free will

As one enlightened person put it, enlightenment comes easily but there is a price to pay and that price is that we have to surrender our free will.

More than anything else, our sense of self comes from our feeling of free will; the ability to choose, to make choices. Indeed, in psychology, the ego is seen to sit somewhere between our instinctive drive – our instinctive desires, the basic part of our mind, the id – somewhere between that and our conscience, our super ego that is telling us what is the right thing to do in any situation. And so you see, this free will is needed if our mind is fragmented in different parts puling in different directions, some mechanism is needed to arbitrate between these conflicting desires, and choose. And that mechanism of choice is our free will.

But it is a strange expression is it not: free will. What is it free of? It’s a big problem in philosophy and theology too. In philosophy, there are those that say the world is materialistic and so is our mind, and everything is determined by the physical nature of existence, and therefore even when we appear to be choosing between alternatives, that choice is itself deterministic. And therefore, there is no such thing as free will. It is an illusion.

There are those that say no, the world is not deterministic. That we do have free will, that we make genuine choices. But if we were always to choose what the super ego is saying is the correct thing to do, then that would not be a choice would it? That also would be a determined, a deterministic behaviour.

The sense of having a free will is there because sometimes we choose the right thing to do and sometimes we choose the thing that is coming from a more primitive drive. And what determines which we choose in any situation? The choice will depend much on our conditioning, how strongly we believe the ‘shoulds’ of the super ego. But also how strongly our instinctive drives are operating. There is a tug of war going on between these two energies, and the stronger one in a particular situation wins. So it is not really a free choice, though we like to think that it is.

Perhaps there is a random element, something non-deterministic, something unpredictable. But does randomness constitute free will? I would say not. And these are really the only two possibilities: either our choices are deterministic in their nature, in which case there is no such thing as free will, and in which case morality ceases to be meaningful, or there is some randomness in our apparent choices. That randomness, that unpredictability may appear to be free will, but again, if it is a random process, then there can be no morality, no sense of ‘I’ as the doer making choices.

So in either case, free will and a sense of self that comes from the feeling of free will is all an illusion, and we would do well to drop it all and admit that there is no such thing as free will. Once again, on the way to enlightenment, we have to lose something, but this loss is, as always, the loss of an illusion, a comfortable illusion, an illusion that gives us a sense of power and very much a sense of self, a separate autonomous being. But it is nonetheless an illusion. So let go of this too. This need to feel that one has free will.