Dear Sundari, I have been wondering since I last spoke to Ramji about choice and coincidence. Do we have any choice? Who chooses? If I am not my thoughts and feelings and I know clearly now that I am not, then who in me has made these choices about how I live my life. Isvara? If there is a satsang or somewhere in one of the books I could read about it, please let me know.
Sundari: All the SW teachers have dealt with the question of free will at length. My take is at the bottom of this email. Be grateful that Isvara has given you the grace to have such a strong a vasana for moksa, Vedanta!
G: As I said before it has been a sort of mind-shattering realization that I am not the gunas or the doer. A relief and maybe a numbness where not much is going on, until I get poked by something and then it is not very dense or long-lasting like it used to be, I am not sure how to describe it.
Sundari: No need to describe it, I know exactly what you mean. Negating the last vestiges of the jiva program, all its emotional/mental conditioning, is extremely subtle and cannot be rushed. Hence nididhysana being the longest and most difficult phase of self-inquiry. You are technically no longer a seeker, yet the seeker/reactor program is still active, even if it is much reduced. At this stage you cannot forget who you are, but it is possible to lose access to Self-knowledge temporarily if you get ‘poked’, i.e., sucked into the jiva program. Mostly what one feels at this point is a new lightness of being, for want of a more original phrase. The ego feels a bit naked, like it must be missing something, or getting something wrong, a kind of imposter syndrome. It passes.
G: And then of course there is Love, but I am reading Essence of Enlightenment again on love. But I have not been feeling at all loving most of the time, not what I expected! But maybe I confuse the feeling of loving others and being open hearted and connected as opposed to love being just what I put my attention on to.
Sundari: Love is not a feeling or thought. Thoughts/feeling are just the reflection of love, they are not actually love, just like your reflection in the mirror is you but is not you. Nondual love has nothing to do with what’s going on in the mind or jiva program. Love as your nature means you are whole and complete and need nothing, it does not involve another. Love may be expressed as a feeling to ‘others’ whom you know to be nondifferent from you. The object is loved for its own sake, not for how the object makes you ‘feel’. Real love wants nothing and fears nothing. It is self-satisfied.
In the discussion on love it is difficult to understand the equation between Consciousness and love because Consciousness is free of feelings, whereas love seems to be a feeling quite separate from Consciousness. But there is actually no difference because reality is non-dual. Feelings are never apart from Consciousness; they arise out of Consciousness and are made up of Consciousness, like the spider’s web is made up of the spider, but feelings are not real.
G: Please don’t think I am complaining, it’s been rather marvelous, but so strange.
S: I don’t think you are not the complaining type!
Free Will or Preordained?
The dharmafield is like a computer game: all the possible moves are programmed into the game before you play it. The question to ask, always, is: are you the Self, or the jiva? As a jiva, although it appears as if you are making independent moves and playing the game to win or lose, in actual fact, it is already pre-determined as you can only make the moves that are already in the programme. Isvara or the dharmafield is playing the game, which is why karma yoga is such an important teaching, and the only way to negate the doer. It is the most sensible way to live because it relieves the pressure of getting the ‘right’ result, or any particular result for that matter, because you understand that the dharmafield is out of your control and it’s a zero-sum Only Isvara has knowledge of all objects and controls the Field for the good of the Total. You get the results that are best for you at any given time. There is no way to step out of the dharmafield as a jiva other than through Self-knowledge, moksha, which is liberation from the person, not for the person.
If you think you are the doer (the person or ego) you have limited free will in that you are seemingly free to choose one thing over another, according to your nature or conditioning. The dharmafield operates according to certain laws which if understood and followed, it is possible to achieve success from the standpoint of the jiva. If that were not the case, success in anything, particularly freedom from the apparent reality, would never be possible. But if we peel back everything we think ‘we’ do to achieve a result, we will see that at every step of the way there were a million factors involved not in our control that made it happen. Everything happens by the grace of Isvara. All the same, if we take the appropriate action at the appropriate time, desired results are often, (though not always) achieved. There are no guarantees in the apparent reality because Isvara runs the Field and takes care of the needs of the Total first. People who do not understand how the Field of Existence works like to claim success at any endeavor as solely a result of their will and doing, though that is impossible because nothing happens without Isvara making it possible.
Apart from that, the other factor is that although most people’s choices seem to be volitional and individual, they are usually highly predictable and repetitive. This is because most people, who have none, or very limited, Self-knowledge behave like automatons, although they don’t think they do. They think that they are doing the choosing, but actually, their conditioning (vasana’s/gunas) is doing the choosing/doing. Still, it does look like one has free will, and in a way, the person does. From this perspective, free will gives the person the choice to ‘make the best’ of their lives. We do have free will to respond to what Isvara dishes out and how we respond either creates unpleasant or pleasant circumstances/karma.
People often ask us: Is free will the cause of karma or is it the gunas? Well, it’s a both/and not either/or. The gunas govern and colour vasanas which create karma, and vasanas/karma reinforce the gunas, in an endless cycle. To understand free will from the point of view of the Self, we first must understand that the gunas, vasanas and karma are three ways of saying the same thing because nothing in mithya can be separated from the gunas. Everything that happens does so by virtue of the gunas. The gunas give rise to the jiva, the vasanas and their results (karma). Everything that happens is a vasana and, everything that happens is karma. Just like the gunas, all vasanas/karma are eternal and exist as principles in the Causal Body. They arise from the three gunas namely, sattva, rajas, and tamas which are what make up Maya—the Field, or creation.
Therefore, good or bad, our guna generated vasanas, not free will, are doing the responding/choosing, so we tend to get more of the same back. As the Self-realized jiva, you may have negated the doer and rendered binding vasanas non-binding, but you will still have vasanas. They will just be in alignment with dharma. Or they will be preferences, not binding. Even if we have Self-knowledge, or we are mature people with good values and always follow dharma, it is no guarantee of outcome.
But if you know you are the Self, you are not bothered with free will or outcome because you know not only that Isvara runs the show. But more importantly, the show is not real. When Self-knowledge has removed ignorance and you know that your true nature is whole and complete non-dual Awareness, there is no karma for you. There are no bad outcomes, just outcomes.
As the Self, samsara no longer exists in ‘your’ mind and you see everything from the perspective of the nondual Self, as non-different from you. What is there to choose? It is all you, the Self, and it is all good. You unfailing respond dharmically and appropriately to all situations so you never create unpleasant circumstances. You take everything as prasad, even if unpleasant circumstances present themselves. You see it all like the movie it is, and nothing touches you. Even though Self-knowledge is not a magic bullet for the ego, which must still transact with this world, it is non the less seen as an object known to you.
Much love, Sundari