free will

Elsewhere I have talked about our feeling of free will and our need to feel in control of our life. And here I want to talk about it again, for it is one of the most fundamental comfort blankets, but also, ultimately, an illusion.

With this illusion we feel we are making choices, that we have choice, and that through these choices our life unfolds in one direction or another, with different consequences emerging as a result of our choices. And this is our concept of free will. But look at what it entails. First of all we have to be separate – a separate autonomous being, making its own choices, influenced perhaps by the rest of existence, but separate from it. And then of course, we must have some metrics by which we make choices, and that fundamental metric is one of good and bad. Choices are based on a sense of morality, and with that, we will almost inevitably, from time to time, choose something that we feel to be bad. And with this comes shame, guilt and all the agony associated with those emotions. And even if we manage always to choose the right, the good, in some saintly way, the chances are we are doing that from the space of ego: we feel good about ourself, as a separate person, because of our right choices. So it reinforces the ego and makes us feel all the more separate from existence. And that separation ultimately is the source of all our sorrow, for with it we feel incomplete, clearly. And that sense of incompleteness can never be filled whilst the ego is alive.

You can start to undermine your sense of free will and choice in various ways. One thing I like to suggest is to adopt a random method for making choices: carry a coin in your pocket and whenever a choice arises, toss the coin, and follow what the coin says.

Another way you can begin to undermine your sense of free will, is to begin to analyse it. If you are a separate system of thought, with information coming from the rest of the world, plus some sense of morality against which you are making decisions, then either these decisions are made in a very mechanical way – this is the good thing to do so I am doing this, but a computer can do that. There is nothing free about that. Everything is a conditioned response. Or if your choices are not made in that way, how do they arise? You are choosing something that is bad, that is wrong. Why would you do that?  There must be some random, or perhaps self-destructive, element in that decision making process. But if you were truly free, surely that would not be the case. You are under the thumb of that random or self-destructive element.

So very simply, free will cannot exist and indeed does not exist. It is one of the greatest illusions that we humans live under. And it is one of the greatest comfort blankets, for it feels we are in control of our life whilst we have this illusion. But we are not, and you can see this very simply, whenever something goes wrong for you in your life: whenever you get sick, or lose your job, or a relationship that you enjoy breaks up. Did you choose that? Were you in control? Did you have free will? Any honest enquiry will begin to show that you are not in control of your life.

So surrender this comfort blanket, for it is an illusion. And come to live in reality: it is far more beautiful anyway – a challenge perhaps, to surrender, to not feel in control of your life – but nevertheless a beautiful way to be in the world, and in the end, a truthful one.