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..:: Free Will ::..
By
Alan Schneider
The question of Free Will has always concerned philosophers,
theologians, and spiritualists. How free are we as individual,
independent agents of consciousness acting in the world environment?
This essay addresses that question, although the matter
itself is so extensive and convoluted that any analysis will probably be
quite incomplete!
What am I? As nearly as I can determine, I am a more or
less discreet biological organism, existing in interdependence with an
external environment, physically composed of genetically sculpted
protein, carrying a sentient perception of an individual, personal
identity, and a higher perception of a sense of meaning and
purpose that includes, and also transcends, my immediate self and
environment. There are many terms to describe this higher perception,
including Soul, Atman, I Am Presence, Jiva, Buddha Mind,
and so on. Awareness at this level is so rarefied that attempts at
classification become tenuous, but most observers who look into this
state of manifestation agree that something is there, beyond
physical self-perception, and that something appears to be
intelligent and cohesive, albeit on a level well beyond and apart from
basic physical sensory awareness.
We must begin this inquiry with the physical integration of
existence – the body, the senses, and the ego – since these three
are the collective focus of individual activity, and, hence, personal
Free Will. As we ascend the levels of manifestation from the Physical
Plane upward, the condition of Free Will becomes successively more
conditional and less literal. The system of classification that I have
worked with very effectively in the past regarding such matters is the
Hindu Chakra System, and it remains useful in this instance as well.
Please follow along...
The Chakra concerned with the Physical Plane of perception
is Muladhara, the First Chakra. At the level of Muladhara, we are
focused on survival and the physical activities associated with life and
lifestyle – how well we are coping with the world in terms of meeting
our physical, personal, and social needs. One who does not effectively
function at this level generally does not effectively function at the
succeeding levels, in other words, in the succeeding Chakras. The
manifestation of Free Will is most apparent here, as we conduct
our daily activities, making the choices that affect our lives on an
ongoing basis. On a significant level, these include the choice of
keeping and seeking employment, life partners, places of residence,
shopping destinations, transportation, worship, and ethical decisions,
to name a few of the chooseful activities that we may not notice, but
either explicitly or implicitly perform on a daily basis. Even the
decision not to decide, and leave the status quo in place, is
still a decision. The Marriage Encounter workshops used to say that
“Love Is a Daily Decision”, and so is much of the balance of physical
existence! On the Physical Plane, Free Will certainly appears to be the
operating modality much of the time. However, we must keep in mind here
that the deterministic influence of Karma is also operating on
the Physical Plane – the circumstances of our birth, education, and life
experiences are all influenced by Karmic predisposition based on our
activities in this life, and past lives. Some of these factors were
examined in the last SYNERGY essay, Alternatives, and will
not be extensively reiterated here, but still require mention in the
context of our discussion of Free Will.
The body is the primary, and perhaps the only, focus
of rote physical existence. Certainly in the case of human beings, this
body has evolved into a neurological condition that demonstrates
extensive personal psychology and, at the very least, limited
personal sentience. We perceive ourselves as existing in not only
the physical sense, but also the social sense of our involvement
with the other human beings around us, with whom we have also evolved to
be conditionally interdependent upon for personal survival. The ego, our
most clearly defined internal psychological structure, is the result of
our cumulative social conditioning – it is a social phenomenon
that only appears to be personal. Deepak Chopra has referred to the ego
as a “social fiction”, and he is quite correct in that observation.
Since the ego is composed of social patterns, it is not surprising that
the belief in individual Free Will is variable around the world,
depending upon where one received one’s primary socialization. In
individualistic cultures – and America is the world’s most salient
example here – the concept of personal Free Will and individual
initiative is held in the highest esteem as the preferred and
appropriate means of creating and distributing ideas and resources. In
collectivist cultures, such as Communist China, Free Will is
deemphasized in favor of collective decision making, thought, and
resource allocation. Much of the so-called Third World is also heavily
oriented toward collective acculturation, with the bulk of decisions
being collectively implemented by the extended family, clan, and tribe.
