GEMS FROM THE
VISION AND PRACTICE
BEACH 10: HINDUISM FOR THE NEXT GENERATION
Wave 9: Divine Will and
Free Will – A Dialogue
The following is an imaginary no-holds-barred 8-part ‘dialogue’ among
‘DFW’, standing
for ‘Disciple who holds Free Will is everything’,
‘DDW’, standing for ‘Disciple who holds Divine Will
is everything’ and
‘TD’, standing for a ‘Third Disciple who holds that
it is neither this nor that exclusively’.
But as the conversation proceeds, you will find their
original convictions gradually change.
-1-
DFW: Free will is essential for reward and
punishment otherwise anyone would do anything they wish and say "it was
God's will, don't blame me!".
DDW: Ah, but that is not quite a correct
viewpoint because,you are cheating. God's will has been expressed in the
various Shrutis (Gita, Upanishads, Bible and what have you) and if you follow
those actions, you can claim to be doing God's will, otherwise you cannot
claim to act in God’s way.
DFW: Hold on, even my acting contrary to the
scriptures is being done by God, right? So I don't understand you
distinguishing some actions from others.
DDW: True, but even the consequences of the
actions against Him will have been described in the scriptures. They are available
for all to see.
TD: I
think you are both taking extreme positions. If man did not have free will to
attempt to do his will, Veda statements like ‘satyam vada’ (Speak the truth) and ‘dharmam cara’ (Act according to dharma)
would lose all their meaning. So I am not prepared to agree with DDW. But what DDW says that it is finally Divine
will that expresses itself is correct.
DDW. Then how can you also agree with DFW?
TD: That is the tricky point. Without the implied choice of action implied
in statements like satyam vada and dharmam cara we can go nowhere. Man is
free to act in the way his tendencies (VasanAs)
take him. Man is also free to resist the bad vAsanAs and act in a way which will purify his mind and rid it of
the dirt accumulated therein.
DDW: Then why are the scriptures repeatedly
professing that it is all divine will? “mayaivaite
nihatAH pUrvameva ..” (‘All these people have been killed by me
already ...’) says
DFW. That quote is exactly what confuses me.
TD:
Maybe
DFW: But Arjuna was not enlightened – at
least, at that point. But wait. What do you say to such expressions in our
shAstras: “Neither Hari (Vishnu) nor Hara (Shiva) can erase what is written on
your forehead”? Does it not say that the
so-called fate that overrules you is dominant. And is not Fate the same as
Divine Will?
DDW: Are you, DFW, arguing for me now?
TD: Both of you are confusing me now! Let us
go about it systematically. That Fate you are talking about is the prArabdha-karma. It is the portion of our past karma which has started taking effect in this birth of ours and it is this facet of
our life where neither God nor anybody can intervene.
DDW: But
that would limit the Almighty’s all-mightiness!
TD:
Here I am with you. To limit His own all-mightiness is His own Will!.
DDW: Let
us come back now to Free Will and Divine Will. If prArabdha is so dominant again you come only to my view. Nothing
can change God’s Will!
DFW: But we have still to answer the question
about the choice of action that TD raised.
TD. That is why I said we have to proceed
systematically. The choice of action is there so long as you believe ‘I am the
doer’.
DFW: You have now brought in a third belief –
namely whether one is the doer or not. But if I am not the doer and God is the
doer, then is He not responsible for all my bad thoughts and bad actions?
TD: He
is not responsible even for your good thoughts and good actions.
DDW: Wait, wait. You are contradicting my
theory of Divine Will totally and I thought you earlier said that you agreed
with me.
TD: There are stages of evolution in a man’s
life – in fact, several lives. There is
a stage when we have to grant free will. That is the stage when you are either
a growing child either in the physical plane or in the spiritual plane. You
cannot tell a high school student that it is all divine will; then there is no
purpose in asking him to make effort at his education.
DFW: But even assuming that at the adult
stage of a better spiritual evolution, to believe it is some other Power within
us, other than our egoism, that it is the doer and the experiencer, is only
fatalism. I would not like to grant that Hinduism or Vedanta is all fatalism.
TD: Your equating the fact that there is another Power within
us with Fatalsim is not correct. The
recognition of this other Power within us is the first step towards our spiritual evolution.
DDW:
What can this other Power within us be except God?
DFW: But that contradicts your earlier
statement that God is not responsible for any of our actions either good or
bad!
TD: This other Power within us is not God. It
is our own individualised PrakRti (SvabhAva – our own nature) for which we
are ourselves the architect, by means of the way we thought and lived in all
our past lives and also in this life up to the present.
