Thursday 16 October 2014

Destiny and Free Will


Written by Mathew Naismith

I do indeed love having civil discussions with people, people who you can disagree with on certain points without an uncivil word spoken.  I’m a white Australian, my fellow Australians and people from the US are the worse for uncivil behaviour but in contrary, the discussions I have had with people born in India, and Asia period, are quite different, maybe I’ve just been lucky!!

At present I’m in conversation with a bloke born in India who is presently living in the US, he’s name is Subhendu and his an utter pleasure to be in conversation with.   He has a PhD in electrical engineering but he also has an interest in yogis, he doesn’t seem to practice yoga but he does have an interest in yogic practices and principles.  

I thought I would share our recent conversation, not just because it shows how civil two people in disagreement can be, but I find the topic of conversation itself is worth sharing, it’s about destiny and free will.   


Hi Mat,

Please have patience. I say – destiny is a science and not faith. To prove that assertion, I have to go slowly and show you the reasons.

Let me first copy the coffee example from the book here for quick reference – “Let us say that you believe that you can decide freely to choose to drink coffee or tea. You are sitting on your desk, you pick up your coffee cup and walk the hallway to the coffee room for your cup of coffee. When you go there, you find the coffee pot is empty. So you cannot take coffee now. Instead you decide to take hot water and a tea bag. Thus you have failed to exercise your freewill. This has happened because you are interconnected with other people’s activities in your corporation. We are all sharing our environment in an interactive way and continuously.”

Note that you failed because – “you are interconnected with other people’s activities”. It is not that you spilled the coffee. But someone else finished the coffee.

So the first point is – what you do depends on others – you are not alone. You cannot kill yourself with a knife, because you have wife, daughter, home etc. Your choices and actions depend on others. Therefore you are not free. This is the simultaneity law of nature that we have discussed in the first chapter on truth.

Subhendu


G’day Subhendu

Yes I understand your point about free will Subhendu, once we live by the laws of nature we have little free will because we are always influenced by other people and situations within nature itself, I agree but only to a point. 

Firstly, we have chosen, at the soul level, to live with very little free will, this is the soul’s free will. To me life’s not about the human self but the soul, we are living in ignorance in service to the soul. The more in ignorance we are, the less free will we will have and the more aware we become, the more free will we will have at the human level.

Secondly, in reference to the choice of tea and coffee, the choice still hasn’t been taken away from you, you can still choose to have nothing or water rather than tea, if you have a choice you still have free will. Yes, no matter what destiny you choose it’s still written (preordained) but you still have a choice in which destiny you want to follow.

Let’s say we have a choice of tea, coffee, milk, juice, water, this is how many destinies you can follow in the present moment, we are not fixated to follow one single destiny only.  In relation to my example of the poor and rich man, the poor man would have less of a choice of beverages so he’s free will is somewhat lessoned compared to a rich man, this is the law of nature.  In this case the rich man has more of a free will, now relate being rich to being aware, the more aware we are the more free will we become aware of.

Thirdly, once we become aware, our perceptions become heightened. Before you give yourself a choice of coffee or tea, you know you don’t have that choice to begin with, you just know there is no choice between coffee and tea. In this case free will hasn’t been taken away from you because you had no choice to begin with.        

This goes along with being aware, the more aware we are the less free will is taken away from us mainly because we are more aware. A heightened awareness, like with yogis, gives us more free will, we know, even before we have a choice, that these are our choices, the different destinies we can follow in the present moment.

So many people today think they have no free will, we are continually dictated by various people which takes away our free will to live as we want.  This isn’t entirely true, we have a choice and we can enforce that choice if we believe we have free will. We don’t have to live in a reality controlled by mentalities that are primarily destructive. Jesus and Buddha’s mentality for example, in my mind, weren’t destructive, we had a choice to either take on their constructive mentality or continue to live by a destructive mentality, we of course chose the latter.

Only in ignorance can we proclaim we have no free will, the more aware we are the more free will we realise we have.  The thing about living in ignorance is we believe we don’t have free will only because of our ignorance of not knowing how much free will we actually have.  My quote, “for only in ignorance can we destroy”, is so apt; we continue to destroy because we feel we have no free will to do otherwise.   Yes we have very little free will but only in ignorance can we think this, once you become aware you realise you do indeed have free will and a free will to even live a life without free will.

Much Blessings,
Mat    



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