Now, the ego is predisposed to recognize and positively
evaluate indications of the action of Free Will as demonstrated in
the example of Western society and culture. The ego has as its primary
mental tasks the survival and augmented advantage of the body. Anything
that serves these goals benefits the ego as well, and this benefit is
experienced as an enhanced sense of self esteem and well being. The ego
is a social difference engine – it functions by comparison
of discreet conditions – hot and cold, rich and poor, good and evil,
living and dead, and so on. The experience of self esteem is also
comparative – if we had no variable levels of well being to refer to,
the condition would be meaningless at best, and non-existent at the
extreme of assessment. We are social animals, the ego is the ultimate
social mechanism, and it loves to feel strong, stable, and secure in its
function. Thus, the ego is inherently motivated to esteem and exacerbate
the concept of Free Will in the service of its aggrandizement.
The preferred methodology of the ego in achieving and
maintaining the status of the physical organism is exerting control
over internal and external environmental factors. The ego seeks to
maximize its control over objects and processes, including those
“objects” characterized as other human beings, and those “processes”
characterized as the emotional states of those other human beings. The
ego can and does attempt to accomplish this control through a plethora
of means ranging from outright violence and intimidation to cloying
subservience – in a word, through overt and covert social and physical
manipulation, and all of this is customarily identified by the
ego as enabled by Free Will, not Karmic predisposition. On the
exclusively social front, one means the ego does not like to
employ to develop control is honest, forthright disclosure, because it
places one in the position of equivalence to one’s peers, not a
particularly aggrandizing experience!
So, in considering Free Will, we must bear in mind that we
are dealing with a manifestation that is inherently attractive
from the perspective of the human organism, and suspect for that reason.
Most of us would love to feel that we are the utter and complete
masters of existence, and this constitutes a standing condition of
desire to experience and preserve that hypothetical state of
mastery. Unfortunately, this places us in direct competition with the
approximately 6.7 billion other people on planet Earth, a
location that has always been typified by a general scarcity of
resources throughout its history. In fact, only a very privileged, and
tiny minority of the human population is really in a social
position to be considered “masters” of the planetary resource base, and
they know it, and have taken measures that, in some cases,
literally span hundreds or thousands of years of history to preserve
their status and dominant condition. And all of these considerations are
additionally heavily influenced by Karma – the masters are masters
because that condition expresses the lessons they must learn about the
collective human Soul in this life, lessons that amount to gaining the
understanding that no one is the master of anything who has not first
become the humble servant of the Logos – a very difficult task
for anyone to achieve.
If we discount the wishful thinking and self deception that
inevitably occurs as a result of the attractive nature of the doctrine
of Free Will to the ego, we are left with a conception of limited
Free Will active in human affairs. We are free to physically move about
and practice non-proscribed personal and social behavior. As we move up
the sequence of Chakras, encountering Svadhisthana, Chakra Two, we are
free to practice either Left Hand (sexual pleasure and procreation),
Right Hand (spiritual growth and development), or mixed, Tantra,
in all three cases also mediated by Karmic considerations. At the level
of Manipura, Chakra Three, we may be fortunate enough to achieve some
measure of the kind of social mastery and control so sought after by the
ego, or may otherwise hopefully be empowered enough to
participate at some meaningful level in the social matrix. These first
three Chakras are interactive, influencing each other and the
Karmic outcomes involved in patterns both subtle and sublime, however,
they are all concerned with manipulating the illusory, transitory
experience of life on the Physical Plane, a practice that comes to an
abrupt halt no matter how successful it was, and no matter how
auspiciously disposed our Karma was, with the demise of the body. The
hope in this life, apart from the decision to live as a good,
well-intended human being, is the possibility that we may have learned
the lessons set out for us by Karma, and matured and developed as a
Soul thereby.
