IS
THERE FREE WILL?
Noumenon, a South African
publication, emailed the following question and asked for
Barry Long's comments. The editor, Kiben Pillay, said he’d sent
the same question to an ‘English spiritual teacher, Maitreya'.
As the subject is a source of much confusion I was pleased
to respond. His text and Barry Long's reply follow:
Question: There appear to be two schools
of thought. One is like Krishnamurti’s, which implies
a kind of free will to break through, and the other is like
Balsekar’s, which says there is no free will, and that
all is pre-determined, even the desire to break through.
Somehow, my gut instinct tells me that Life is like an improvisation
rather than being a fixed script, and while I once had a powerful
experience of being lived by Life, it still felt like an improvisation,
a potential rather than a fixed plan. This also accords with
quantum physics.
I would appreciate your comments.
Maitreya's reply: 'Free will is an ego trip
that every human is programmed with to allow separation and
suffering to occur. Naturally your ego is happy to choose,
manifest and generally try to arrange things to its liking.
Clearly life has a different agenda to your ego. This gap
between the facts of life, suchness or what is, and your ego
agenda manifests as suffering.
Krishnamurti and most enlightened teachers use an ego-based
approach to try to get you to be more conscious, loving, total
or some other spiritual ideal.
All of which strengthens the illusion of individual power
of some kind, and also its shadow: suffering and ego neurosis.
My experience is totally consistent with advaita. In fact
there is no rational alternative to advaita.
I understand your gut feeling but suggest you take my hypothesis
as a starting point for a journey of experiential discovery
into the facticity of life. And use your clear intellect to
support your journey. The hypothesis: God is all there is,
I am not separate from That, cannot include any free agents
with free will.
Every ego and its programme for free will is just a play
of consciousness, even yours. Consciousness is all there is,
therefore ego-based ideas are the main illusion in life. And
the essential means to perpetuate suffering. That is why the
understanding of advaita is so potent, it supports the let
go into the flow of isness that is freedom here now.'
Barry Long’s reply - My Cows and The Truth
Do we have free will?
No. What we call free will is the perceived freedom
to choose. But our choices are extremely limited. We choose
what we think will give us pleasure and choose to avoid what
we think will cause us pain. Our other choices are about trying
to correct the negative effects of past choices. All this
gives us a sense of free will. When of course it is bondage,
the bondage of most of humanity.
We never make the right choice for long. What we don’t
want today is the result of what we once chose. The next choice
or decision we make will eventually lead to discontent or
unhappiness.
The word ‘free will’ is an invention of the choosing
human mind. The term is a cover-up for deception similar to
the device of countries calling themselves democratic republics
you know immediately they are not democratic.
How do I give up the ignorance of choice? Such a question
implies that there is a choice. And you can’t give up
ignorance by choice. But stay with me. There’s no flip
answer.
Do we have a way out without choice?
Yes. The way out is built into the system by the magnificent
intelligence behind it all. My cows are a good example. Once
stung by the electric fence protecting the succulent new trees
we’ve planted in the paddock they stay well away from
it. We don’t. We forget continually that pain hurts.
Unlike the instinctively logical cows we try for the succulent
pleasures again and again. And we get stung again and again
without realising that our choosing is the cause of the pain.
We can’t see the truth of our suffering because our
rational minds justify and make excuses for our lack of logic.
After a long, long time, and after your self-induced suffering
has brought you to your knees (or senses), you realise, like
the logical cows, that pain hurts; and you want no more of
‘my’ will, ‘my’ choosing, the cause
of the pain. An extraordinary change can then happen within
you. Not by choice, but simply by the logic in the system.
In other words, when we’ve truly had enough of the repetition
of (an) experience, the desire for it dissolves.
Where in all this is God, the indescribable supreme Consciousness?
It’s a question of place: where I, Consciousness, am
in God within.
There is nothing but God. God is absolutely everything. Everything
is God being God. And God is without limit within and without.
As God is everything, God is also ignorance. How can this
be?
Ignorance is self, your self, everybody’s self (which
Maitreya and most teachers mistakenly call ego). Your self
consists of all your opinions, past hurts, frustrations and
emotions all of which were created by past choices.
In other words, self is the chooser.
