Techne,
“It got me thinking about the causes of human behavior. I like to believe that humans have a space of freedom in which to determine our actions; we are not automatic creatures.”
Drop your likes and dislikes, as well as your beliefs - they are casting a veil over one’s eyes.
It all depends on whether one is living out of consciousness or unconsciousness. It should not be assumed and taken for granted that a human being is free in one’s experience, freedom is a state which only very rarely any human being has ever come into contact with. And the reason for it is that man’s system is a by product of thousands of years of evolution. While different minds and bodies may express themselves differently, their basic workings are more or less the same. Unless one comes to more awareness as to one’s own inner workings, man is just a computer, a program working according to whatever has been written on it. There is not even a single thought or emotion which is one’s own - all of the content of one’s mind has been gathered from the outside. And every action that one does is already determined by so many forces in the cosmos which are beyond one’s control, so there is really no question of free will. Even something as simple as the process of breathing, is not something which is within one’s control - although perhaps there are those who are practicing pranayam who may believe it to be the case. If you are not even in control of the very source of one’s existence which is one and the same as existence itself, there is no question of being in control of anything else that arises in one’s experience. Everything is being orchestrated by a dimension which is far more fundamental than what one ordinarily experiences, although it is not separate from ordinary experience.
But, man does have the ability to choose, and choice is something which is entirely differnet than free will. Although, human beings like to feel as though they have free will simply because nobody wants to feel as though they are drifting powerlessly in a universe which does not care for their being. When a human being feels helpless, great fear arises - and the tragedy is that it is only through being absolutely helpless that there is a possibility of surrender.
But although man does not possess free will, that does not mean that there is no such thing as freedom. Freedom is one’s very nature, one’s true self has always been from first to last birthless and deathless. Only it has nothing to do with your own conscious will, it is the very will of existence itself, impersonal. The very idea of will implies resistence, it implies limitation. You have to channel your intention and energy in a certain direction to acheive a certain outcome. That is what most people are calling “free will” - it is consciously making an effort to acheive a certain desire. Because it is consciously chosen, one assumes that this is freedom. That is not what freedom is, freedom is such - that there is absolutely no trace of choice in it. It is only a state of being which becomes revealed once one comes to know of that which is choiceless, once the method disappears into the methodless. And although man does not have free will, he can live as though he does have free will, and use this illusion as a means towards coming to his awakening. If one starts clinging to the other extreme, that there is no free will, one may simply use it as an excuse to become a vegetable, vegetate, and fall into passivity. The work of awakening requires your active involvement - and in this very moment one has all of the necessary intelligence to start inquiring into oneself.
