Attention & Focus · “You Become What You Hold”
Responsible Choice
To pause at a choice point, consult your feelings and intuition (not just the five-sensory analysis), and choose the response that creates love rather than fear — owning the consequences as your own.
Responsible choice: At a fork, name it. See the real options. Consult feeling and intuition, not just analysis. For each, ask: love or fear? Choose the response that creates love — and that you’re willing to take full responsibility for. Then learn from what follows. (Weigh intuition with reason on high-stakes calls.)
What it is
This is Gary Zukav’s practice for the moment of decision. At a fork — how to respond, what to say, which way to go — you pause and consult your feelings and intuition, not only the five-sensory cost-benefit analysis, and then choose the response that creates love rather than fear, accepting that the consequences are yours.
Zukav defines a responsible choice as one whose consequences you are willing to assume responsibility for, and he ties it to becoming a multisensory human: someone who uses the five senses but also attends to intuitions — hunches and subtle feelings — that the five senses alone can’t justify.
His guidance is that before acting you take the time to discover your real intention and consult what you feel, because every experience presents a responsible choice. The practice trains you to treat the felt sense and the hunch as decision-grade information, alongside reason.
It is free choice exercised consciously (Creation Is Finished), in service of experience and growth (It's All Play), reading the felt/intuitive signal as real data (The Inner Creates the Outer).
The Method
From The Seat of the Soul (Intuition and Choice) and The Mind of the Soul: Responsible Choice:
- Recognize you are at a choice point. Zukav’s frame: every experience presents a responsible choice. Naming the fork — even a small one — pulls it out of autopilot.
- See the options before you. Lay out the realistic responses available in this moment (not in fantasy). Each is a different “current” you could enter.
- Consult feeling and intuition, not just analysis. Beyond the five-sensory pros and cons, ask: what do I sense here? what does my intuition — the subtle hunch, the gut feeling — tell me? As you become multisensory, these signals “about yourself, other people, and situations” carry information reason alone can’t supply.
- Check the intention behind each option. For the response you’re leaning toward, ask whether it springs from love or from a frightened part — and which choice would create love rather than fear (in yourself and the situation).
- Choose, and own the consequence. Make the choice you are willing to assume responsibility for. Responsible choice means no blaming the outcome on others or circumstance — you authored the response.
- Learn from what follows. Zukav holds that multisensory choosing lets you learn faster from painful results and “choose more wisely and with more compassion” next time. Feed the result back in. (Sourcing note: “a choice that creates consequences for which you are willing to assume responsibility,” the five-sensory/multisensory distinction, and “intuitions — its hunches and subtle feelings” are short quotations of Zukav’s phrasing; steps are faithfully paraphrased.)
Source & Lineage
The intuition-and-choice teaching is in Gary Zukav, The Seat of the Soul (1989), and is developed as a stand-alone practice in _The Mind of the Soul: Responsible Choice_ (2003, with Linda Francis).
The “five-sensory vs multisensory human” distinction is Zukav’s signature contribution.
Common refinements
Outsourcing the whole decision to a hunch. Intuition is decision-grade input, not an oracle; pair it with analysis for high-stakes or technical calls.
- Mistaking a frightened part for intuition. Anxiety, craving, and avoidance disguise themselves as “gut feeling.” Feel the body first (see emotional-awareness technique) so you can tell fear from signal.
- Choosing, then disowning the result. That breaks the “responsible” in responsible choice. Own it to learn from it.
- Skipping the love/fear check. “What do I feel like doing” isn’t the question; “what creates love rather than fear” is.
- Refinement: for recurring decisions, journal the choice, the felt signal, and the outcome — calibrate your intuition over time.