Freedom, says Alan Watts, isn't personal but a quality of the world

I don't believe in free will. But I believe in freedom. This isn't a freedom of my personal will to do what I choose. It is the freedom of realizing that I'm part of the unified whole we call the universe. 

This view is scientific. I much prefer it to unscientific notions of free will that basically say, "Because we humans feel that we have free will, it must be so." Unfortunately, feelings have little or nothing to do with truth.

In his book, Determined, Robert Sapolsky laid out the reasons why free will is an illusion. An appealing illusion, to be sure, but an illusion nonetheless. His core conception is similar to a central tenet of Buddhism: causes and conditions result in stuff happening, with the happening producing more causes and conditions that result in additional stuff happening.

We members of Homo sapiens aren't separate from all the happenings of the universe just because we have an evolved brain/mind that can make us feel like we're observing the world from a detached vantage point.

In truth, we're as much a part of nature as a daisy, rock, wolf, or hurricane is. This is so obvious it really shouldn't need to be pointed out. However, because our mind is prone to seeing ourselves as being an isolated "I" who often is at odds with what is not us, we need to be reminded that our sense of selfhood is a sometimes useful falsehood tossed up by evolution. It isn't the way things truly are.

Alan Watts explains this well in his terrific little book, The Wisdom of Insecurity, which he wrote in 1951. I finished re-reading it today. Here's a passage about the nature of freedom.

The meaning of freedom can never be grasped by the divided mind. If I feel separate from my experience, and from the world, freedom will seem to be the extent to which I can push the world around, and fate the extent to which the world pushes me around.

But to the whole mind there is no contrast of "I" and the world. There is just one process acting, and it does everything that happens. It raises my little finger and it creates earthquakes. Or, if you want to put it that way, I raise my little finger and also make earthquakes. No one fates and no one is being fated.

Of course this is a strange view of freedom. We are accustomed to think that, if there any freedom at all, it resides, not in nature, but in the separate human will and its power of choice.

But what we ordinarily mean by choice is not freedom. Choices are usually decisions motivated by pleasure and pain, and the divided mind acts with the sole purpose of getting "I" into pleasure and out of pain. But the best pleasures are those for which we do not plan, and the worst part of pain is expecting it and trying to get away from it when it has come. You cannot plan to be happy.

I'll end with some additional passages from the book about another seeming truth: our awareness of the world in nondual. Meaning, there isn't (1) the world, and (2) our knowledge of the world. What we know of the world is the world. There's just one thing going on, not two.

Certainly most people feel separate from everything that surrounds them. On the one hand there is myself, and on the other the rest of the universe. I am not rooted in the earth like a tree. I rattle around independently. I seem to be the center of everything, and yet cut off and alone.

...Nevertheless, the physical reality is that my body exists only in relation to this universe, and in fact I am as attached to it and dependent on it as a leaf on a tree. I am cut off only because I am split within myself, because I try to be divided from my own feelings and sensations. What I feel and sense therefore seems foreign to me. And on being aware of the unreality of this division, the universe does not seem foreign any more.

For I am what I know; what I know is I. The sensation of a home across the street or of a star in outer space is no less I than an itch on the sole of my feet or an idea in my brain.

In another sense, I am also what I do not know. I am not aware of my own brain as a brain. In just the same way, I am not aware of the house across the street as a thing apart from my sensation of it. I know my brain as thoughts and feelings, and I know the house as sensations. In the same way and sense that I do not know my own brain, or the house as a thing-in-itself, I do not know the private thoughts in your brain.

But my brain, which is also I, your brain and the thoughts within it, as well as the house across the street, are all forms of an inextricably interwoven process called the real world. Conscious or unconscious of it as I may be, it is all I in the sense that the sun, the air, and human society are just as vital to me as my brain or my lungs.

If then, this brain is my brain -- unaware of it as I am -- the sun is my sun, the air my air, and society my society.

...That there is a sun apart from my sensation of it is an inference. The fact that I have a brain, though I cannot see it, is likewise an inference. We know about these things only in theory, and not by immediate experience. But this "external" world of theoretical objects is, apparently, just as much a unity as the "internal" world of experience.

From experience I infer that it exists. And because experience is a unity -- I am my sensations -- I must likewise infer that this theoretical universe is a unity, that my body and the world form a single process. 

...But you will cease to feel isolated when you recognize, for example, that you do not have a sensation of the sky: you are that sensation. For all purposes of feeling, your sensation of the sky is the sky, and there is no "you" apart from what you sense, feel, and know.

This is why the mystics and many of the poets give frequent utterance to the feeling that they are "one with the All," or "united with God," or, as Sir Edwin Arnold expressed it -- Foregoing self, the universe grows I. 

Comments

[Spence Tepper]

Our experience changes. It's not the same even within a day or a moment. We think we are constant but our attention and focus are fluctuating all the time. So the world changes for us all the time. Friends become enemies and then we see that hated enemies are actually loving friends.

