Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it. But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves. A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort.
Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
Free will without fate is no more conceivable than spirit without matter, good without evil.
Friedrich Nietzsche
People allow themselves to be slaves of their bad habits and society’s bad habits – but they have free will, and if they wish to be free, they can.
Peace Pilgrim
How free are we as individuals? How free am I? How free are you? How free are we collectively? These questions become more relevant as life unfolds in these tumultuous times.
When I was most shackled in my adult life, – a twenty-year-old full of rage, grief, resentment, and fear, – that’s when the illusion of free will was at its strongest. Go anywhere, do anything, be anyone. Now, decades later it is clear that unseen forces have been dictating much of my thinking, my words, and my actions throughout my entire life.
Someone once shared with me their very simple and relatable definition of `expansion of consciousness´ , a definition which made a deep and lasting impression on me. It was: `Getting to know yourself better´.
As a young lad, I had very little exposure to the big wide world beyond my family of origin and our still relatively sheltered Emerald Isle. Study and experience of depth psychology, myth, spirituality, comparative religion, sexuality, geography, parenthood, – all still lay way ahead of me, as did the daily bread and butter of personal dysfunction, survival, crashing, burning, surrender, recovery, and healing.
Experience has shown that much of my thinking and behaviour from my twenties onwards had been fuelled and shaped by innumerable fears. My weltanschauung and reaction to events had been programmed from an array of survival strategies shaped by the adversity I experienced throughout the formative years of childhood, beginning perhaps as early as my sojourn in the womb.
Of course, it took some time and suffering for me to get to the point where I was prepared to survey and eventually question my idealised version of childhood (a manifestation of ego self-protection), not to mind deconstruct it and begin unpacking the truth. When I got sick and tired of being sick and tired, that is to say.
As a college student, with false courage fuelled by alcohol and weed, I was sure my destiny was to change the world. In the meantime, having gotten clean and sober, I now realise that there is only one person on the planet that I can change. That person is me!
The process of recovery from addiction requires the willingness to have my inner world reconfigured, perception disorders removed, and ego deflated. The power of the fear-driven entities of the ego slowly begins to recede, making way for the re-emergence of the true Self, made up of pure, unconditional love.
So how much free will, if any, do we humans have? Let me elaborate using a topical paragraph that came up in this week’s reading (I am currently re-reading Eckhard Tolle’s `A New Earth´, first published in 2005).
On a collective level, the mindset `we are right, and they are wrong´ is particularly deeply entrenched in those parts of the world where conflict between two nations, races, tribes, religions, or ideologies is long standing, extreme, and endemic. Both sides of the conflict are equally identified with their own perspective, their own story, that is to say, identified with thought.
Both are equally incapable of seeing that another perspective, another story, may exist and also be valid. Israeli writer Y. Halevi speaks of the possibility of `accommodating a competing narrative´ but in many parts of the world people are not yet able or willing to do that.
Both sides believe themselves to be in possession of the truth. Both regard themselves as victims of the other and the other as evil. And because they have conceptualized and thereby dehumanized the other as the enemy, they can kill and inflict all kinds of violence on the other, even on children, without feeling their humanity and suffering. They become trapped in an insane spiral of perpetration, and retribution, action and reaction.
Tolle continues: By far the greater part of violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged but of normal respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego. One can go so far as to say that on this planet, normal equals insane. What is it that lies at the root of this insanity? Complete identification with thought and emotion, that is to say, ego.
Sounds eerily familiar, doesn’t it? If in doubt, just turn on today’s evening news on TV.
My own path demonstrates the destructive power of the ego. Driven by the fear of abandonment and isolation, by direct threats to my life, freedom, and comfort, I developed survival strategies which now hamper my relationships and the realisation of my full potential. These include – `I need to be self-sufficient, never asking for or even needing help´. This pattern appears to be quite widespread among those of us who, when faced with childhood adversity, did not receive healthy holding and comforting by our adult caregivers.
Since the re-animation of the relationship between my adult self and the `little one within´, I (we) have been learning a lot. My Inner Child shared with me this morning how frightened he has always been of people who were, on the one hand, overburdened and, on the other, not sufficiently conscious of this fact to get help. In such dire straits, these people are therefore prone to act out in reactive, destructive ways. This could take the form of martyrdom, complaining, blaming, shaming, or even punishing whichever bystanders are available, the more defenceless the better.
When the overburdened one is an adult caregiver and the target of the reaction is a young child, much damage can be wrought. Where is the free will in such scenarios? Whether or not my soul chose the family of origin into which I was born is not a question I need to resolve right now. More shall be revealed, perhaps, at the end of this incarnation.
The pertinent question today is the one which addresses my degree of willingness to wake up to the reality of life as it is right now, in the present moment, to accept the mixed bag of wounds and gifts that have accumulated over time, and to embrace the opportunity to heal the old wounds while cultivating and further developing the gifts.
Herein lies my free will.
Reflecting on the very human destructive patterns of thinking and behaviour we all know, the contemporary mystic, Richard Rohr, says that we are given the choice between `transform or transfer´. By choosing transformation, our wounds may heal such that we do not pass on their burden to the next generation, at least not in full. Otherwise, the burden simply gets passed on from one generation to the next. It is a choice between collective spiritual evolution or calamitous decay.
We could say that the hand I was dealt is fate, and how I play the cards lies, in part at least, in the domain of free will. Carl Jung suggested the necessity of embracing that part of us which has lain unseen, thus engaging in what he called `shadow work´, by which means we get to know ourselves better. My experience confirms this.
On the issue of the neediness of the overburdened (who among us has never been in situations where we were stretched beyond our limits?) I can now clearly see that my `blind spot´ reflex, born of the old survival strategies, was to deny its existence, in both self and others, and to do whatever was in my powers to make it appear to go away. A hint of another being overwhelmed (regardless of their capacity to deal with the situation) seems to be sufficient, at times, to initiate this inner reflex. This has hampered the development of true empathy on my part, which has been the cause of much strife and hurt in relationships, especially with those dearest to me.
My free will is to continue to explore the shadow, however painful that may be. As the task unfolds, experience shows that the pain is never a burden too heavy to bear, if I succeed in not adding to the burden by taking up a stance of resistance to `what is´, (thereby adding suffering to the mix).
The path to liberation leads within. The reflex to seek the solution `out there´ is a cunning trick of the ego, which – by its very nature – is invested in the status quo. The fact that the answers lie within is, indeed, good news. Only there do I have any true agency and leverage.
As the inner work progresses, free will continues to materialize, from the inside out, forever rippling outwards.