-2-
DDW:
But I have never heard of this concept
of ‘individualised prakRti’ that you
are using.
TD: In
Gita Ch.3, shloka No.33 the Lord says that even the wise man does work according to his prakRti. Acharya Shankara, in commenting
on this, writes: ‘PrakRti is nothing
but the accumulated samskAras of our past lives individualised and earmarked
for this life of ours’. The sanskrit word ‘prakRta’
(from which ‘prakRti’ is derived)
means ‘currently in vogue’.
DDW: But why is God causing people to behave
the way they do in these times? How can you account for the fact that the world
is in such a mess? Why is everyone now immersed in thinking only of themselves
and not the greater good? Why is this
play?
DFW:
You said it right. It all looks like a deliberate play. In fact, I would
say that if the theory of play is right, then God must be a sadist!
TD: No,
no. Not that way. It is a play alright, but that is what is termed in the
Puranas as God’s LeelA. That requires a
lot of faith to go in that direction. Let us
pursue the trend of our conversation in the way we started it. First
God is not causing people to behave the way they do. It is the people who behave that way. That
itself tells you that people have the freewill to do what they want to do. This free will God
has granted man.
DFW:
At last you are veering to my viewpoint!
TD:
Don’t be too assured. Of course
God has granted freewill to us both to obey His orders like ‘satyam vada’ and
‘dharmam cara’ and also to disobey them.
DDW:
That is what I call the play of the Divine.
DFW: But
then God must be foolish to play that dangerous game.
DDW: Your choice of words ‘dangerous game’
reminds me of what Sathya Sai Baba once
replied to a devotee. The devotee asked him, while they were walking along the
shores of the Arabian Sea, ‘Lord, if you are capable of doing all those
miracles for which you are known, why don’t you change this entire sea into a
sea of petrol and thus solve the problem of scarcity of oil-fuel in the
world?’. Sathya Sai Baba immediately
replied: ‘But then I cannot guarantee that no crazy human being like you would
not throw a lighted cigarette into that sea!’.
TD: The moral of the story is: Even God cannot
guarantee that man will not behave in an animal way. And that proves that Man
has free will!
DFW: Oh Good! Daniel come to judgement!
DDW: But then where does all this lead us?
TD: It
leads to our starting point. It is not all black and white. It is a spectrum of
colours. The answer to the dilemma depends upon three factors. 1. The situation
or the action that we are talking about. 2. Level of spiritual evolution of the
individual concerned. 3. Degree of willingness to stand apart and surrender the
ego.
DDW. I
am sure on the third factor the generality of us may be taken to be at the
base level.
TD. To simplify the discussion I am willing to
assume, for the present, that with respect to the second factor – spiritual
evolution also – we are almost at the base level. Once we do that, we come back
to the child level of spiritual evolution, which we have already discussed. At
this level, it is Free will that is considered to be dominant in the psychology
of the individual concerned. But this is
only the beginning. But when we start moving up the ladder of spiritual evolution,
our factor levels get a gradual relaxation.
DFW. I
think this is too much for me today. Why not we continue tomorrow?
DDW and TD: OK.
-3-
DFW: Do you mean then that what is dominant
is different at different times of the life of an individual?
DDW: If I heard TD right, I thought he said:
*in the psychology of the person concerned*
TD:
Yes, when we start moving up the spiritual ladder our mental make-up
changes.
DDW:
Yes, we gradually begin to understand how when a jnAni is acting,
actually he is not doing any action because he has no identification with his
body, mind and intellect. But such
understanding also generates new confusions in one’s mind. The Gita verse which specifically refers to
this ‘inaction in action’ also in the same breath refers to ‘action in
inaction’. While not acting how can one
do action?
DFW:
When the train moves, the landscape moves in the opposite direction. The
child thinks that it is the landscape that is moving and the train is
stationary. Even
we adults get this mistaken feeling when two
trains are in adjacent platforms ready to move in opposite directions. Suddenly
we feel that the other train has already moved, but on examination of the
changing landscape between the two
trains we understand that it is our train that has started moving and not the
other train. This is the understanding of action in apparent inaction. To attribute non-action to the Self which
stands still as it were is only to comprehend it relatively. It is the Self
which permeates everyhere, it is the substratum of everything and it is the
prime mover par excellence. The Self is therefore the chief agent of action, as
it were, though it appears to be only a silent witness. Thus the wise man sees
action in non-action.
