Free Will, Determinism - or Both?
An Essay about the Paradox of Free Will in a Determined World.
A classic debate in philosophy and theology is between the ideas of Free Will and Destiny. In theology, this tension appears in our sovereignty as co-creators of this world in the likeness of God who are endowed with free will on the one hand, and God’s almightiness and divine plan that we could never tarnish on the other. In more modern, scientific terms, it appears in the idea of determination of the world by natural laws versus our felt sense that we can make our own choices and deny our programming.
Time only seems linear in the third dimension, in reality it’s like a circle, the end and the beginning being the same Singularity, the eternal Now. And everything is present already, from beginning to end. But there are multiple timelines, paths one can take, because all potential futures exist.
What is it? Are we mere puppets of destiny, of larger forces? And if so, then why are we here to experience this? Doesn’t that make this whole thing rather meaningless and perhaps cruel? If we are mere billiartballs struck eternities ago that will have a brief determined existence only to fade out into nothingness all the while having an illusion of choice that keeps us trying to maximize pleasure and minimize pain but having no real say in the matter? This idea doesn’t feel good to me, and with me many others. And as I have argued in another article on the Emotional Guidance System: when something doesn’t feel right, it usually isn’t right. But scientific evidence points to this determined and predictable nature of our universe and since we seem to be part of this universe, how could we defy the laws of physics?
Indeed, scientific consensus appears to be that free will doesn’t exist. More and more books from neuroscience and other articles are emerging that attempt to imagine a world without free will. This is - suprisingly - pretty hard, even for those hardcore materialist scientists, since it seems necessary to believe in free will to have moral responsibility. If there’s no free will — if everything is already determined anyway — why would one even try to be good? When people stop believing they are free agents, they stop seeing themselves as blameworthy for their actions and then they have an excuse to give into their lower nature and they lose their sense of possibility and empowerment. But at the same time it can mean ultimate freedom. Why? Because if there’s no free will, we no longer have to do anything. We no longer have to worry about doing something “right” or “wrong”, we no longer have to exert any effort, we can just do what we feel like and let everything go. Now what if we can have the cake and eat it too? What if we can have both absolute free will, and yet we are not to blame for anything that happens? What if there can be both absolute potentiality and empowerment and yet no effort, no burden? Here, I will attempt to convince you that this is actually the case.
Who are We?
To do this, a few things need to be in place. We need to understand, first of all, who we really are. I will probably write more in depth articles about this subject in the near future but I will lay out the basics here. What we normally think of as being ourselves are our bodies, and our minds. We identify ourselves with the images we see of our body and the I-thoughts that appear in our minds. In Indian philosophy, they call this part of the mind — that constantly spits out I-thoughts: “I want this.” “I don’t like that.” — the ahamkar(a). This literally means aham (I) + kar(a) (maker), the I-maker or the ego. The mind has three other parts according to this model: the buddhi, the manas, and the chitta. The chitta is the awareness, the manas is the repository of memories and associations, and the buddhi is the discerning intellect which makes wisdom possible. The buddha, therefore, was one who was renowned for having perfected this ability of discernment. The ahamkara assumes authorship and responsibility over all the actions of the manas, the buddhi, the senses and organs of action: “I see this” “I do this.” “I think this” “I am this” and so on. This is what gives you your sense of agency. But this is not actually your real self. This is merely an aftereffect of your own mind that labels some things as “me” and others as “not me”. The real cause, the real You lies deeper than that, beyond that.
So if we are not what we think we are, what are we? The answer is quite simple really, we are what we are. We are Consciousness. How do we know this? Well, we can ask what can we take away, and still remain ourselves, this is called the “neti, neti” (not this, not that) method that ancient sages have used to determine what is not-self. That which remains after everything else that is not us has been taken away must be ourselves. We can take our thoughts away and still be there; we can take our emotions away and still be there; we can take parts of our body off and still be there. In fact, Near-Death Experiences show that we can even be physically dead and still experience - often even in an heightened way: people afterwards actually report having felt more alive than ever! This would be strange if our consciousness was produced in our (dead) brains/bodies. This happens because our brains are actually filters for experience - like radio’s that attune you to a certain frequency band of the spectrum of existence - and consciousness is a field - the most fundamental field, more fundamental than matter, as quantum mechanics shows. So we can even take away our bodies and still be there! This more or less seperate unit of consciousness that remains - that you are - is called the soul. Because you cannot take your consciousness away and still be there. Even though it seems like your consciousness is taken away in sleep, that is not really the case because you can have dreams and be aware of them, so there must still be a presence there.
