Free Will and Nonduality

The topic for today was suggested by a seminary professor who emailed me. He wrote:

“Here’s a question I wonder if you tackle in your works or are interested in addressing: what does seeing through the illusion of the self entail for the concept of free will? In his book Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism, Jay Michaelson calls free will the last gasp of unenlightened thinking. The logic seems pretty clear: if there is no agent, how can there be agency? In the end, one might join with Julian of Norwich when she says of God, “There is no doer but He.” …. So I’d be curious to hear where your experiences and reflections have taken you on this question, if you are willing to share in a podcast or blog post at some point.”

In this episode I address the topic of free will within nonduality.

Transcript

Free Will and Nonduality

The topic for today was suggested by a seminary professor who emailed me. He wrote:

“Here’s a question I wonder if you tackle in your works or are interested in addressing: what does seeing through the illusion of the self entail for the concept of free will? In his book Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism, Jay Michaelson calls free will the last gasp of unenlightened thinking. The logic seems pretty clear: if there is no agent, how can there be agency? In the end, one might join with Julian of Norwich when she says of God, “There is no doer but He.” …. So I’d be curious to hear where your experiences and reflections have taken you on this question, if you are willing to share in a podcast or blog post at some point.”

There are so many ways to come at this question. I have been fascinated by recent research in neuroscience that reveals that our body has already started to act before the brain is conscious of the decision to act. The unconscious body/mind seems to commit to certain decisions before the person becomes conscious of having made a decision. The delay between starting to act and deciding to act is brief, only a second or so, but that is enough time to call into question whether we actually make decisions or whether they are made for us and are just along for the ride. In other words, if we actually have free will or whether it is an illusion. 

I am not a neuroscientist and am not competent to judge such scientific experiments.  As a seminary trained pastor I have explored the theological implications of free will. The divide between Calvinism and Arminianism runs straight through the issue of free will. During my Calvinist phase I remember reading Martin Luther’s book On the Bondage of the Will, and shaking my head in agreement. The absence of free will, at least insofar as we have the ability to choose to be saved or to do good, is the foundation for the Calvinist doctrines of predestination, unconditional election, irresistible grace and total depravity. 

I am not a Calvinist any longer, but I still consider myself a Christian. Furthermore I – insofar as I still use that pronoun for practical reasons - have come to know unitive awareness. As I have related elsewhere, at different points in my life, most decisively in 2012, it was seen that there is no self. There is no I. Everything is seen as one. The idea of a separate personal self is simply a fabrication of the brain; it has no objective reality. 

Yet that personal self feels real and feels like it makes choices. It feels like it has free will. As I was preparing the notes for this podcast yesterday, my wife and I were making the decision when to bring our cat to the vet to be euthanized. A week ago the vet gave us the prognosis that he only had a short time to live. We decided to keep him as long as he was not in discomfort and seemed to have a decent quality of life. But it became clear yesterday that his health was failing rapidly and his life was coming to an end in the next couple of days. So I brought him to the vet yesterday to make it easier for him. But it was not easy for us.

Did I make that decision? It certainly feels like it. Did I choose when to take Percy to the vet? Or was I just going along with what my body, emotions and brain were leading me to do? What is this “I” that was supposedly going along or not? There is no self making decisions. Decisions are being made by this human organism – this body-mind called Marshall Davis – but the self is not deciding.  So is there free will? There is a will but it is not free. There is no real self to have free will. How can something imaginary have a free will? 

As humans we are like any animal, most noticeably our primate cousins, the apes. They seem to make decisions all the time – to eat or mate or fight or flee. They have a social network and a family society. But apes are guided by instincts, by the dictates of their bodies and brains. We are the same as our ape cousins. We just have a larger prefrontal cortex and an elaborate vocabulary and have developed a sophisticated sense of a personal self. But those are the only differences. We have no more free will than other apes. 

But there is a difference. We are aware that we are more than our bodies and brains. We can see that we not the separate self. When we see through the illusion of the self, we see that we are the Whole, expressed in a part. We are the Cosmic Self, the Divine Self, Brahman, the Tao, the Universal Christ, whatever our religious tradition or philosophy wants to call it. We are That. We are not separate entities. The separate entities are us, but we are the Whole expressed as parts. We are the Source of all beings and creatures. In Christian language, we are one with God. 

Would a Christian say that God has free will? Of course! In fact my Calvinist brethren would say that God is the only one with free will. Everything happens according to God’s will. This is where I am very grateful for those years I spent studying Reformed theology. Those theologians are right … in a sense. There is only one will in the universe, and it is God’s will and it is free. And we are it. Everything that happens is our free will as the Source of all.

Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you."  Yet we do not see Jesus in the gospels moving mountains around from place to place like building blocks. Jesus understood that he was the One who put the mountain in its present place. No reason to move it. That is faith. Faith is knowing that we are one with the Prime Mover, to use the philosophical term.

There is another place in the gospels that sheds light on free will. It is the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night Jesus was arrested. We see Jesus struggling with the decision to go to the Cross and suffer and die. Every instinct in his body told him to live. That is the survival instinct built into our bodies. Yet Jesus was one with the Father. He knew it was God’s will for the body to die at this time. 

Jesus struggled with that decision emotionally. Finally Jesus said, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” Or as the KJV puts it, “nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.”  Did Jesus have free will at that moment? As the separate human self, no. He could not NOT go to the Cross. But as the universal Christ, yes, he did. Jesus made that decision, and with that decision came peace.

Living in accord with our True Self brings peace. When see ourselves as separate human selves, then life is suffering. The will of the small self is at odds with the Big Self. Things do not go as it wants them to go. We “kick against the goad” as the Book of Acts graphically describes it at Saul’s Awakening – usually called his conversion - on the Damascus Road. This is a way of saying that life is suffering. 

Liberation from suffering is to cease to kick against the goad. It is seeing that in reality there is only God’s will and finding peace in that. Inshallah, as Muslims say. It is waking up to Divine will and the illusory nature of personal will. Seen from this Divine perspective we are the embodiment of divine free will. Waking up is seeing that we do not have free will, but we are the expression of Divine free will. Jesus said, “Not my will, but thine.” That is the end of suffering. That gave Jesus the courage and strength to endure pain and the Cross.

So back to the question at hand, do we have free will? Like with everything in nonduality the answer is a resounding yes and no.  Does the personal human self have free will? No. It is a creation of the human brain and has no more free will than a character in a novel or a movie script. We play our roles. The sense of free will that we feel is actually divine Free will operating through us. When the character in the story realizes that it is the Script writer, the Author, the Grand Novelist, the Creator, then it is free. As Paul said, “We have the Mind of Christ.” And “Have this mind which was also in Christ Jesus.” As Jesus said, “When the Son sets you free, you are free indeed.”

In this sense we could say that faith sets us free. Faith is trusting in the Divine Reality that we have seen as our True Identity. Though faith our wills are expressions of the will of God. We say with Jesus, not my will but thine. It is no longer I who live but Christ. When we accept Reality as God’s will, without trying to bend it to our will, then we are free indeed. 

That is it for today. And by the way my newest book, entitled Biblical Nonduality, was just published a couple of days ago and is available on Amazon. Hope you enjoy it.

Grace and Peace to you.