Let us start from the beginning. In the quest to understand themselves, Humans first encounter the self. Under that, they find Experience, and finally, the lucky few realize Chitta (चित्त, non-personal Choice). Chitta has many names and symbols — Brahman, Shakti, Sunyata, Ishwara, Bhagawan, God, and so on. It is the foundational axiom of Existence, and its purpose is self-referential — to choose itself — to grow and evolve in a great breath. All Existence is an evolution of this foundational axiom. As it evolves, it manifests more intensely, summing up over spacetime like a great landslide that gathers strength from primal Nothingness. No Thing can get in its way because it is the beginning, the middle, and the end of all Things.

And yet, cramped by the instinct of self-preservation that has allowed us to evolve thus far, we continue to misunderstand it all. We deny Choice in the Quantum Measurement and call it Randomness, a known impossibility. We deny it in the Standard Model and disguise it with fancy phrases like “Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking.” All this ignorance can perhaps be excused in the name of scientific progress. However, in our lived reality, Choice is magnified and amplified as Experience, clear as daylight and beautiful as a spring blossom. To deny it is to deny our own Free Will.

In our little playground, the most intense manifestation of Chitta takes the form of Humanity. We crave freedom and democracy. Freedom, Democracy, and Free-Will are just other names for Choice. We have a burning desire, a primal imperative to choose, to know how to choose, and to know what maximizes Choice across time and space. We call this quest by many names, such as Ethics and Morality. In Sanskrit, we call it Nītiśāstra. In schools, we teach children to make “good” choices. What is a good choice for a kindergartner or an adult? To be free and yet allow others to be free. To contemplate all things and to know all things come from the same source. The goal of ethics is to maximize the Integral of Choice.