This bubble of consciousness called the soul however is not really any different than the rest of the field of consciousness, it is just turned in upon itself so that it feels like it has a seperate existence, but actually it is one with the whole of consciousness, this can be experienced in mystical states and this knowledge is captured in the ancient vedic mantra “Atman [the individual soul] is Brahman [God, the field of consiousness, the universal soul]”.
Do we have Free Will?
Now that we know who we are, we can answer the question: “Do we have free will?”. Science would say “no”. Why? Because it is materialistic. Science only recognizes the visible realm of cause and effect, and everything in the realm of cause and effect is subject to deterministic laws, therefore we are subject to deterministic laws. This is the same reason why it cannot explain consciousness, — and love for that matter — consciousness is not measureable. It’s the invisible fundament of the world, its substance (which literally means to stand under). Everything is made out of consciousness. Matter is just condensed consciousness. Our 3D realm of cause and effect — what we call the world — cannot facilitate free will because of its temporal linearity. Free will needs an action to be able to be started from anywhere at any time, it needs something to be able to come out of “nothing” and linear time always presupposes that the origin of something lies in its past. But if everything that happens is caused by something before it, you’ll have infinite regress which doesn’t make sense because causality presupposes a beginning. Which is why philosophers like Aristotle proposed a “First Cause”, which in religious terms would be God, and in modern scientific terms would be the Singularity before the Big Bang (which are actually the same thing). This Singularity, according to science, would be beyond time and space, and would create time and space. It would be infinitely small and would contain infinite potential, all the energy of the universe. What’s the difference between that and a transcendent (beyond time and space) and immanent (permeating time and space) God, an infinite being with infinite power and potential? Very little indeed, only perhaps that the Singularity is not a Being, it is more like a dead object, it’s not intelligent, not alive like God is. It has no consciousness, no love. And science gets to this view of God because it doesn’t recognize consciousness, it only recognizes unconscious objects, it leaves half of the equation out. It recognizes the quantum field, but not the qualium field — and not the Conciousness that perceives both the quanta and the qualia.
So if you trace back causes far enough you’ll get to the Big Bang or God, something infinite beyond time & space. But if it is truly beyond time and space, it must be present everywhere and everywhen. Therefore it is also present now and in you. This is the God-spark within. This is our true Self, the Atman that is one with Brahman. This is what gives us our free will. And this is how man is “made in the image of God”: we share in His creative power. We are co-creators of this reality. Microcosms of the Macrocosm, like an infinite fractal. But how does this work?
The Mechanics of Co-Creation
First of all we have to understand that time is an illusion of a lower dimension. We’re not really in time, we’re in eternity. We’re already beyond time & space. We’re in the eternal Now. It’s only that our character that we play is in spacetime and we usually identify with this character. In the same way that in a movie, things appear to change but ultimately, in the end, we’re still in the same theater, watching the same screen. Time seems real only because we believe in the movie. And to the extent we are identified with this character and believe in the thoughts and affects of the ego-mind, we are determined by them. Only when we start to take the position of observer of our thoughts do we get some distance from them and with this distance comes freedom. This is one of the benefits of meditation: to develop distance from the ego’s patterns and therefore to become more peaceful and free. From here, from the level of the Soul, or the “I AM” presence — where you do not identify with anything but you just are — you can start to reprogram your egomind by choosing different actions than your habitual inclinations would go out to. But you can move even further to the level of the Atman, the Real Self. This is where you open your heart to the presence of God and peaceful love and light starts flooding into your consciousness from the Source. What you’re doing here is tapping into the Zero-Point field, which is the quantum field but at its level of pure potentiality. You’re silencing your mind-waves to the point that your consciousness becomes so still that it becomes One with this Zero-Point quantum field. Your consciousness returns to the Nothingness of pure potentiality, de-collapsing the quantum wave function that created a particular instantation of a world, freeing up the energy from it, and making you able to recreate your world anew, to manifest, to re-dream this dream. These states of mind correlate with delta and theta brainwaves, and this is the state we return to in deep sleep and why we feel so rejuvenated afterwards. So there are levels, degrees of free will, there’s little free will on the level of the ego, where you’re basically determined by every thought, impuls, emotion; more free will on the level of the soul, where you can reprogram your ego and make choices against your nature; and there’s high levels of free will on the level of the Atman, where you can re-dream the world to make drastic changes. All of these levels are present simultaneously. You’re now in and beyond space & time. So in this sense, you’re already enlightened. But if we just gain this knowledge intellectually but do not deeply embody it, this knowledge doesn’t really do a lot for us. Then we’re still stuck in the ego level but knowing that part of us is beyond it. Spiritual practice aims at Self-Realization, which is the full integration of this knowledge of the Real Self.
