Free will and I have had a life-long journey together. For the first forty years, I āknewā I had free will. I could do anything I set my mind to. Such certainty is particularly strong in youth, and naturally so! Around age forty, I began to look for biological evidence of free will. Any clear example not explained by universal biological processes would do.
My doubts grew deeper as I failed to find any unequivocal evidence for free will. I also began noticing various ways the free will ideal serves society. Did I not see this before because it is all too obvious? Honestly, I assume my need to believe I had free will blinded me to the obvious. (See, John Cleese, A Taoist? (p.144) and Beware: the Blind Spot (p.300)
Dream without limit
Thanks to cognition (thought), we can effortlessly dream up solutions to whatever bothers us in real life. We can easily imagine perfect solutions in our mindās eye, yet we are stuck living in our physical realityāthe real world. We are trapped between the real world and a world we envision possibleā¦ the ideal āif onlyā world.
This ideality of our mind vs. the reality of our body is deeply disconnecting, often causing us great stress. No wonder we tightly embrace the free will āsolutionā. āJust do itā is the free will button we push to break the logjam of life. āJust do itā promises to transform the real world into our image of what it should be.
New Yearās resolutions are a straightforward example of how this process plays out. Hopeful ideals prompt us to make our promises for the year to come. Later, when our resolution wavers, we chalk it up to bad luck, poor timing, or human weakness. Any excuse we can dream up will do as long as it lets our belief in free will remain intact. āNext time will be differentā, we tell ourselves. Oddly, we never seem to get it.
The sense of free will, whether implicit or implied, is the result of feeling a real need to resolve a real world issue, combined with an imagined way to make it happen. This is essentially need + thought. As I put it earlier, desire = need + thought. (See How the Hoodwink Hooks, p.100.) Essentially then, free will = need + thought as well. The connection between desire and free will is very close indeed. Among other things, this means that each time we satiate a desire, we automatically reinforce any belief we have in free will. You might say, free will = desire. Emotion, especially need and fear, in concert with thought create our blind spot. Because animals donāt think, they experience no such blind spot. Unlike us, they experience no disconnection between an ideal world and their real world.
The Free Will of āI amā
The observation above didnāt just come out of thin air. Some recent experiences have led me to rethink free will, especially evident in a conversation with Brian, who believes in free will. I told him I found the idea of free will, either explicit or implied, to underlie all affirmational spiritual literature to some extentā¦ including most translations of the Tao Te Ching (i.e., much less than the literal Chinese). However, not believing in free will doesnāt mean I am a Nonbeliever, as it were. As I said, I donāt see any evidence that is not attributable to simpler biological causes. This changed with Brianās comment: āI canāt agree about there being no free will, thatās just where I am at presentā. His words, āI am at presentā prodded me to see free will in a newer and deeper light.
Like Schrodingerās Cat (p.149), free will seems like it is there when you look, otherwise it is in a state of indeterminacy. In other words, saying or thinking āI amā makes the āhalf-dead, half-alive catā of free will come alive. Saying āIā plus ā__(a verb)__ā awakens the sense of free will. The sense of free will doesnāt appear until I think or say āIā. In moments absent of āIā, free will must be indeterminate. In other words, free will manifests itself in the act of observation of āIā. The Zen kÅan (å ¬ę”), āthe sound of one hand clappingā suggests one characteristic of this weirdness. Even better, āIf a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?ā The reality of āIā lies in the thought of āIā. Without the thought, there is no āIā. Likewise, without the listener, there is no sound, and without the eye, there is no color (1).
Now then, what about the existence of free will in other people? It only exists when their subjective experience of āIā brings it alive. Alternatively, and more socially important, free will comes āaliveā only when you feel another person experiences the same quality of being, the āIā, that you do. This makes sense when you consider that society doesnāt regard young children or animals as being self responsible, i.e., of having free will.
In addition, perhaps free will originates not so much in āI amā as in āI desireā. Desire fundamentally determines what we see. The observerās eye that peeks in to see whether the cat is alive or dead is similar to how āBeauty is in the eye of the beholderā. When I am impartial, truly neutral, how can I possibly choose sides and know whether anything is or isnāt ā itās both! In the same way, I know free will is and is not. This is quite a special awareness, for at-the-moment of knowing Nothing, knowing everything comes naturally.
The Arrogance of āI Amā
The perception āI amā also separates the individual from the rest of creation. Each living thing has the innate drive to maintain self-integrity, from the single cell on upā¦ and perhaps on down as well. To āStrive on diligentlyā as Buddha put it (see āā¦ Strive On Diligentlyā, p.218). This intrinsic self does not give itself life. The unique human capacity for creating the illusion of an objective self ā the āI amā ā disunites us emotionally from realityās cosmic background. Subsequently, our innate survival instincts bustle about to shore up and protect that Self-illusion. Chapter 7 sums it up wellā¦
(1) Of course, the physics of sound and color are still there, but the subjective experience of an objective reality is absent when āIā is not present. As chapter 56 has it, This is called profound sameness.