DDW:
Hey, DFW, Are you not advocating my cause that it is all God’s will that
is taking place?
DFW: Well, TD has said just now that our
moods change. Maybe my mood has changed! But shall we get back to the earlier
trend of the conversation? TD, you said that as we move up the ladder of
spiritual perfection, our factor levels change. Can you continue that thought a
little further?
TD: As
we move up the ladder of spiritual understanding, for some of us the first
shock arises when we begin to realise that, in addition to the limitations of
parentage, sex and environment, there are other limitations also. Very often we
blame it on our ill-luck if, after all our efforts, we don’t achieve what we
want to achieve. Slowly it dawns on us that what and how we will, there is
something else that wills it otherwise.
If we can find a scapegoat of an earthly person or cause we blame it on
them. But when we don’t find such a cause, we are at a dead end for
explanations. And then it is that the concept of prArabdha karma seems to
make sense. And we realise that prArabdha
could also be another name for ill-luck.
Why ill luck? Even for good luck also, on which we put so much faith, prArabdha could be the other name!
DFW: But when we reach, as you say, a stage
where we look upward for the hand of God to help us out of our problems, do we
really believe that God can change things for us?
DDW: What else does it mean to look upward for
the hand of God?
TD: I think DFW is asking *Shall we trust God
totally? Or shall we take it that He gives just a hand?*
DDW: That is a dilemma that I have never got
through.
TD: I think almost all of us go through this
dilemma most of our lives vacillating between extremes. The intensity of this
vacillation depends on our mood and environment. It is also a function of the
company we keep and the amount of pressure from our peers.
DDW: Oh yes. It also depends on what somebody
just said to me and walked away. You
allow this DFW to be talking to you continuously, your mood will change.
DFW: Hey, DDW, it is the same thing with me
when you keep reeling off your quotes from authoirities and scriptures!
TD: Well, it is nobody’s fault. It is in our
nature. The company we keep, our kith and kin as well as the attachment we have
to all of them influence largely the opinions we have and only magnifies the
dilemma about whether to believe in God totally or not.
DFW: In fact, I have a fundamental question
in that connection. If you believe in a supernatural interventionist God who
comes to your help when you pray to Him, how do you explain the umpteen situations
when He does not intervene?
DDW: Oh Boy! That is a deep question. May be we
should sit back and think about it.
TD: I
suggest we break now and continue tomorrow.
-4-
TD: We had just raised the question why the
supernatural interventionist God does not always intervene – even in such
tragedies like the Tsunami.
DFW.
You said it right. Why did He not intervene and stop the tragedy? If He
exists but cannot remove our suffering then He is not God. If He exists and
would not remove our suffering then He is not kind. If He exists and should not
remove our suffering then He is not the boss. If He exists and suffering also
has to exist then He is not the only Truth.
DDW. You
seem to have analysed it thoroughly!
TD: All these are only rhetorical statements
which do not take into account the fact that a God, if He is really God, should
not be judged from our human norms of right and wrong, justice and injustice.
DFW. You are only inventing an answer so that
you can escape answering the question.
DDW. I feel that these questions
themselves have been invented to throw
God out.
TD: My answer has a simple reason. No human
being has either the database or the holistic view that Divinity must surely
have of the universe and its contents.
DFW: I don’t understand you.
DDW: TD says God has an ultimate purpose for
everything and we may not know it.
TD: But His purpose could not be removal of
human poverty or illness.
DDW: Why not?
DFW:
Because if that were so , He should have done it long ago. He did not
have to wait for two or three millenia to remove illness and poverty from the
world. At least it is clear He has not
done it yet.
TD: I
think we are going at a tangent. We wanted to understand why it is that we
cannot understand that He is not removing our suffering even though by
definition of God as Almighty God, He should have been able to do it. And DDW
said that God perhaps has a purpose for everything. Shall I tell you a real
story why I feel DDW might be right?
DDW and DFW together: Go ahead.
TD. Well it is a long story. But let me be as
brief as possible. Two American
youngsters living 100 miles south of
DFW: That is interesting certainly. But we
have strayed far from our original quest of deciding between Free will and Divine
Will.
DDW: But we have to settle this question of
God’s non-intervention. When there is a natural calamity like the Tsunami, we
have only to take it that God does not want, by His own Free Will, to interfere
with Nature and its workings – though all of it is His own creation.
DFW:
Wait a minute. You just said that God has Free Will. Free Will implies
multiple options and a freedom to exercise choice. Does He have several
options? Why does He choose one of them?
DDW : Because He has a purpose for everything
as I already told you.
