappy here so I must go somewhere else or be with someone else where happiness must be. So we engage on a path of seeking, in order to find. This is Seek-Find.

Discover-Choose

Now, imagine yourself in the same dense jungle, holding the same machete. But instead of searching for a hidden treasure, you focus on what’s right in front of you. As you clear the brush to your left, you discover an open path. You take a step forward, revealing more of the landscape. With each step, you make a choice—do you continue in this direction, or shift to another? Was it useful or not?

This is the Discover-Choose approach. Instead of chasing some vague idea of fulfillment, you gain clarity on what you want, and then engage with what’s already present, uncovering possibilities as you go. You don’t have to be certain of the entire journey—you simply choose into what resonates, developing what you want to unfold through direct experience.

Happiness (or any other thing you want to feel) is not out there for you to find. These feelings are within you, and you must develop your capacity to discover them, and at the same time choose into what you discover.

Distinguishing the two

The key distinction between Seek-Find and Discover-Choose is this:

• Seek-Find is based on the assumption that what you want is somewhere else, outside of you. It leads to endless searching, hoping that the next job, relationship, or opportunity will finally bring happiness or fulfillment. It often creates frustration because the destination is unclear, and the search never truly ends.
• Discover-Choose recognizes that fulfillment is already present, waiting to be uncovered. Instead of endlessly searching, you engage with what’s right in front of you, revealing possibilities as you go. As you discover what resonates, you actively choose into it, deepening your experience rather than chasing an unknown future.

In short:

• Seek-Find assumes what we want is external and unknown, and leads to endless searching.
• Discover-Choose reveals what we want from within and requires clarity and commitment, and leads to deeper fulfillment.