Free Will and Causality
“Why can I not smash a wall with my hand without feeling pain?” beats many. Some folks assume that it’s in the way they are smashing the wall, so they try again and again. Some give up and whine, “How is such a choice free?” Few, then, study the wall, the hand, the motion in order to answer the initial question.
However, the very fact that you can choose between smashing a wall or not demonstrates already that any choice as such is free. It is there, freely available for you to make it. And that each option has a deterministic (or, rather, pretty much predictable) outcome does not detract from that freedom.
What’s not exactly free is our human decision making. The way we weight and consider available options exactly because each opened path is equally free to follow.
From a different perspective though, I don’t even need to bother with why hitting a wall with all my strength hurts like hell. It’s simply like that. Okay. I may as well accept this obvious causality and its dependent origination of outcomes. Or, as others like to say, it would serve me well to honor my ancestors.
And that choice is exactly as free as is the rest.
So, in the end, I can either surf the universe or I can fight it. After all, those two are the only equally available causal outcomes of that particular crossroad. Guess which one is more propitious for self-realization aka knowledge of God?
Suffice to say, that ultimate knowledge impacts human decision making too. In fact, it shifts the scales of considerations in a pretty dramatic way because Sisyphean futility goes out of the window. You could also say that it’s only then when one’s will becomes truly free at last.
(Although ironically, and despite the fact that each choice taken becomes pretty much set — it’s obvious what to choose given the options I’m aware of in the context of any particular circumstances — actual decision making still happens with incomplete information. And always will.)
But it’s only with coming of the knowledge of absolute when the seed of responsibility sprouts at last and the journey we call life truly begins. It’s only then when you are reborn.
Finally, at peace.
