I am sure you are familiar with the poem by Robert Frost “Road Not Taken.”

In it is a reference to “taking the road less traveled”

The literal meaning of this poem by Robert Frost is pretty obvious. A traveler comes to a fork in the road and needs to decide which way to go to continue his journey. After much mental debate, the traveler picks the road “less traveled by.”

About 30 years ago Scott Peck wrote a best selling book by this title. The opening line of Peck’s book is “Life is difficult.” He goes on to quote the Buddha and the Four Noble Truths. Peck’s book is about accepting responsibility for our lives.

One section is titled “Escape From Freedom.” I love that title because it is such an oxymoron - like spiritual materialism or ordinary magic. Escape from freedom? Isn’t Freedom suppose to be liberate you? How can you escape from it? Another way of putting this is “not accepting responsibility for your life.”

Explain: Escape From Freedom from the book.

We are all responsible for our lives. Throughout our lives and everyday we are forced to make choices. Sometimes painful choices. When we fail to choose, then we let someone or something else choose for us. When we do that we are not being responsible for our lives — we are living as a victim.

“Life always gets harder toward the summit- the cold increases responsibility increases.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

So, it is up to us to choose which fork in the road we take. Are we going to choose the road that leads us to stay stuck in suffering? Or take the one that leads to freedom?

The Buddha was very clear about how to end suffering in this life. He showed us through the Four Noble Truths that our suffering is caused by the clinging, grasping nature of our mind. He also showed us that through meditation we can train our mind and let go of self cherishing. We can develop the enlightened qualities of compassion and wisdom.

So the choices in our lives are almost unlimited. Every day we can choose which road to take.

I know some of you are familiar with Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. His hypothesis is that before we can become self-actualized, all of our basic needs must be met first. He identified them in a hierarchy starting at the bottom with:

• Physiological needs (food, water, air).
• Safety needs.
• Love and belonging needs.
• Esteem needs.
• Self actualization.

I used to believe that. I used to think how can someone who is so poor as to not meet their basic needs every become self-actualized - or in Buddhism we would call enlightened? That was until I met the Tibetan monk Palden Gyatso last week. As you know he spent 33 years as political a prisoner in a Chinese prison where he suffered years of torture and abuse. He reported that 70% of the prison population died of starvation. So I guess it is safe to say that his basics needs were not being met. Yet he never lost his compassion - even for his captors. So I am no longer convinced that basic needs must be met to achieve liberation.

So, the point to all of this is that everyone of us must decide every day which road to take. It is up to us - it is our choice. If we fail to choose, then that is a choice in itself - and someone will choose for us. When we fail to choose then we are stuck in victimhood. Because then we can blame others for our failures.

So, if we take the Buddha’s advice we will take the road less traveled. We will choose to do spiritual practice and work on our minds to transform our body, speech and mind from the afflictive emotions of anger, greed, jealously and lust into the enlightened activities of compassion & wisdom.