A question that often shows up in philosophical and ethical discussions is whether or not people have free will or are governed by so-called "determinism," i.e. predestination. And the truth is that people do not have free will. But, and this is the thing: people can develop a free will. But this requires the right knowledge and effort.
So, one can say that both free will and predestination exists and is a matter of degree, more freedom or less freedom. But the first thing people need to learn is that people do not act along free will. That this is only a possibility which among the majority of people is incredibly rare.
The majority of people do not have free will. They do not choose their preferences or their mood or their thoughts or feelings. Their preferences "happens" to them; their thoughts and feelings "happens" to them; their friends and enemies "happens" to them; and their quarrels and infatuations "happens" to them – just like the color of their eyes or the fact that they are sentient beings "happens" to them. Like their birth and death "happens" to them. Like their kids "happens" to them. They do not love, do not hate, do not long...all this happens.
Everything is connected. Independence does not exist, everything is involved in a constant exchange of energy. How is it possible to assume that in an organism some cells will move in accordance with their own choice and will? Do we choose to fill our lungs with oxygen, or does it happen? Did we chose that the book we are inspired by was to be written or did it happen? Did we chose that the author who wrote it was to be born or did it happen?
This is very close to determinism, but the difference is that determinism is also implying that there is no inherent consciousness. Determinism is closely related to materialistic ideologies such as Communism and ideas that we start like blank papers and all that we are depends on the environment and external influences. This is only the lower degree of cause and effect, while causality in fact can be divided into four different degrees as in my timeless education:
1. Own capacity to impartiality (free will)
2. Fate (nature)
3. Indoctrination (culture)
4. Accidents (surprise)
At the bottom here, we have predestination in the form of so-called Accidents or chance. Chance is something no one has control over, all depend on coincidences. If we could control coincidences and random things, everything would be predictable. It is cause and effect we can never escape, but which is necessary for real experience. At first glance, 'cause and effect' appears as something that can be predicted, but the processes that cause them are so countless that it is quite impossible to predict them all. Everything happens according to law – cause and effect – or consciousness. There is no real randomness. The term "random" is merely an expression related to obscure causes that we can not see. Accidents are managed through the right attitude, such as not taking them personally, but instead viewing them as necessary for life experiences.
Indoctrination depends on culture and can be difficult to free oneself from. It is, however, cause and effect we can most easily escape from with the right knowledge. But usually, when a person feels that they've avoided the brainwashing of the prevailing culture, it's solely due to the fact that their individual nature has been attracted to an alternative culture that they've been brainwashed by instead – not that they are synchronized with their natural life energy or deeper existence.
It is these two levels that determinists are concerned with, and which they think is the cause of everything. But there are two higher degrees of causality arising from consciousness: our inherent nature or "internal" influences, as well as something that finally can be called "free will."
Nature, or "fate," is cause and effect that is even harder to free oneself from than culture. Nature is an individual's inherent and characteristic features or energetic pattern. It is their personal instincts, tastes and urges. Their partiality (bias). It is the hidden cause behind culture and that which is attracted by the culture that often is most similar to one's own nature. It is also our genetic aspects and things like congenital diseases or disabilities. Fate or nature is also our particular, but often hidden, talent: our "function" or "purpose" in the organism of humanity.
Freedom and real capacity depends on strong will and is hardest of all to attain. Our urges are usually what we call our will, but it is not true will. The situation, the culture, or the inherent nature chooses man's "I want" for him. In another situation, his "I want" would be different. Behaviors are elicited, not emitted. True will is the capacity to resist one's elicited "will," that is, one's nature, one's culture, and the influence of circumstances occurring. True will is to be capable of being passive, to observe and take in experiences without identifying with what happens.