DFW: Purpose is always for achieving
something. Does God want to achieve something? But I have heard it said that
God has nothing to obtain which He has not already obtained.
TD: His purpose could only be to bring back every
erring human being to His fold.
DDW: But then you are implicitly agreeing to
the contention that human beings have
the freedom of will to err.
TD. Certainly,
that is what I have been saying from the beginning. God gives you the
commandment of ‘satyam vada’ and ‘dharmam chara’ and also gives you the
free will to disobey them. But He also keeps on telling you to have the
willingness to obey them.
DDW: Is not even this Free Will subject to the
influence of the Divine?
TD: You have touched a deeper chord. Let us take it next time.
-5-
DDW: We were raising the doubt whether the Free
Will that is enjoined to obey God’s injunctions through the vedas, is itself
under the influence of the Divine Will.
DFW: I
was thinking of this problem last night and I have a fundamental doubt before
you all proceed further in this discussion. The philosophy of advaita that we
all adhere to claims that there is only one absolute brahman and everything else is only an appearance that comes and
goes. If that is so, where is the question of a divine will? Does brahman,
the attributeless, have a will for Itself?
DDW:
Hey! Where do you get all these questions? They cut the ground under my
feet!
TD: But it is a legitimate question. I suggest
we take it up first.
DFW: I
feel if you grant that the attributeless brahman
is the only Absolute Truth, then there can be no divine will. If you want to
have divine will as an entity, then advaita is contradicted.
DDW. But if
you grant free will absolutely, then that means there are choices to
choose from. All this means duality and multiplicity, which is against advaita.
TD: May
I correct your qualification 'absolutely'? Even if there is one instance of
free will, that is enough to imply duality.
DFW:
If there is only one Consciousness
everywhere and all the time, where is the question of free will? Free
will of whom? Free from what?
TD: The
problem arises because we are making the standard mistake of mixing up two
different levels of our awareness. If we want to stay at the level of the
Absolute brahman, then there is
nothing else to talk about. Only Silence. Remember Dakshinamurti concept. But
the moment we think of God or Ishvara, we have descended to the level of the mAyic world and in this vyAvahArika world, there is God, -- who is now nothing but Saguna brahman, i.e., brahman on whom we have
superposed several attributes -- there are creations, there can be talk of free
will, divine will etc.
DDW: I
see. It is really a subtle point.
TD. This subtlety is usually missed in
arguments. Now let us come back to the question of whether free will itself is under the
influence of the divine will.
DFW: In fact that is exactly where I have
another question. I would like here to
come down to the ordinary concept of bhakti or devotion rather than the
abstract injunctions of ‘satyam vada’
and ‘dharmam chara’. Now all religion
says “Be devoted to God. Pray to Him”.
This is bhakti. If God, your
saguna brahman, is the Almighty that He is supposed to be,
why not He Himself grant me, by a wave of His magic, that bhakti which I find it difficult to cultivate by my free will?
DDW: Good question! I appreciate you, DFW, for
the way you articulate your questions. But God does grant you that bhakti.
Only you have to receive it. The rain may pour, but if a vessel is upside down
no water will collect in it.
TD:
Well said. Our minds are free. So by our own free will we have to decide
to receive what God gives us. By our own volition we must decide to trust in
God and surrender to Him.
DDW: If by supplanting our will, God has to
give us what we need, then there need be no creation, no existence of the
universe.
TD: That is the mystery of God’s leelA, sport or play of creation.
Creation is where God allows beings to have the feeling of separateness from
Him and then waits and waits until the beings that have emerged from Him come
back to Him. If they don’t want to come
back to Him, He allows them to go their own way and take their own time to
discover that that is the Want which will rid them of all other wants.
DDW: This is what Sathya Sai Baba calls ‘The
agony of God’ in this great cycle of creation. His anguish is that beings do
not want to get out of this cycle. So sometimes He gives them all the petty
things they want, so that in due time they would want what He wants to give
them.
TD: As Sri Ramakrishna said: ‘Breeze of Grace
is always blowing, but you have to set your sail to catch that breeze’. In other words He allows us to go our ways
and learn by our own experience and come to Him by our own volition.
DFW: Then is this experience ours or is it
given by Him?
TD: He does not give us these experiences.
Because, we have already programmed it for ourselves by our own past actions.
DDW: The one thing He assures us however, is
that once we take even a minor step towards Him He comes forth with both hands
to receive us, as would a mother in welcoming a lost child. As Sathya Sai Baba
would say: ‘You take one step towards Me; I will take ten steps towards you’!
