There’s a huge discussion going on right now about free will, with philosophers, and scientists, and everybody. It is the perfect example of how the human mind can go badly and lead us to our very destruction. Let me explain.
The simplest way to look at it is: Free Will is a concept that’s been invented. Some philosopher came up with it a long time ago, and people have been arguing about it ever since. Then, on the other hand, there are very complicated aspects to being a human being that it’s really worthwhile examining, but it needs to be examined in an open field of curiosity. And putting too many of these terms on it just makes the conversation impossible, which is why this conversation has been going on for centuries.
And lately, you know, a Stanford Professor came out with a book ‘There is no Free Will,’ and so everybody’s arguing about it. But it’s a concept. It was just invented. This is literally what Buddha said centuries ago: that concepts happen in your mind. Concepts can be useful if you understand that they’re just concepts, but they’re not you, they are not real. They can help us figure out how to live better, or they can just confuse the heck out of us.
So, think about this: the conversation on whether Free Will exists or not, is that helping you or is it confusing you? If it’s confusing, then why? Why is this confusing at all? Why can’t we just live our lives without this idea? Why do we feel like we need to understand it? These are way more interesting questions than ‘does free will actually exist?’ Because can we live beautifully without this idea? Sure, we can. Can we live beautifully by really understanding this idea? Well, maybe if we pick it apart, you know, and define each little bit of it. But, you know, I just don’t see how that’s not going to get fixed, stuck in our brains as a concept that we think we’re understanding.
So, bottom line is this discussion lets us see that asking the right questions is way more important than getting the answers. Is there free will? Kind of an unanswerable question. But how does the idea of free will enable us to live our lives better? And most importantly, does considering whether Free Will exists or not, does the act of doing that bring you closer to actual realization of yourself, which as far as nonduality is concerned, is really the only goal? Then, after you actually self-realize, you could take up the conversation of ‘is there free will’ in a totally different way. You probably won’t bother taking it up at all because it’s like, what does it [Laughter] matter? So, yes it does exist, no it doesn’t, yes it does, no it doesn’t. Doesn’t matter.