From: doug@uuisis.isis.org (Doug Thompson)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.newage
Subject: Free will
Date: 14 Oct 92 09:02:07 GMT
Organization: International Shared Information Service (Ottawa)


 >: He was not cast out of paradise for acquiring knowledge.  He was
 >: cast out for being disobedient to God.  Free will and free choice
 >: was given, to obey or not to obey God.
 >
 >Free will, as you seem to think of it, doesn't exist.  Essentially,
 >most peoples' lives are a series of conditioned responses they think is
 >free will.  Spiritual awakening, and spiritual progress, involves the
 >lessening of the hold of that conditioning.  From what I have seen,
 >most members of all religions differ only in their conditioned
 >responses. When one is spiritually aware, there is really no choice in
 >action either.  To quote Jung, free will means that we do gladly that
 >which we must do.
 >So, from this perspective, which I am sure you disagree with, having
 >complete freedom of action as you do, WoMan was either spiritually
 >awakened, in which case there would have been no urge to disobey God,
 >or s/he was ignorant, with a predilection to checking out forbidden
 >fruits, in which case, s/he really couldn't help it any way.
 >"Oh dear, Johnny, I told you not to touch that vase. I love you
 >Johnny, but I'm afraid it's the electric chair for you."

Ok, *now* you have got my attention! The old problem of free will. I
think it has to be said that just because many responses are
'conditioned' and therefore predictable, does not mean that free will
isn't there. First, there is a chance to choose one's conditioning and
second, it's well known that people *can* and sometimes *do* reject
conditioning and *choose* a different course.

"To do gladly what one must do" is a choice, for sure. But this is
logically equivalent to saying "I must do what I choose" or "What I
choose is what I must do".

What must one do? One must make the best choice one can. Many of us fail
to do what we really think is best. Many of us have really warped ideas
of what is 'good for us'. So we 'must' learn to do what we 'must' do and
we do that by repeatedly choosing not to and suffering the consequences.

In all these cases one is aware that one could do this or that, and one
chooses, and is often aware of choosing. I think one can be aware of
choosing more often, if one chooses. :-) Indeed every moment is full of
choices. 

Is not maturity simply the art of making wise choices?

If will is not bound or controlled by an external agency, then the
choices made are 'freely' chosen and this is free will.

If one has no choice but to do 'what one must do', then we are into the
idea of pre-destination.  In that view there is only an illusion of free
will.  In fact, it is known (determined) in advance what choice you will
make. 

From that view there is no such thing as moral responsibility. You can't
hold someone responsible for a thing over which he had no control or an
action over which he had no power of choice.

 >"Oh dear, Johnny, I told you not to touch that vase. I love you
 >Johnny, but I'm afraid it's the electric chair for you."

Now the story of the Garden of Eden is a story about disobedience. And
being cast out of the garden isn't the elecric chair. It's more like:

  "Oh dear, Johnny, I told you not to touch that vase. I love you
  Johnny, but I'm afraid you'll have to be expelled from the room until
  you learn your lesson."

The central theme of the Bible and Christianity is the story of learning
the lesson and getting back to the garden with lots of active
intervention by God.

This mythology, the fall from Grace, the 'quarantine' of homo-sapiens on
earth and the social-religious struggle to regain Paradise Lost is not
only a central myth of Christianity (and Judaism) but is also a central
myth of much esoteric, occult and New Age thought. In the versions I've
read we don't have a pair of innocents in a physical garden, we have a
large collection of souls on a non-physical plane who *choose* to
incarnate as physical creatures and then get caught up in the
physicality and loose connection with God. History (and karmic cycles)
then become the process of recovering what was lost. In the process,
something no doubt gets learned and accomplished.

The Luciferic myth is one of rebellion. Lucifer's act of rebelling
against God triggers this whole thing called humanity, earth and
history. Man and Woman (Adam and Eve) get seduced by Lucifer into
joining the rebellion. Having thus joined the rebellion and fallen away
from close fellowship with God, humanity must now struggle in this
process called history to find its way back. This is not just a
Christian Myth. It is common in many other belief systems.

The Christ myth represents a dramatic intervention by God in the process
which has the effect of defeating the rebellion at the root and breaking
its power such that the road back is expedited. Many occultists also
accept this myth.

Without a concept of free will, and the moral activity of making
choices, all of these ideas of the meaning of history and the meaning of
life become nonsense.

While saying that, I am fully aware that life (or karma if you will)
sometimes conspires to make it practically impossible to make certain
choices and to not make others. We're all familiar (I expect) with the
experience of 'falling in love'. The victim of Cupid's arrows certainly
feels that s/he 'cannot help falling in love'. And falling in love isn't
very often something people set out deliberately to do. It's an
experience that overtakes and overwhelms them with powerful imperatives
(musts). Yet, having fallen in love, people do choose quite a wide range
of behaviours in response to it.

Other times events over which we have no power, like wars and
earthquakes, simply happen to us, disrupting all our choices and
presenting us with unpleasant necessity.

Then there are the ordinary necessities. We must breather, eat, drink,
etc. 