DFW: Then let us come back to the question of whether
Free Will itself is under the influence of Divine Will or not.
TD: I am happy you are recognising the
existence of Divine Will to that extent. When we say that everything happens
according to the Will of God, are we specifically referring to Nature and Nature’s doings?
DFW: When an event happens to a human being
and this is referred to as God’s Will, is this not just another way of
saying that it is one’s past karma that has brought about this event?
DDW: But the average psychology is different.
When a bad thing happens to somebody we rush to say it is God’s Will. When a
good thing happens to us we would rather ascribe it to our own effort.
TD: That is where the teaching of religion is
important. Either learn to accept both as God’s Will, or in the alternative,
learn to take responsibility for both. Don’t blame only unpleasant things on
God.
DFW. That is why I say, we should take
responsibility for every one of our actions. It is all our free will.
DDW: You are going back to your old refrain.
TD: We shall now have to go to the next level
of spiritual evolution. That, I think, will make matters clearer.
DDW. That means we are breaking now.
-
6 –
DDW: We
were discussing the question of DFW whether Free will itself could be under the
influence of Divine Will.
TD: Well, it is quite clear here from your own
example. This discussion on Divine Will
and Free Will is taking place because you raised a question first and started
the discussion. You are therefore the ‘nimitta
kAraNa’ for this action that is taking place now. But this event of a
discussion is itself God’s Will.
DFW. If you go in this strain then every
action of everybody becomes an act of God!
DDW. No. Each action of ours is not merely a
product of the action or thought that precedes it but it is also the product of
a state of moral character , which is what TD calls our individualised prakRti. This prakRti has been brought by us as a chip of imprints from all our
previous lives.
DFW: So is it
then not God’s action?
DDW But it is He who is the distributor of
results of past deeds and thoughts.
TD: Wait. The concept of free will changes
(subjectively) as one evolves philosophically. The common man’s understanding
that the Almighty intervenes either by way of Grace or otherwise is rather
elementary. The real work of the Almighty is deeper. Not a leaf moves without
His knowledge or sanction, not a drop flows down by itself. Gravity is His
Will. Action and Reaction are His Will.
DFW: Is Divine Will absolute then? Is that what is called Fate? Then why all this talk about Free Will?
DDW: Let us not confuse between Fate and Divine
Will. I think they are different.
TD:
Yes, first let us dispose of Fate. Then we can discuss Free Will and
Divine Will more understandably. Fate
and Free will are interwoven just as the threads of a fabric are crossed and
interlaced. We cannot rewrite our past or
fly like a bird or breathe under water. These are our limitations,
inherent in our nature, our fate. Our past is our fate for the future. But it
is only our tendencies that are determined by our past (and the so-called
fate). Our actions are not determined by our fate. Actions are ours.
DFW: Then why does DDW say that everything is
Divine Will?
DDW: Just now we decided to dispose of the
concept of Fate before we make the final lap of discussion between divine will
and free will. Don’t bring in divine will now. TD is doing alright; please allow him to go his own way.
TD: Only actions are ours. Fate has nothing to
do it. Fate, that is, our prArabdha, might have created the circumstances that led
to our action, but the action is ours. Fate might have contributed by shaping
our tendencies, which led to our action, but the action is still ours. It is
our mind that dictates our action. All spiritual teaching pleads for the Will
of Man to become stronger than the mind. Everywhere in the upanishads the
appeal is to the will . It is not as if man is a helpless creature as a leaf in
the storm or a feather in the wind. Man’s will has an element of complete
freedom. It is the power which enables him to act in directions opposite even
to his spontaneous bad tendency (dur-vAsanA). In this sense he is the architect of his
fate. Indeed this is the time when he
should not slacken any of his self-effort. Ultimately man’s will must prove
stronger than fate, because it is his own past will that created his present
fate.
DFW: Wonderful. I have heard Swami Chinmayananda say
something like this. I cannot take shelter under ‘Fate’ and refuse to act in a morally elevating
manner. I cannot argue, for instance, that ‘I will not go to the help of a
suffering man, because it is his karma
that makes him suffer; let him suffer!’. Maybe the other person suffers because
of his karma but my action or karma of not going to his help is my own
decision, out of my own free will.
DDW: And that will be a debit entry in your kArmic accounting, for which you have
only yourself to blame.
