FREE WILL VERSUS DIVINE WILL : Part 3 of 4

FREE WILL VERSUS DIVINE WILL

Part 3 of 4

TD: Yes, first let us dispose of Fate. Then we can discuss Free Will and Divine Will more understandably. Fate and Free will are interwoven just as the threads of a fabric are crossed and interlaced. We cannot rewrite our past or fly like a bird or breathe under water. These are our limitations, inherent in our nature, our fate. Our past is our fate for the future. But it is only our tendencies that are determined by our past (and the so-called fate). Our actions are not determined by our fate. Actions are ours.

DFW: Then why does DDW say that everything is Divine Will?

DDW: Just now we decided to dispose of the concept of Fate before we make the final lap of discussion between divine will and free will. Don’t bring in divine will now. TD is doing alright; please allow him to go his own way.

TD: Only actions are ours. Fate has nothing to do with it. Fate, that is, our prArabdha, might have created the circumstances that led to our action, but the action is ours. Fate might have contributed by shaping our tendencies, which led to our action, but the action is still ours. It is our mind that dictates our action. All spiritual teaching pleads for the Will of Man to become stronger than the mind. Everywhere in the upanishads the appeal is to the will. It is not as if man is a helpless creature as a leaf in the storm or a feather in the wind. Man’s will has an element of complete freedom. It is the power which enables him to act in directions opposite even to his spontaneous bad tendency (dur-vAsanA). In this sense he is the architect of his fate. Indeed this is the time when he should not slacken any of his self-effort. Ultimately man’s will must prove stronger than fate, because it is his own past will that created his present fate.

DFW: Wonderful. I have heard Swami ChinmayAnanda say something like this. I cannot take shelter under ‘Fate’ and refuse to act in a morally elevating manner. I cannot argue, for instance, that ‘I will not go to the help of a suffering man, because it is his karma that makes him suffer; let him suffer’! Maybe the other person suffers because of his karma but my action or karma of not going to his help is my own decision, out of my own free will.

DDW: And that will be a debit entry in your kArmic accounting, for which you have only yourself to blame.

TD: In fact this cover for inaction will start a chain reaction of vAsanAs in your future conduct and will gradually consume you in its own way. I was saying therefore, that it is by our own will that we must face our fate, that is prArabdha. Of course we cannot rewrite our past. We may not be able to repair our wrong actions, but we can learn lessons from them and act accordingly, by a determined free will, in the future.

DFW: Maybe we can try to avoid repeating them.

TD: Fate is only our prArabdha karma which nobody can escape. It seems even divine intervention cannot change it. Many of our stotras which promise eradication of all sin as the result of recitation of that stotra, are careful to imply only the destruction of sanchita karma and not prArabdha karma. Sometimes it says this explicitly as in “sanchita-pApa vinAshaka lingam” in LingAshhTakaM. PrArabdha karma has to be exhausted only by experiencing it.

DDW: But it is our attitude to the experience that changes according to our trust in God.

TD: That is where our level of spiritual evolution enters the picture. A trust in God and his omnipotence does not mean that we ‘believe’ in Fate. It is wrong to think so. It is the first step for the correct understanding of Hindu philosophy and spirituality.

DFW : Does not the omnipotence of God mean that unless He wills it we cannot become spiritual?

TD: You are raising the right question at the right time. Your question brings home to us another point that is mentioned in our smritis. You know there are four goals of life. These are called ‘purushArthas’ in Sanskrit. They are dharma, artha, kAma and mokSha. – meaning broadly, Duty of Righteousness, material prosperity, satisfaction of sensual desires and release from the samsAra bondage. Of these, the smritis would say, only artha and kAma are obtained as per one’s prArabdha karma. The other two, dharma and mokSha are obtained only by self-effort. That is why ‘satyam vada’ and ‘dharmam chara’ are specific injunctions to us. Self effort is the most essential ingredient for lifting ourselves upward in the ladder of spiritual evolution.

DDW: If the upward path to higher levels of spirituality has to be chalked out only by our effort then where comes the question of divine will? You are confusing me now.

TD: We have to go slow now. We all have to start our lives with the hypothesis of absolute free will. It is the sheet-anchor on which we base all our actions. But as we move forward along the journey of life, we learn lessons from the world and we become wiser to the ways of the world as also to the ways of the Lord.

