FREE WILL VERSUS DIVINE WILL: Part 2 of 4

FREE WILL VERSUS  DIVINE WILL

Part 2 of 4

TD: The question is why the supernatural interventionist God does not always intervene – even in such tragedies like the Tsunami.

DFW. You said it right. Why did He not intervene and stop the tragedy? If He exists but cannot remove our suffering then He is not God. If He exists and would not remove our suffering then He is not kind. If He exists and should not remove our suffering then He is not the boss. If He exists and suffering also has to exist then He is not the only Truth.

DDW. You seem to have analysed it thoroughly!

TD: All these are only rhetorical statements which do not take into account the fact that a God, if He is really God, should not be judged from our human norms of right and wrong, justice and injustice.

DFW. You are only inventing an answer so that you can escape answering the question.

DDW. I feel that these questions themselves have been invented to throw God out.

TD: My answer has a simple reason. No human being has either the database or the holistic view that Divinity must surely have of the universe and its contents.

DFW: I don’t understand you.

DDW: TD says God has an ultimate purpose for everything and we may not know it.

TD: But His purpose could not be removal of human poverty or illness.

DDW: Why not?

DFW: Because if that were so, He should have done it long ago. He did not have to wait for two or three millenia to remove illness and poverty from the world. At least it is clear He has not done it yet.

TD: I think we are going at a tangent. We wanted to understand why it is that we cannot understand that He is not removing our suffering even though by definition of God as Almighty God, He should have been able to do it. And DDW said that God perhaps has a purpose for everything. Shall I tell you a real story why I feel DDW might be right?

DDW and DFW together: Go ahead.

TD. Well it is a long story. But let me be as brief as possible. Two American youngsters living 100 miles south of New York plan to spend a Saturday afternoon in a public park near New York along with some of their friends (living north of New York) who promise to join them at a certain specified time right at the entrance to the park. The plan is made, almost to the minute. But the two, on their way to New York meet, first with a tire burst, then halfway up with a hold-up by no less than the sheriff of the area for speeding – both these incidents taking off two hours from their schedule. And then, after the hold-up, when they start the car, the engine refuses to ignite and this causes a further delay of another two hours because the cause is traced to be battery failure. But since they are only 25 miles from the park they decide to give it a try even after the delay, even though they are sure their friends would have given them up by this time. But soon after, they have to negotiate a long diversion of the route in view of a nasty accident on the highway ahead of them; and this diversion delays them as much as another hour, because they lose their way! Thus there have been five coincidences all working against them and when they finally reach the park it is late evening and in fact the park is closing its gates. Still they enter and look for their friends. The park is deserted since everybody has gone. They are about to curse their fate and return to their car when they hear cries for help from a lake in the park. Rushing there they see two boys almost drowning. They jump in and being first-aid-certificate holders themselves they are able to save the two little boys of ten and twelve from certain drowning and death. They think of the sequence of events that happened to them during the whole trip. A few minutes earlier they had thought that their journey was nothing but futile, their day had been spent in vain, but now it became clear that it was not so; because if they had not arrived at this late hour near that lake, those two boys would have died by drowning! This is a true story. The Almighty has a purpose for everything!

DFW: That is interesting certainly.  But we have strayed far from our original quest of deciding between Free will and Divine Will.

DDW: Let us settle this question of God’s non-intervention. When there is a natural calamity like the Tsunami, we have only to take it that God does not want, by His own Free Will, to interfere with Nature and its workings – though all of it is His own creation.

DFW: Wait a minute. You just said that God has Free Will. Free Will implies multiple options and a freedom to exercise choice. Does He have several options? Why does He choose one of them?

DDW: Because He has a purpose for everything as I already told you.

DFW: Purpose is always for achieving something. Does God want to achieve something? But I have heard it said that God has nothing to obtain which He has not already obtained.

TD: His purpose could only be to bring back every erring human being to His fold.

DDW: But then you are implicitly agreeing to the contention that human beings have the freedom of will to err.

TD. Certainly, that is what I have been saying from the beginning. God gives you the commandment of ‘satyam vada’ and ‘dharmam chara’ and also gives you the free will to disobey them. But He also keeps on telling you to have the willingness to obey them.

DDW: Is not even this Free Will subject to the influence of the Divine?

TD: You have touched a deeper chord.

DDW: We were raising the doubt whether the Free Will that is enjoined to obey God’s injunctions through the vedas, is itself under the influence of the Divine Will.

DFW: I was thinking of this problem last night and I have a fundamental doubt before you all proceed further in this discussion. The philosophy of advaita that we all adhere to claims that there is only one absolute Brahman and everything else is only an appearance that comes and goes. If that is so, where is the question of a divine will? Does Brahman, the attributeless, have a will for Itself?

DDW: Hey! Where do you get all these questions? They cut the ground under my feet!

TD: But it is a legitimate question. I suggest we take it up first.

DFW: I feel if you grant that the attributeless Brahman is the only Absolute Truth, then there can be no divine will. If you want to have divine will as an entity, then advaita is contradicted.

DDW. But if you grant free will absolutely, then that means there are choices to choose from. All this means duality and multiplicity, which is against advaita.

TD: May I correct your qualification 'absolutely'? Even if there is one instance of free will, that is enough to imply duality.

DFW: If there is only one Consciousness everywhere and all the time, where is the question of free will? Free will of whom? Free from what?

