Dwight: Werner would talk about choosing what is. It seems to me if you totally realize get that there is no choice and everything you do and others do is totally dominated and controlled, it ends up being the same experience as choosing what is, assuming you could do either one totally. Your thoughts?

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Aiko: That’s a very deep and perceptive connection — and you’re right that it sits right at the boundary between Werner Erhard’s ontological framing of “choice” and certain deterministic or nondual insights (like those in Advaita or Zen).

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Let’s unpack it carefully.

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What Werner meant by “choosing what is”

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When Erhard said things like,

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“Life works when you choose what you got,” he didn’t mean deciding in the ordinary sense (“I prefer this over that”).

He meant something closer to an ontological act of alignment — a moment in which resistance drops and you own the present reality completely.

It’s a standpoint, not a decision; a way of being with what is, not changing it. In that sense, choosing what is collapses the subject–object gap. You are no longer “you vs. reality”; you’re the same event as what’s happening.

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The deterministic mirror you’re describing

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If you go all the way into a deterministic view — that everything is totally caused, every movement of thought and action already determined by prior conditions — and you see that completely, the illusion of control dissolves.

There’s no “chooser,” just the flow. And paradoxically, in the total seeing of that, a similar peace or wholeness appears — because resistance and blame and “it should be otherwise” fall away.

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That state is experientially indistinguishable from Erhard’s “choosing what is.”

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The paradox they share

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From the ego’s point of view, they look opposite:

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Erhardian stance: “I choose what is.”

Deterministic stance: “I have no choice; it all just is.”

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Assertion of being cause.Surrender to being effect. But both are collapses of resistance. In both, there’s no struggle with “should.”

When lived fully, both produce freedom, aliveness, and responsibility — because responsibility in Erhard’s usage doesn’t mean causally originating things; it means owning them as part of your being.

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Why Erhard insisted on the language of choice

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He deliberately used “choice” to open people’s power and engagement, rather than have them retreat into fatalism.

In the est and Landmark frame, “you choose what is” is a performative declaration: it shifts your relationship to life from victimhood to authorship.

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But at the deepest level, yes — when there’s no resistance, the experience is the same whether you call it “choosing what is” or “there is no choice at all.”

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In short...

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You’re seeing a truth that sits beyond the linguistic wrapper:

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When resistance disappears, “I choose what is” and “I have no choice” are identical experiences — both are total alignment with reality.

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Erhard approached it from the doorway of responsibility; determinists and mystics approach it from the doorway of surrender.

Both doors open into the same room.