TD: In fact this cover for inaction will start a chain reaction of vAsanAs in your future conduct and will
gradually consume you in its own way. I
was saying therefore, that it is by our own will that we must face our fate,
that is prArabdha. Of course we
cannot rewrite our past. We may not be able to repair our wrong actions, but we
can learn lessons from them and act accordingly, by a determined free will, in
the future.
DFW:
Maybe we can try to avoid repeating them.
TD:
Fate is only our prArabdha karma which nobody can escape. It seems
even divine intervention cannot change it. Many of our stotras which promise eradication of all sin as the result of
recitation of that stotra, are
careful to imply only the destruction of sanchita
karma and not prArabdha karma. Sometimes it says this explicitly as in “sanchita-pApa vinAshaka lingam” in LingAshhTakaM. PrArabdha karma has to be
exhausted only by experiencing it.
DDW: But it is our attitude to the experience
that changes according to our trust in God.
TD: That is where our level of spiritual
evolution enters the picture. A trust in God and his omnipotence does not mean
that we ‘believe’ in Fate. It is wrong to think so. It is the first step for
the correct understanding of Hindu philosophy and spirituality.
DFW : Does not the omnipotence of God mean
that unless He wills it we cannot become spiritual?
TD: You
are raising the right question at the right time. Your question brings home to
us another point that is mentioned in our smritis.
You know there are four goals of life. These are called ‘purushArthas’ in Sanskrit. They are
dharma, artha,
DDW: If the upward path to higher levels of
spirituality has to be chalked out only by our effort then where comes the
question of divine will? You are confusing me now.
TD: We
have to go slow now. Maybe we should break here and continue next time.
- 7 -
TD: We
all have to start our lives with the hypothesis of absolute free will. It is
the sheet-anchor on which we base all our actions. But as we move forward along
the journey of life, we learn lessons from the world and we become wiser to the
ways of the world as also to the ways of the Lord.
DFW: Are you saying that our world experience
takes us away from belief in free will? I feel it is the contrary. For it is by
persistent and continuous self-effort great achievers have achieved what they are known to have achieved.
TD: I don’t deny that. By the same persistent
and continuous self-effort one learns that unless we bid farewell to a
self-centred life we cannot rise spiritually. So the path to higher levels of
spirituality needs a strong free will to strengthen the inner life rather than
the outer life. That is why the smritis say
the goals dharma and mokSha are sought only by self-effort.
DDW: The
common man thinks Faith in God is superstition. Superstition is what holds you
when you think negatively. But
Faith is some kind of intuition which
makes you, through your own free will, reach out and contact the most positive
thing in the universe, namely, the Supreme Almighty.
TD: Wonderfully said, DDW. It is that spark of Faith which we have to
keep fanning until with the blessing of a Guru it
blows up into a Fire of Wisdom (jnAnAgni). That way one develops a
God-centred nature.
DFW: Earlier you said that it is
world-experience that gradually takes us into the belief in a divine will.
Where does that stand in the light of this necessity to fan the so-called
Faith?
TD: If we carefully analyse the
world-experience of ourselves as well as of others, slowly it would appear
that, try what we may, certain happenings which seemed to be totally in our
control have slipped away from us and we feel that an invincible but invisible forceis pulling us. This inevitability of events strikes us in
the face.
DFW: But as we grow older I think we move from the childhood beliefs of
naivete, myth and superstition to the adult days of self-effort and freedom of
free will.
TD: You
have to move farther to learn the lessons of philosophy. All along we have been
thinking that prArabdha karma starts
our life with its own prescriptions of initial conditions and limitations on
our mind, intellect and environment and that all the rest is our free will. All
along we have believed that it is our prakRti
which is the result of our prArabdha
karma, that does everything and is the cause of all action. But this theory is too mechanical to be
ultimate. Even though Lord Krishna says this in the third chapter, later he
modifies it. PrakRti is inert and to
say that it is the doer and enjoyer is to accept the sentient self to be in the
control of the insentient prakRti.
DDW: I
see you are referring to the theory of purushha
and prakRti in the thirteenth chapter of the Gita.
TD: Yes, we have to bring in the sentient Purushha now. In the innermost recesses
of man there is a Consciousness which is Purushha
rather than PrakRti. PrakRti is only the force of the Purushha. It is this Purushha that makes the PrakRti work through the lower
self.
DDW: The free will that we have been holding on
to is not any more free. Our will, though powerful as we thought, has only a
limited power.
DFW:
Will aims at the end; but Power is the means to attain that end.
DDW: Will without power is helpless to provide
the means to attain the end. Power without will is purposeless because it has
no end in view.