So in this way, our consciousness alters our quantum field which expresses itself through our aura, classically illustrated by the halo around enlightened sages. What we’re sending out are actually waves of information, of love/light. This information is then (subconsiously) being read by the field of the environment and other conscious agents, prompting them to act in various ways depending on what energies are in their their own field: karma, proclivities, trapped emotions, thoughts, chemicals and so on. These form your overal vibration. The “Law of Attraction” works on this principle as well: you attract what lessons are in your field and you attract people from a similar frequency range. Beside meditation, there are other ways to help you heal and raise your frequency so that you naturally attract more love and success in your life like balancing your chakras, releasing old trapped emotions, re-programming your belief system, disciplining your mind, being healthy and working out and so on. This is what “manifestation” is about.
Fate, Destiny, and Free Will
Now let us return to the start. One question we asked was: “Since we seem to be part of this universe, how could we defy the laws of physics?” Well the answer is we can and cannot. Our Real Self is beyond time and space, is the proverbial guy in the cinema watching/creating the movie, this Self is One with all, with God, with the Singularity, and is therefore the Source from which space and time and its laws spring, this is pure undifferentiated consciousness — the level of the Father in Christianity. From here, from the Unmanifest, we are absolutely free and we can dream any world we want. The Son, our character that is in space and time, cannot defy the laws of physics, nor could Jesus. But, as quantum mechanics shows, the laws of physics are not what we thought they were. In fact, the laws of physics themselves enable freedom if understood correctly, as sketched out here, if it is realized that “I (the Son) and the Father are one” (John 10:30). Jesus could only do his miracles because he knew his Unity with the Father, with God.
Furthermore, free will is a necessarily unperceivable phenomenon because if it were to be in time and space, it would necessarily be determined. It takes place beyond time and space and orchestrates the way things interact in time and space itself. Spacetime is the realm of effects, not of causes. If time is an illusion, then so is causation. It is real from the perspective within the dream, but does one frame of a movie really “cause” another?
Another good metaphor is the lucid dream: when you’re dreaming you can change the dream, but only when you awake in the dream, when you realize your Real Self — the Dreamer — and stop believing that you are the character in the dream. After that, you have “power over the matrix” like Neo. But the difference between a dream and reality is that reality is a more collective and stubborn dream. Not only do we have to deal with our own imaginations, but we also have to deal with those of others, it’s like multiplayer dreaming. As such collective agreements are made (out of free will) and certain rules are put in place, environments are agreed upon. But those environments do not necessarily “really exist” objectively, they are rendered by each consciousness in the same way that in a multiplayer video game environments are created on every screen seperately and do not exist somewhere independently “out there”, they only exist virtually.
And then what is fate? What is destiny? If we are supposedly creating our own reality? We have chosen to play a certain game, we have chosen a certain storyline, this is destiny, it’s your destination. It is like the blueprint of your life, just like an acorn has the destiny to become a oak tree. Free will is used to make particular choices in that path, there are many ways to become an oak tree, many ways to grow. Fate is when you use your free will to try to run from your destiny and you find out you can’t. Then it is fated. It is like karma. It is about the the universe balancing itself out when you do not take the path that was destined for you.
Now can we change our destiny? Yes. There’s absolute free will at the same time as there’s predestination. Whatever you decide now will turn out to have been predestined. But you are free, actually, to do what you want in this moment if you understand the Truth of who you are. If you are not simply conditioned by the egomind’s patterns of behaviour and you abide in the Eternal Now, the 5d quantum world which exists beyond time and space. That place cannot be entered while holding on to your past, your problems, your name, your plans, your pain, or emotions. You cannot enter there as somebody. You must enter as no body, as Nothingness. This Gateless Gate will lead you to freedom. That freedom then, is what allows you to change your destiny by reprogramming your quantum field. It will have been your destiny to have changed your destiny, but none the less, that is the freedom, and that is the paradox.
And now, to end with our promise: what if we can both have our cake and eat it too? “What if we can have both absolute free will, and yet we are not to blame for anything that happens? What if there can be both absolute potentiality and empowerment and yet no effort, no burden?” The Real Self, that is One with the Absolute, the Source, the All, has absolute free will because it is pure potentiality and one can always return to this state and abide in it even while going through normal life. And it is also exactly in this state that there is no effort, no burden, no blame. Effort, burdens and blame are a product of the ego, of believing in the false self, of straying from your path, from the Dao, the Way. When you’re identified with the person in the dream, that person struggles. Especially when it is a bad dream like it is for a lot of people these days. But in a sense that’s good, because it’s easier to wake up from a bad dream, and that’s all we need to do. When you realize you’re the Dreamer, your burden and your efforts and your blames suddenly disappear. So enjoy your cake! You don’t have to renounce it, you can eat it too! As long as you realize you’re the One Consciousness creating the cake. Enjoy Yourself! ❤