In order to be able to call ourselves free, we have to break one of the laws of reality. But is there any law of nature we can break? Circumstances and accidents we can do nothing about. Physical needs such as oxygen, liquid, food, sleep, and so on, we can do nothing about. But the law of subjectivity, that is, our partiality, and cultural hypnosis, can be broken. Man can never be completely free, since even free will can only be accomplished through someone or something that makes you realize this, so it is a question of degree.
Ayn Rand is often brought up as an example of someone whose philosophy denies determinism, but examples I've found have not been convincing. The biggest criticism against determinism seems to almost entirely revolve around morality and ethics. Ayn Rand says:
"Dictatorship and determinism are reciprocally reinforcing corollaries: if one seeks to enslave men, one has to destroy their reliance on the validity of their own judgments and choices--if one believes that reason and volition are impotent, one has to accept the rule of force."
The flaw in this reasoning is that anyone who uses coercion to enslave people still believe that they are acting on the basis of their free will and that they can achieve something. True determinism should lead to acceptance and less persistence, which can only enhance people's well-being and health, while the belief in free will leads to self-assertion and vain attempts to accomplish all kinds of things that just makes life worse. Dictatorship – the belief that it is possible to manage and control – can not be separated from the belief in free will and something's performance capability.
It is in fact the belief in free will that is unethical and leads to evil, since it is false. But ironically, the acceptance of determinism, which is very difficult, is something that actually leads to the seemingly impossible: freedom, morality and free will. It is precisely man's lack of free will that is closer to evil than freedom of choice. We need an ethos based on being able to liberate people, and the only thing that can make people free to the extent it is possible, is right knowledge. But to assert or claim that we already have free will goes against proper knowledge and is thus immoral, to the extent something that only happens can be said to be immoral.
One of the biggest resistances against the development of "free will" is that it first requires that determinism be admitted as reality. Here I also mean higher determinism, not only the material thinking that people associate with the concept of determinism. Desires, urges, character, preferences, and so on, are programmed by nature. Cultural indoctrination is man's attempt to reprogram what nature has programmed. But both aspects lack proper self-control and "will." We do not choose our feelings or even our thoughts. Have you ever tried to stop your own thoughts? It's not possible, because it is not you who chooses them. Your thoughts happens to you. Your feelings happens to you. Even your physical actions happens to you as a result of those thoughts and feelings that happens to you. Everything is under the law of cause and effect. Even if you manage to stop your thoughts, for example by Buddhist meditation practice, then also this practice is just another influence you've fallen under and thus mimics.
So in other words, "free will" is something people can have, in terms of choosing a different attitude, but which most people in practice do not have and cannot have as long as they believe in free will. Determinism and free will is thus the same thing in different degrees. Free will can only begin from the realization that everything happens according to cause and effect, and that free will is more a matter of resisting one's will than to follow it, since our will is determined by the situation, the culture or one's own nature. Free will is, in other words, to cease with will, which is extremely difficult and requires effort, attention and self-control.
A person's capacity to do, depends entirely on the individual's ability to not do. When a person has been training their ability to resist the temptation to act along what emotions dictate, then that person can choose their actions. When a person has trained their ability to resist the tendency to be touched emotionally along what their thoughts and ideas dictate, then that person can choose their emotions. When a person has trained their ability to resist the tendency to have preferences, then that person can choose his thoughts. And the one who can choose their thoughts also choose their emotions, which are influenced by thoughts; as well as their actions, which are influenced by emotions. We are doing nothing until we attain an impartial inner attitude, when we are that which is observing and experiencing and nothing else. Until then things are done through us, but not by us. Until then everything is something that happens.
We can not begin by "doing," we can only begin by choosing better or worse among the thoughts and ideas that happen to us. Therefore doing begins with the right knowledge. But all partial forces are fighting against this knowledge, both within the individuals themselves and in society at large. The big struggle is not between "good and evil," but between objective clear vision and bias; between non-preference and the imaginary but tempting knowledge of good and evil; between those few who have achieved free will and the masses who are trapped in determinism. And the masses are trapped in determinism because they are willing and proud slaves to their bias and cultural patterns.