DFW: Are you saying that our world experience takes us away from belief in free will? I feel it is the contrary. For it is by persistent and continuous self-effort great achievers have achieved what they are known to have achieved.

TD: I don’t deny that. By the same persistent and continuous self-effort one learns that unless we bid farewell to a self-centred life we cannot rise spiritually. So the path to higher levels of spirituality needs a strong free will to strengthen the inner life rather than the outer life. That is why the smritis say the goals dharma and mokSha are sought only by self-effort.

DDW: The common man thinks Faith in God is superstition. Superstition is what holds you when you think negatively. But Faith is some kind of intuition which makes you, through your own free will, reach out and contact the most positive thing in the universe, namely, the Supreme Almighty.

TD: Wonderfully said, DDW. It is that spark of Faith which we have to keep fanning until with the blessing of a Guru it blows up into a Fire of Wisdom (jnAnAgni). That way one develops a God-centred nature.

DFW: Earlier you said that it is world-experience that gradually takes us into the belief in a divine will. Where does that stand in the light of this necessity to fan the so-called Faith?

TD: If we carefully analyse the world-experience of ourselves as well as of others, slowly it would appear that, try what we may, certain happenings which seemed to be totally in our control have slipped away from us and we feel that an invincible but invisible force is pulling us. This inevitability of events strikes us in the face.

DFW: But as we grow older I think we move from the childhood beliefs of naivete, myth and superstition to the adult days of self-effort and freedom of free will.

TD: You have to move farther to learn the lessons of philosophy. All along we have been thinking that prArabdha karma starts our life with its own prescriptions of initial conditions and limitations on our mind, intellect and environment and that all the rest is our free will. All along we have believed that it is our prakRti which is the result of our prArabdha karma, that does everything and is the cause of all action. But this theory is too mechanical to be ultimate. Even though Lord Krishna says this in the third chapter of the Gita, later he modifies it. PrakRti is inert and to say that it is the doer and enjoyer is to accept the sentient self to be in the control of the insentient prakRti.

DDW: I see you are referring to the theory of purusha and prakRti in the thirteenth chapter of the Gita.

TD: Yes, we have to bring in the sentient Purusha now. In the innermost recesses of man there is a Consciousness which is Purusha rather than PrakRti. PrakRti is only the force of the Purusha. It is this Purusha that makes the PrakRti work through the lower self.

DDW: The free will that we have been holding on to is not any more free. Our will, though powerful as we thought, has only a limited power.

DFW: Will aims at the end; but Power is the means to attain that end.

DDW: Will without power is helpless to provide the means to attain the end. Power without will is purposeless because it has no end in view.

TD: There cannot be any Power without Consciousness. And there cannot be Consciousness without Power. The will-power we thought was ours comes really from the consciousness within. And that Consciousness is the Purusha.

DDW: The Gita makes a very impassioned appeal for us to surrender to the Purusha within. After showing His cosmic form to Arjuna, Krishna declares: I have already conquered and vanquished all your enemies; be only an instrument of my action. Go and fight.

DFW: You already quoted this in Sanskrit at the beginning of our conversation and I said that is what always confuses me.

TD: But now we can understand it. The plea of the Gita is for us to be the instrument of the Will of God, that is, this Purusha. We have to be like the needle in a gramaphone which only traces the channels already chalked out for it by the designer of the record.

DDW: In other words, we only walk over the path already dictated by God for us.

TD: Listen to Him for His voice. Throw the responsibility on Him. Abandon all your dharmas, meaning, abandon the doership attitude of all actions. You are not the doer. He is the doer. This is the greatest renunciation, greatest surrender.

DFW: But still we have not found an answer to the fundamental question I raised earlier. I can now rephrase that question in the light of the theory that the Purusha within is what makes the PrakRti the doer. In that case, then, the same Purusha should be held responsible for all my bad thoughts and actions. Originally I asked whether God is the one who should take responsibility. Now we have come to the conclusion it is the Purusha. But the Purusha is the same as the cosmic Almighty, if I understand advaita right. So then, that brings us back to square one!

(To be continued)