The point is we can always choose from a range of responses and
attitudes just how we will react to any given external necessity.

Simone Veil, the 20th Century French mystic, suggests that Christ can
only be encountered in the confrontation with unpleasant necessity. She
suggests that through poverty, toil and hardship where will seems most
unfree and most constrained, one is left with only one thing to choose -
to choose not to let it get you down. She suggests this is a great
spiritual breakthrough and the ultimate expression of human free will, a
spiritual transformation, and other good things like that.

In other words, external necessity may eliminate all your choices except
the choice of what you are going to think about and how you are going to
feel about it. That choice can never be taken away by any external
agency or any kind of necessity.

One can always choose one's *thoughts*. And feelings derive from
thoughts. The ability to excercise such control over one's thoughts, and
therefore one's feelings may be the essence of spiritual 'awakening' and
spiritual disciplines may be all about leading disciples toward that
goal.

Once you know that you *can* control your thoughts, you *must* (and you
will) choose (by free will) what you will think. What you feel follows
from what you think. Your attitude, what you do, and what kind of
situations you attract and what kind of situations attract you follows
in turn from that.

If you want a new life, get some new thoughts! I don't mean to be
flippant here, I mean to be serious.

So back to the Garden. Eve is thinking "Gee, I can be like GOD" and she
thinks that because the serpent (Lucifer) puts the thought in her mind
by telling her it is so. Eve thinks "God said I will surely die if I eat
the fruit of that tree" and tells the serpent so. The serpent scoffs and
says it isn't so. Eve has two thoughts at this point: God's assertion
and instructions and the Serpent's assertion and seductive offer of a
way to cheat God. Eve *CHOOSES* between these two clear thoughts.

Eve knows quite well what she is doing. She chooses to make the mistake.

Now there is an old saying that no one ever makes a mistake s/he didn't
*have* to make. That is, if we know it is a mistake we usually don't
make it eh? There is some truth to that.

It is also true that many people knowingly make mistakes for certain
reasons. Inner conflicts. "I know if I don't get to bed on time I'll not
perform well at work in the morning, but I'm having so much fun right
now that I'll just forget that I know that for a couple of hours."

This is one of my personal favourites. It's a mistake I make time and
time again. Not all the time. Sometimes I avoid it, but I have a real
weakness for this mistake. Which means it's not a 'mistake', it's quite
deliberately chosen with full conscious awareness of the consequences.

You could call it sloth, irresponsibility, or whatever. It always comes
with the thought "what I'm doing now is much more fun than going to work
and I don't get enough fun so I'll grab it while I can". The thought is
correct by the way and the problem is that I do work too much so don't
get enough 'fun' so I am motivated to 'cheat'. But that too is a
life-style I have chosen and I could choose to re-arrange things so I
was getting enough fun.

I'm introducing, by anecdote, many of the subtleties of will and choice.
It works in complex ways in any person's life. It's all by way of
arguing that I think Eve's choice was freely made in full knowledge of
the consequences and therefore the consequences are not in any way
unfair.

Another way this can be looked at is to imagine God not giving Eve the
opportunity to make the wrong choice. Eve could never learn to exercise
will in a morally responsible way if she did not have the option of
making the wrong choice. God, wanting to create genuinely morally
responsible creatures, had to set up a situation in which the creatures
*could* make mistakes. Having done that, I suppose it is just a matter
of time until one of the creatures *does* make a mistake.

It's interesting that the forbidden fruit is the knowledge of good and
evil - morality in other words.  Is God's instruction here really an
order forbidding her to aquire the knowledge of good and evil?  Yes. God
warns her not to eat of that fruit but makes it possible for her to do
so. Eventually she does and history begins.

So even though it can be said that God knew she was gonna do it and set
her up for a fall, she chose to go along with it. She was not
*compelled*, she was a *willing* rebel.

Now what I suppose is this. God's up there in heaven with all the angels
and everyone's having a grand time but free will doesn't really exist
because everyone does what they must do and there is no real choice to
be 'bad'. It's just not an option. But God wants some of his creatures
to develop real knowledge of good and evil and moral choices so he
creates the tree of knowledge. He's gotta give someone the chance to eat
but he can't actually *make* anyone do it. That would start the whole
thing off wrong and it wouldn't be free will. To learn free will the
first mistake has to be freely made, once the opportunity for it is
created.

So he gives Eve the choice, she makes it and in so doing becomes a
volunteer to go through a few milennia of learning how to exercise that
free will. And the end of the lesson may be the awareness that one must
do what one must do gladly. But that too is *freely* chosen in an
environment where disobedience is possible.

And if history means anything to me, it's all about everyone learning
that lesson: given the choice, choosing the right thing - or choosing
between evil and good.

Now I think a major purpose for religion is to instruct those who don't
know about the nature of good and the nature of evil.  It is hard to
choose well when you don't know the difference. Another major purpose
for religion, as I see it, is to encourage the spiritual disciplines
required to develop the ability to exercise will (make choices)
responsibly. If free will didn't really exist, I'd say it would all be
quite pointless - life that is.

=Doug