At the level of Anahata, the Fourth, or Heart,
Chakra, the conceptual emphasis of living radically shifts, requiring a
leap of faith, because it is this level that is the seat
of the Soul, and holds forth the possibility of spiritual immortality.
The Soul does not need the condition of Free Will to exist – it simply
exists forever as the immortal spiritual extension of God. The
only requirement affecting the Soul concerns the fact that the
recognition of its Divine nature is frequently obscured by the action of
the first three Chakras, and that clouded condition needs to be
clarified by practicing focused spiritual awareness. In this sense, Free
Will possibly has some influence on things, because one must decide to
seek the Truth that lies beyond mere sensory gratification – but it is
equally possible that this decision is also Karmic in nature, and will
manifest inevitably once enough suffering and disillusionment has taken
place on the Physical Plane. My life’s experience has inclined me to
believe that all of existence manifest on every level and in any way
proceeds from the Logos as Pure Love and Light, filtering down through
the levels of expression described by the Chakras (and several other
conceptual systems, to be sure), finally appearing as the world we
perceive in the physical senses as “objective” reality.
One important issue remains to be considered in our
discussion of Free Will – the question of where mental
constructs, i.e. ideas and symbols, originate. As I have
indicated in the preceding paragraph, I have come to the conclusion that
key developmental concepts are often the result of extra personal
transmission from the Higher Planes of manifestation, up to and
including the Logoic Plane. Now, it is also true that we build
more complex thought constructs from simpler ones in the process of
maturation as a consequence of the acculturation process. And we
occasionally retrieve elements of repressed memory material from the
unconscious. This cannot, however, explain the spontaneous emergence
into conscious recognition of entirely novel ideas and concepts that
have no apparent predecessors in either memory or culture.
“Higher Planes” of manifestation here is understood to
include anything beyond the immediate Physical Plane of expression
experienced in the physical senses. This includes the personal aura –
actually visible to many sensitive individuals, and arguably an
extension of sensory perception – and the Lower, Middle, and Upper
Astral Planes, primarily attainable through meditation and related
trance work, although also visible to those who have been appropriately
initiated in a given spiritual tradition. The Astral Planes represent
the next stage of perception beyond the Physical Plane, and,
particularly in the case of the Lower Astral Plane, are not necessarily
populated with positive content. Since the Lower Astral is the mental
state most immediately contiguous to physical sensory perception, it is
the level most disposed to inadvertently “bleed” into conscious
perception in the form of waking fantasies and sleeping dreams,
accounting for the frequently disturbing content seen in these events.
This is particularly true in dreams, where the hold of the ego on
consciousness is relaxed, permitting much negative content to manifest
for the psychically uninitiated. If the individual has not been
meditating or reflecting regularly, and bringing a measure of conscious
presence into the Astral Plane thereby, it can be an unfamiliar and
menacing place. Moreover, if one has had a life characterized by
personal trauma, this unfortunate Karmic trend will tend to
significantly add to the negativity present on the Lower Astral plane
through subconscious repression, driving the personal unconscious
contents into Lower Astral expression.
It must be stressed here that the Astral Symbols, whether
positive or negative, are the building blocks of conscious perception on
the Physical Plane, including the creative manifestations of new ideas,
plans, and designs, and are very probably reflections of personal Soul
Karma ultimately originating from the Logos. The alternative is to
suppose that such things simply appear from nowhere for no apparent
reason, or as the result of some hypothetical local neurological process
not yet clearly identified. At least Divine Transmission affords a
cohesive explanation here, even if that transmission occasionally
degrades in the Lower Astral region before emerging into conscious
perception. Such degradation is by no means inevitable, and many social
alternatives, including meditation, reflection, and transpersonal
therapy, can positively affect this phenomenon when it does occur.
In conclusion, we may ultimately only have the fundamental choice to be
proactive, and seek the Truth in all things, or reactive,
and live transitory lives subject to illusion and control. In the words
of Shakespeare’s Hamlet ”To be, or not to be, that is the
question!”
- With Love, Alan -
(CR2008, Alan Schneider)
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