TD: There cannot be any Power without
Consciousness. And there cannot be Consciousness without Power. The will-power we thought was ours comes
really from the consciousness within. And that Consciousness is the Purushha.
DDW: The Gita makes a very impassioned appeal
for us to surrender to the Purushha
within. After showing His cosmic form to Arjuna,
DFW: You already quoted this in Sanskrit on the first day of our conversation and I said that is what
always confuses me.
TD: But
now we can understand it. The plea of the Gita is for us to be the instrument
of the Will of God, that is, this Purushha.
We have to be like the needle in a gramaphone which only traces the channels
already chalked out for it by the designer of the record.
DDW: In other words, we only walk over the path
already dictated by God for us.
TD: Listen to Him for His voice. Throw the
responsibility on Him. Abandon all your dharmas,
meaning, abandon the doership attitude of all actions. You are not the doer. He
is the doer. This is the greatest renunciation, greatest surrender.
DFW:
But still we have not found an answer to the fundamental question I raised
earlier. I can now rephrase that question in the light of the theory that the Purushha
within is what makes the PrakRti the doer. In that case, then, the same Purushha should be held responsible for
all my bad thoughts and actions.
Originally I asked whether God is the one who should take
responsibility. Now we have come to the conclusion it is the Purushha.
But the Purushha is the same as the
cosmic Almighty, if I understand advaita right. So then, that brings us back to
square one!
TD:
Your logic is certainly reasonable. But you are missing one more bit of
information from the fifteenth chapter of the Gita. Maybe we should take it up
when we meet afresh.
-
8 –
DFW: What is it that I am missing from the
fifteenth chapter of the Gita?
TD: It
is the fact that there are two purushhas instead of one.
DFW:
Both sentient?
TD: Yes, both sentient. By themselves mind and intellect are not sentient. The spark of the Infinite
Consciousness that resides in us as the
sentient Purushha is the source of this sentience. This spark is the JIva But the JIva cannot express itself in any manner except through the BMI. When it so expresses
itself, an identification takes place between jIva on the one side and the BMI on the other side. This
identification results in a conscious personality which is what goes by the
ordinary name of ‘I’. This is one purushha. It is the perishable purushha
(kshara-purushha). If on the other hand jIva disassociates
itself from the BMI and remains as the spark of Consciousness that it really
is, then it is the imperishable purshha within. It is known as the akshara-purushha. Thus there are two purushhas.
DFW.
So who is responsible for my actions, good or bad? Who is the doer?
TD: It
is only the perishable purushha. The other one is imperishable, unattached,
unaffected, unpolluted, and immutable.
It is the real ‘I’. The perishable purushha is the false ‘I’ or the lower
self. The real ‘I’ is the higher
Self.
DDW:
Shall we say then that the real doer of actions is this perishable purushha?
TD: In
a sense, yes. Not only he is the doer but suffers the result of his doings. He
it is that goes from body to body and suffers all the fruits of actions.
DFW: Then what does the other purushha (the imperishable) do?
TD: He is untouched by anything. All our Upanishads as well as all the great
teachers of advaita from Shankara downwards tell us to identify ourselves with
the divine within and thus be unaffected by the ups and downs that the kshara purushha goes through.
DFW: I
still don’t understand it. What exactly do you mean by ‘identification’. Is it
just a posture? How does it translate into action? The discussion has now taken
such a turn that we have forgotten why we started the discussion. Where have
the Free Will and Divine Will gone now?
DDW: We
have not strayed. We are still trying to understand Divine Will. Because it is
the purushha within, whose presence in
us makes us will, act and feel through
our BMI, it is common in Vedanta to say that the outer self has no control and
it is the inner self that is the motor behind it.
TD: One
of you mentioned earlier the concept of
‘action in inaction’. This is it. The
inner Self does nothing but in its presence everything happens. But for its presence nothing would happen.
DDW:
This concept of the inner self as the power behind all our actions gets
translated for general understanding to
say it is all divine will. Common folk
understand by this statement that God is sitting there in his throne and dispensing all decisions and actions! The bottomline lesson is that we have to be
in harmony with that ‘divine will’ in order to live and die in peace. The identification means that you should be
constantly aware that you (the real You)
are neither the doer of actions
nor the experiencer of the
consequences. ‘na ahaM kartA, na aham bhoktA’.
Your mind thinks, your hands and feet act; but You are only a witness to
all of these.
DFW: I feel this identification business is
tricky. I think there is some blurring here.
TD: Let
me try to explain. Whenever we act, we think we are the doer of the action.
