Spirituality and Free Will

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Spirituality and Free Will

Sri Ramana Maharshi accepted the validity of the laws of Karma but said that they were only applicable as long as a person imagined that he was separate from the Self. At this level (the level of the agyani or the ignorant) individuals will pass through a series of pre-ordained activities and experiences, all of which are the consequences of previous acts and thoughts. Every act and experience in a person’s life is determined at birth and that the only freedom one has is to realise that there is no one acting and no one experiencing. However, once one realises the Self there is no one left to experience the consequences of actions and so the whole structure of Karmic laws then becomes redundant.

If the agent, upon whom the Karma depends, namely the ego, which subsists between the body and the Self, merges in its source and loses its form, how can the Karma, which depends upon it, survive? When there is no ‘I’ there is no Karma. The essence of Karma is to know the truth of oneself by enquiring - ‘Who am I, the doer, who begins to do Karmas?’ Unless the doer of Karmas, the ego, is destroyed through enquiry and introspection, the perfect peace of supreme bliss, which is the result of Karma Yoga, cannot be achieved.

What then is free will? Whose will are we talking about? So long as there is the sense of doer-ship, there is the sense of enjoyment and of individual will. But if this sense is lost through the practice of self-enquiry (introspection) and one becomes self-realised, the divine will act and guide the course of events. The free will holds the field only in association with individuality. As long as individuality lasts there is free will. All the scriptures are based on this idea and therefore advise us to direct the free will towards right goals.

There are only two ways to conquer destiny or be independent of it. One is to enquire for whom is this destiny and discover that only the ego is bound by destiny and not the Self, and that the ego is non-existent. Destiny is the result of past action. It concerns the body. Let the body act as may suit it. Why should one be concerned with it? Why should one pay attention to it? Should anything happen, it happens as a result of past actions, of divine will and other factors. This idea is embedded in the common term ‘namaste’ we use in our day-to-day social interactions. This word can be split up as na+ma+te+astu meaning thereby – ‘I am not’ (na ma); ‘You are’ (te astu) implying a complete wiping out of the notion of ‘I-ness’ and ‘My-ness’ and surrendering to ‘Paramatma’.

The other way is to kill the ego by completely surrendering to Paramatma, by realising one’s helplessness and saying all the time, ‘Not I but Thou, O Paramatma’, giving up all sense of ‘I’ and ‘mine’ and leaving it to Paramatma to do what He likes with you. Surrender can never be regarded as complete so long as the devotee wants this or that from Paramatma. True surrender is love of God for the sake of love and nothing else, not even for the sake of liberation. In other words, complete effacement of the ego is necessary to conquer destiny. It is immaterial whether you achieve this effacement through Gyan Marg - self-enquiry or through Bhakti Marga - path of devotion.