Freedom To Choose
A few years ago, I was staying in a little fishermen village in South India when I met a German guy living in a hut on the beach. The guy was, well… eccentric, and enjoyed sharing his spiritual insights gained from years of devotion to the famous Indian Guru – Amma-ji.
He claimed that every single thing that happens in life, even the most minute thing like the way he just put down his glass on the table, or the form of the smoke cloud from his exhalation, was pre-determined and unchangeable.
The only real freedom of choice we have, he said, is whether to identify with our body-mind, or with the underlying conciousness that we are. Choosing from where we relate to all the pre-determined happenings is the only way to achieve freedom within this life.
This came in a time in which I was struggling quite hard to rid myself of an addiction to smoking, something that required a lot of effort on my part. If everything is pre-determined by my karma, what is the point of all this effort? What’s meant to happen will happen anyway, I thought.
And so I became caught up with this question - Is there any real free choice? At that time I came to a conclusion that there must be some free choice after all for one simple reason. Why would the Spirit that I believe in orchestrate such an infinite play like the one we are in, if it were just to have everything determined by Her to the dime.
Many New Agers call Earth the “Planet of Choice,” claiming that Earth is a rare place in the Universe with real free choice. That sounds like a lot more fun for Spirit to add this chaotic rule - the participants in the movie get to choose their own roles, now lets see what happens.
Co-Creating
So there is free choice! Great! But now that I think of it, many times in life I have also felt that I am being guided by some force in very delicate and precise ways. It doesn’t really make sense to me that I am the only one that is choosing, because sometimes it feels that my freedom of choice is not in fact all that great. Many times I made a firm decision only to later find myself doing the exact opposite. Looking back, I couldn’t find any point in time when I reversed my decision, it just didn’t happen the way I decided.
The New Age answer seems to say that we are not the sole creators, we are actually co-creating our reality together with others. Our higher selves are constantly in touch with the higher selves of our co-creators, weaving our movement in life in a manner that will fulfill all our creations.
The intricate timing of occurrences is sometimes called synchronicity. On a higher level, we are all the time working out stuff with the souls around us.
So I do have free choice, but it is all the time subject to the wills of my co-creators in a kind of weird negotiation? OK, I think I got it.
Ahh, well, actually in the realm of Unity that Yogis talk about, there is no distinction between me and you, or as Pink Floyd put it: “I am you and what I see is me”.
Everything Is Foreseen
If we are all indeed One, there can be no individual to make the free choices. Whether the Great All is working with a pre-written script or is ‘winging it’ and making it up on the fly, it isn’t My free choice anyway, because the very concept of I is an illusion.
Jewish tradition has it’s own answer to this dilemma, a well known Hebrew saying by Rabbi Akiva, can be translated to say: Everything is Foreseen, and the Permission is Granted.
My German friend would probably say: “that’s what I’ve been saying all along” - everything is predetermined but we have the permission to either identify with the body-mind, ‘the movie’ (often referred to in the East as : ‘the source of suffering’), or with the unmoving awareness at the root of the happenings (a.k.a. ‘liberation.’)
Since biblical times Jewish thinkers and theologians have wrestled with this saying trying to understand it and coming up with different interpretations – how can everything be foreseen, meaning pre-determined, and at the same time, we have the permission to freely choose our own paths.
Perhaps the real significance of this saying is such that cannot be understood by the regular analytic mind, being multi-dimensional, any attempt to grasp it mentally will end up as one thing and the opposite at the same time, a paradox.
A Zen priest with a stick comes to mind: “Meditate on that for a few years and come back when you have the answer.”