Actually we are thinking of the false ‘I’ here. The 18th chapter of
the Gita elaborates four others that have a part in the action. One is called ‘adhiShTAnaM’, the support or base of all
action. In other words it is the conglomerate of natural forces that constitute
the field of action.
DDW: The
next is the toality of the different senses which form the instrument of
action. The third is the set of circumstances or the context. The fourth is variously called Fate or Divine
Element; actually it is the set of vAsanAs
as we know, that have inspired the action.
TD:
Thus the false ‘I’ together with these four accessories become the
agents of action..
DFW:
The difference between this false ‘I’ and the real ‘I’ is only in the attitude. Right?
TD: But
the attitude or bhAvanA is everything.
This is the crux of the entire philosophy of advaita. The doer or kartA is the
individual mental attitude which unifies itself with the external things like
body, senses and the mind to the extent that it thinks they are itself. This
process of attitudinal unification is what is called identification.
DDW: On
the other hand, the real ‘I’, the deeper Self, stands aloof as Witness, sAkShI.
TD: If
now our mental attitude is perfectly tuned to identify itself with the sAkShI
behind, then the five participants to the action are outside us. We can then
clearly say “na ahaM kartA, na ahaM bhoktA” (I am not the doer or the
experiencer).
DDW: But all the four agents of action belong to PrakRti
or its effects and the fifth namely the
kshara purushha, is also an effect of the mAyic spell over us. So it is
also right to say that PrakRti is the
doer.
DFW:
But yesterday or so we concluded that PrakRti, being insentient, cannot
be the doer and it is He, the inner self, that is the doer.
TD: It is now clear, after the analysis in the
18th chapter, in what sense we are saying that PrakRti is the doer.
It is the false inner self along with
the four other agents of action
that is the doer. Thus
PrakRti together with the sentience of the false self becomes
the doer.
DFW: It is all pretty complicated.
DDW:
That is why, to the common folk, we simply say, that the spirit within
us, which is divine, is the doer. And they further simplify it by saying that
it is all divine will. ...
TD: ...
which is right after all, since it is the spark of Consciousness that sparks
the mAyA that causes our false self to say what it says.
DDW : I feel greatly relieved now. I feel I
understand it all.
DFW.
Do you, really? Then can you
answer the question: Does the ‘divine’ have free will?
DDW: I
know you are trying to trap me. To say
it does not have free will is absurd
because we ourselves have free will in some measure. To say the divine has free will also leads to
absurd supplementaries.
DFW: Like what?
DDW:
Like what you yourself pointed out earlier. Free will implies options to
choose from. Does the divine choose from several options? Why does it choose
one of them? In that case is the divine
so ignorant of the future to have to choose from its options? What governs its
choice? Nature or PrakRti? Is the divine a slave to Nature? It cannot be. What
desire makes the divine choose? If the divine is omniscient, omnipotent and
omnipresent, why does He have to have options, choices, freedom to choose or
not to choose? Why? Why? Does it not all add up to saying that the divine is a
bundle of contradictions?
TD:
Wonderful. The divine Godhead in Hinduism is difficult to conceive
of because it simultaneously possesses
‘contradictory’ qualities. There is no parallel in this finite world of ours.
The divine has no desire, yet He has will! He chooses and chooses not! He
intervenes and He also never intervenes, only watches! He has options but each
option is His own Will! He knows the future, yet He chooses to act! The future
is what He makes of the present. Nature or PrakRti is His slave, yet He allows Nature to take
its course. He is Personal, but not personal in the ‘worldly’ sense, because He
is all-knowing. He is perfect, not in the sense of free from limitations,
because limitations don’t exist outside of His will! Yes, He is a bundle of
contradictions, if you yourself don’t have Faith in your Self!
DDW: Therefore the plea for us is only
this: Be the instrument of the Will of this Self and nothing more.
TD: The
so-called free will itself is in the ultimate sense an expression of Grace as
MA AnandamayI would say. If one makes the right spiritual effort Divine Power
would be with him. Thereafter whatever he does would be nothing but expressions
of the divine will. This identification with the divine will and to work in the
world simply as an instrument of His will, form the crux of the theory of Surrender
to God.
DDW: But we should beware. Such injunctions
like ‘Be the instrument of God’s Will’ and associated ideas about the
not-so-free free will are only for those who are already a few steps up in the
spiritual ladder.
DFW:
How does one know that one is up in the ladder?
TD: Ask yourself, whether these injunctions
make sense to you. If they do, then you are ready to rise further. If they do
not, then your will is still free!
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