True freedom is at least freedom from our limited view and the gaining of a greater view, a more constant view, a broader larger view; a view of our natural place and part of all this and each other.

That view has a lot in it we may not yet experience.

We have a part to play in living a life of greater understanding and hence greater freedom. A life geared to transformation and liberation. Raising our consciousness, with the help of encouragement and good friends, we can emerge from the prison of our own ignorance. And the experience of that is to become more conscious, more aware than we are today. We can be free of the old constraints of our own past ignorance. Then we automatically are a source of peace, happiness and inspiration to those around us.

To gain that view we may need to disentangle ourselves from a lot of misunderstanding, desire, reactivity and attachment. When we see how these warp and blinker our understanding and behavior and even our kindness, we are happy to be rid of them.

Such experiences happen all the time. They are part of our education in this life. And so we seek them, happy to pay the price of giving up what we once identified as me and mine, even right and wrong, to replace these with a greater and deeper awareness and understanding of ourselves, and each other, and life itself, as all members of the same family of life.

[Kranvir]

Gurinder singh dhillon makes sure that you act on feeling and emotion. These attributes can be manipulated by a clever heartless narcissist - just see how much advertising companies spend to make and sell a brand. Gurinder talks nothings on stage and never answers questions from his own knowing and always leans on Sikhism , Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism concepts. This is the sign that he is no God, which in a recent satsang he openly mocks the sangat and admits he is no God. But sangat choose to believe that he still is. Isn't this proof of manipulated emotion, feeling and sheepish behaviour? This implies that the sangats freewill is switched off and they show no objective critical thinking. They are sadly doomed to hell, as that's where the pied piper is taking them - down the cliff. Wake up sangat. It's never too late to live your life on your own script and not of the rssb agenda.

[Kranvir]

Gurinder singh dhillon makes sure that you act on feeling and emotion. These attributes can be manipulated by a clever heartless narcissist - just see how much advertising companies spend to make and sell a brand. Gurinder talks nothings on stage and never answers questions from his own knowing and always leans on Sikhism , Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism concepts. This is the sign that he is no God, which in a recent satsang he openly mocks the sangat and admits he is no God. But sangat choose to believe that he still is. Isn't this proof of manipulated emotion, feeling and sheepish behaviour? This implies that the sangats freewill is switched off and they show no objective critical thinking. They are sadly doomed to hell, as that's where the pied piper is taking them - down the cliff. Wake up sangat. It's never too late to live your life on your own script and not of the rssb agenda.

[Ron E.]

Watts: - “The meaning of freedom can never be grasped by the divided mind. If I feel separate from my experience, and from the world, freedom will seem to be the extent to which I can push the world around, and fate the extent to which the world pushes me around.”

That’s what most people think of as freedom, though forgetting or not seeing that a mind filled with ‘rights’ and ‘permissions’ and the so-called freedoms of speech emanate from a mind suffused with personal, cultural and national ideas and opinions. Freedom of speech can easily become a mode for mis-information, abuse and numerous ‘self’ promoting divisions that negate real freedom.

This is what the mind generally consists of; a whole host of collective and personal data that can only perpetuate a self that consequently feels separate and isolated from the world, other people and from ourselves. The antidote then is meditation; not the usual methods of meditation where there is a ‘me’ meditating, a ‘me’ having various experiences, but the on-going choiceless awareness of allowing the conditioned stream of thoughts to come and go without assigning them to a ‘me’ thinking the thoughts.

In this scenario there is not any ‘one’, any automatous self or me that’s doing the allowing or emptying, but more to do with just seeing, being aware of present moment activity of thought before it habitually becomes part of the process that saturates the mind with the concept of a separate, divisive entity or ‘me’.

[October]

if we do the spiritual dissection of 'free will' rather scientific exploration,it becomes quite straightforward that there is no individual free will. Because then how do the entity God knows what will happen in future so that all events are pre-programmed to will of Creator.

For that reason the concept of Maya(or illusion) is there. As long as we are part of Maya we have no free will because having free will will violate the law of Truth.

From sant mat model, each plane consumes the lower plane in whole. With each ascending plane, Will also notches up to will of higher guarding entity of plane. And to surprise of many, this experience can be experienced in sant mat model. At the top Radhasoami Dham, we do realize that there is no free will but will of Radhasoami Purush.

Sant Mat tries to encompass this truth by putting the term "Mauj" of Radhasoami.

What is Mauj of radhasoami dham? why do we have to accept it and sometimes unwillingly. Because what we have at that level is total wholesome of existence.Point to be understood is that this Level is even higher than plane of Truth(Sachkhand) by two levels Agam and Alakh.

This whole thing do follow logical concepts until there is no concept of concepts(end of causal plane) where all causing agents dissapear and Time reduces to null(end of Kaal).