In this place of self, God is ignorant of God.
Such ignorance, or self, is demonstrated by the lack of knowledge
of God without limit. And the cause is the lack of self-knowledge,
the lack of knowledge of your own ignorance. So self-knowledge
is to begin to know your own ignorance.
In the place of self or ignorance, God is not logical, only
rational. To be logical, is to put first thing first
self-knowledge. Rationalists put second thing first. A good
example is the scientists who put information of the material
world first before knowledge of their self. This applies to
most people. Then by rationalising, the clever self finds
sufficient reasons in itself to conclude that there’s
nothing to know but the external existence.
What happens when you give up all desire to have ‘my’
own will, ‘my’ own way?
‘My’ consciousness is altered. It changes from
self-consciousness, which is the selfish way of the chooser,
to consciousness no longer fixated on self but focused increasingly
within. After a transitional period which may take many years,
the consciousness becomes pure Consciousness. ‘I’
merge with the pure intellect and realise God. I am then one
with God, the source. I have no choice in my life. I am one
with God’s will, the only will, which is every moment,
now. I want for nothing. All is provided. I am complete. For
now. For in truth, there is no end, no end to God.
Some realised teachers erroneously imply that they are God.
But God is realised as knowledge every moment and can’t
be held on to as knowing. I am that but I am not a paradox
beyond description but not beyond being.
Now to your preamble and question. There can't be two schools
of thought in truth. In fact it is the different schools of
thought the religions and philosophies that have
helped create the ignorance of self and spiritual confusion.
First you should note the self-evident truth that once you’ve
truly had enough of an experience, the desire to experience
it again dissolves. This dissolution is change and change
implies movement movement in the consciousness. This
is not by any decision but, as I’ve described, is by
the way of things in God’s mind in which we live and
have our being.
Krishnamurti, whether consciously or unconsciously, recognised
this. He saw the possibility, as you say, of breakthrough.
Advaita, from the premise Maitreya describes, apparently does
not recognise this. If it does not, it is deficient in truth.
Such movement of course is the movement of consciousness
from ignorance to less ignorance. Take the example of Maitreya
himself (whom I’ve never met) or Barry Long. Both of
us were once steeped in ignorance. Then gradually, which is
movement, more and more of our ignorance was shed for us until
we realised as our own being the astonishing source called
God. So in Maitreya’s knowledge there may be as he says
'no rational alternative to advaita'. But there is a logical
alternative and that’s the one presented by our two
lives and what I’ve described above the divine
scheme free of duality without excluding self-evident ignorance.
I must point out that anything Krishnamurti might have said
about free will refers to the freedom of being one with the
divine will.
Balsekar I have no knowledge of except what you say he says:
that all is pre-determined, even the desire to break through.
To me, such an assertion by a teacher is due to an imperfect
realisation of God or Consciousness.
The truth is:
The source, God, is always drawing back to itself the
consciousness wherever the consciousness is in the scheme
of things. That movement of consciousness is the only thing
that is pre-determined and it accounts for the entire dynamic
of life before and beyond death.
About your ‘gut instinct’. You are right. Your
powerful insight of being lived by Life is the truth. It is
not a feeling; it is knowledge. Life is an aspect of God and
your consciousness touched that and was informed by it beyond
argument. That knowledge is unshakable in you. The only thing
is that as yet it is not uninterrupted living knowledge. I
suggest you don’t take Matreya’s hypothesis as
a starting point, but live from the point of your own realisation.
Focus as much as you can in your daily life on that which
was revealed to you; for there is much more to it than you’ve
expressed.
Nothing is fixed, all is moving every moment. All is new
in the Consciousness of God. So again you are right. All you
have to do is live it.
It seems to me that the validity of the many different ideas
of truth expressed by spiritual teachers depends on the depth
of the teacher’s realisation of God. As God is everything,
and without limit within, there is an enormous range of possibilities
of God realisation, some just within, some deep within and
some...who knows?
All we can do is assess a master, apart from his presence,
by the extent and depth of his realised knowledge of truth,
life, love, death and God and his practicality.
Thank you for writing.
Barry Long
A couple of days later the editor asked for clarification
of three points in the article.
Read,
his questions (with reasons) and Barry Long's reply to each
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