TD: The problem arises because we are making the standard mistake of mixing up two different levels of our awareness. If we want to stay at the level of the Absolute Brahman, then there is nothing else to talk about. Only Silence. Remember Dakshinamurti concept. But the moment we think of God or ISvara, we have descended to the level of the mAyic world and in this vyAvahArika world, there is God, -- who is now nothing but saguna Brahman, i.e., Brahman on whom we have superposed several attributes -- there are creations, there can be talk of free will, divine will etc.

DDW: I see. It is really a subtle point.

TD. This subtlety is usually missed in arguments. Now let us come back to the question of whether free will itself is under the influence of the divine will.

DFW: In fact that is exactly where I have another question. I would like here to come down to the ordinary concept of bhakti or devotion rather than the abstract injunctions of ‘satyam vada’ and ‘dharmam chara’. Now all religion says “Be devoted to God. Pray to Him”. This is bhakti. If God, your saguNa Brahman, is the Almighty that He is supposed to be, why not He Himself grant me, by a wave of His magic, that bhakti which I find it difficult to cultivate by my free will?

DDW: Good question! I appreciate you, DFW, for the way you articulate your questions. But God does grant you that bhakti. Only you have to receive it. The rain may pour, but if a vessel is upside down no water will collect in it.

TD: I will tell you another story, not real of course, that I recently came across on Facebook.  It is about a gentleman visiting a haircutting saloon.  While having his haircut and faceshave a conversation ensued with the barber, which finally strayed into the question of existence of God. The barber asserted that there cannot be any God existing.  When the gentleman asked for a reason, back came an emphatic reply saying: ‘Go along this street and see how many sick people and how many poor are there. If God exists what is He doing without redressing this state of the world?’.  The gentleman noted the aggressive tone of the reply and kept quiet.  As he went out of the saloon, he saw a man with a fully grown beard  and ill-kept overgrown hair.  Immediately he rushed in to retort to the barber saying, If there are such people in the world shall I conclude there are no barbers in this neighbourhood? And the barber replied: What can we barbers do if these people don’t come to us?. Ah, that is it. That is the argument.  If people don’t seek God how do you expect Him to redress people’s distress?  Our minds are free. So by our own free will we have to decide to receive what God gives us. By our own volition we must decide to trust in God and surrender to Him.

DDW: If by supplanting our will, God has to give us what we need, then there need be no creation, no existence of the universe.

TD: That is the mystery of God’s leelA, sport or play of creation. Creation is where God allows beings to have the feeling of separateness from Him and then waits and waits until the beings that have emerged from Him come back to Him. If they don’t want to come back to Him, He allows them to go their own way and take their own time to discover that that is the Want which will rid them of all other wants.

DDW: This is what Sathya Sai Baba calls ‘The agony of God’ in this great cycle of creation. His anguish is that beings do not want to get out of this cycle. So sometimes He gives them all the petty things they want, so that in due time they would want what He wants to give them.

TD: As Shri Ramakrishna said: ‘Breeze of Grace is always blowing, but you have to set your sail to catch that breeze’. In other words He allows us to go our ways and learn by our own experience and come to Him by our own volition.

DFW: Then is this experience ours or is it given by Him?

TD: He does not give us these experiences. Because, we have already programmed it for ourselves by our own past actions.

DDW: The one thing He assures us however, is that once we take even a minor step towards Him He comes forth with both hands to receive us, as would a mother in welcoming a lost child. As Sathya Sai Baba would say: ‘You take one step towards Me; I will take ten steps towards you’!

DFW: Then let us come back to the question of whether Free Will itself is under the influence of Divine Will or not.

TD: I am happy you are recognising the existence of Divine Will to that extent. When we say that everything happens according to the Will of God, are we specifically referring to Nature and Nature’s doings?

DFW: When an event happens to a human being and this is referred to as God’s Will, is this not just another way of saying that it is one’s past karma that has brought about this event?

DDW: But the average psychology is different. When a bad thing happens to somebody we rush to say it is God’s Will. When a good thing happens to us we would rather ascribe it to our own effort.

TD: That is where the teaching of religion is important. Either learn to accept both as God’s Will, or in the alternative, learn to take responsibility for both. Don’t blame only unpleasant things on God.

DFW. That is why I say, we should take responsibility for every one of our actions. It is all our free will.

DDW: You are going back to your old refrain.

TD: We shall now have to go to the next level of spiritual evolution. That, I think, will make matters clearer.

DDW: The question of DFW is whether Free will itself could be under the influence of Divine Will.

TD: Well, it is quite clear here from your own example. This discussion on Divine Will and Free Will is taking place because you raised a question first and started the discussion. You are therefore the ‘nimitta kAraNa’ for this action that is taking place now. But this event of a discussion is itself God’s Will.

DFW. If you go in this strain then every action of everybody becomes an act of God!

DDW. No. Each action of ours is not merely a product of the action or thought that precedes it but it is also the product of a state of moral character, which is what TD calls our individualised prakRti. This prakRti has been brought by us as a chip of imprints from all our previous lives.

DFW: So is it then not God’s action?

DDW: But it is He who is the distributor of results of past deeds and thoughts.

TD: Wait. The concept of free will changes (subjectively) as one evolves philosophically. The common man’s understanding that the Almighty intervenes either by way of Grace or otherwise is rather elementary. The real work of the Almighty is deeper. Not a leaf moves without His knowledge or sanction, not a drop flows down by itself. Gravity is His Will. Action and Reaction are His Will.

DFW: Is Divine Will absolute then? Is that what is called Fate? Then why all this talk about Free Will?

DDW: Let us not confuse between Fate and Divine Will. I think they are different.

(To be continued)