Do you choose to read this or not?
When I was a kid, I used to sit for hours and think about God’s omniscience. Something about it tripped me out. If God knows everything, then God knows the future. If God knows everything, then God knew the moment he created man what the outcome would be. If God knows everything, then God knows what you are going to do next.
Pretty strange. Where is the elbow room for free will?
When you look into it, the idea that there is free will is contextual.
Contextual doesn’t mean wrong, it just means not absolute.
Everything you do is the culmination of something larger and out of your control.
Everything you say is channeled and not your own.
Freedom is empty.
I am just using words of course, so they are limited and ultimately silly. But let this view sink in for a minute if you care. Not as a new philosophical position or spiritual argument. Just for fun maybe.
A character in a film can appear to have volition, until it is remembered that there is an author and a script.
A thermostat can be said to control the temperature of a room, until it is remembered that it is a hand that turns the dial.
Similarly, it can seem like decisions are your own; within an innocent daydream that there was ever a fixed locus of identity and control.
That my position here can be used as an excuse to avoid responsibility is not a logical argument against it. Almost anything that works as a way to avoid responsibility is used, including the truth.
Who am I? Who are you? So regularly and so deeply is it assumed there is a discrete I and a separate you somewhere(!) at the deepest foundation of our experience. Must be hiding. And so we seek.
Yet this “central experiencer” can never be identified distinctly from that which is happening.
The fact is, there are processes occurring in your brain that collectively create the conviction of a consolidated, executive sense of self, typically behind your eyes, making creative decisions and enjoying or suffering their outcomes. This phenomenon of self-creation is part of evolution and does have relative value. But these processes are themselves without independent nature.
In other words, they dependently arise. This is called pratityasamutpada in Buddhism, arguably the only distinct doctrine to come out of Buddhism that did not have precedent in earlier religions. This view considers the western mechanical model “A (me) is the cause of B (my actions)” as naive. The other side of the same coin is the doctrine of sunyata, or emptiness.
When I say empty I don’t mean it in a materialist sense; lacking abundance, an empty wallet, etc. I mean interdependently co-arising with and in and as Tao, already and always. Empty is a word that has an indescribable, blissful feeling from my experiences in meditation. It has a brightness to it. It’s the dark light in the void, and also the light within manifestation.
An incredible story is being told by no one, to no one. Or by God to God. However you want to look at it.
There is no mistake here. There is nothing wrong with illusion. All great art is a lie. Nature herself is the biggest liar. Choice is an abstraction that is convenient and necessary and good and beautiful in context, as is a sense of self. Without these we would not be human. Yet truly, choices happen without a chooser. There is no thinker of your thoughts.
There is no one who one day wakes up from this dream. One is already awake.
This great illusion of choice is part of an awesome creative game being played by God, our deepest Self, for no comprehensible reason.
In other words, for Love.
This is it folks.