People think they are independent, think they have free will, and this causes our problems to continue. Let me show you two examples; a christian apologetic and a secular humanist; Stefan Gustavsson and Christer Sturmark [excerpts from various lectures and debates on Youtube]:
Gustavsson: "From the christian view of human life, this is connected: we have freedom and responsibility and therefore one can blame [...] because one has responsibility, one has freedom, and one is not a victim just because of coincidences. One is a higher kind of being."
Sturmark: "I think it is obvious based on how people function and can intellectually reason on moral and ethical questions, and such, from this follows, I think, based on observation, that we act as if we have a free will, so to speak. Everything speaks for there existing something which we can call free will. And from that follows, then, also a moral responsibility: we can make choices all the time..."
Gustavsson: "How does an atheist look upon existence? If God does not exist, if one understands everything naturalistically? And in order to help the reader he gives a short introduction which reads as follows: asks a bunch of questions and answers them, then uses the book to detail this... [...] 'Is there free will? Not a chance.' [...]"
Gustavsson: "If man should only be understood from his body...and our consciousness should only be understood from our brain, then we of course arrive at a problem, since that seems to go in a deterministic direction. And that's one of those reasons that I am not a naturalist, because that turns man into a machine. And here one must then take a position: Did you ask this question in freedom or were you forced to ask it? Do I give my answer in freedom because I reflect, choose arguments, think it through, or am I forced to say what I say?"
Rationality in human actions are nothing more than illusions and self-deception. Rationalization is as a rule always based on one's own preferences and wishes. The biggest preference man is slave to is the desire to change the external. Freedom is to accept the external and change the internal in one's own psyche. People waste energy on striving in an impossible direction.
Gustavsson: "If one chooses the deterministic road then one must be aware that, all attempts to hold anyone responsible has been undermined..."
Exactly. People are not responsible. They are dangerous, but they are not responsible until they have done the work it takes to develop free will.
Gustavsson: "All that is called love we have undermined..."
Love is beyond normal human ability. That's why the world looks the way it does. Love is entirely dependent on impartiality, and this people need to be guided to by those few who have attained free will.
Gustavsson: "And the discussion itself, if we are determined or free, have then lost its meaning because even that is in such case determined..."
Discussions like this is something that happens, nothing here have been out of free will. Responsibility and free will can, however, as I said, be achieved either by accident, through instruction from someone who is free, or from friction between nature, culture and accidents. Both the christian apologetic and the secular humanist claims that man has free will, when it is precisely this assumption and assertion that is wrong and therefore immoral. And the funny thing is that both the christian apologetic and the secular humanist should have arrived at the conclusion that man has no free will. In the Bible, God himself says that:
I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things.
- Isaiah 45:7
Does the clay say to the potter, 'What are you making?' Does your work say, 'The potter has no hands'?
- Isaiah 45:9
This is what the Lord says--the Holy One of Israel, and its Maker: Concerning things to come, do you question me about my children, or give me orders about the work of my hands?
- Isaiah 45:11
See now that I myself am he! There is no god besides me. I put to death and I bring to life, I have wounded and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand.
- Deuteronomy 32:39
The Christian position should be that God is the only one who acts. Even Augustine was on the track that the Fall of Man put an end to man's free will, and left him morally incapable. And secular philosophers like Bertrand Russell and scientists like Albert Einstein have often reached the conclusion that everything happens along the law of cause and effect.
Gustavsson: "He [Bertrand Russell] writes like this: 'When a man acts in ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse to face the fact that his annoying behavior is the result of antecedent causes which, if you follow them long enough, will take you beyond the moment of his birth, and therefore to events for which he cannot be held responsible by any stretch of imagination ...' So why was he [Bertrand Russell] against the war in Vietnam? That's the question, because the ones who started that are not responsible for their actions. So, here again, Bertrand Russell becomes irrational, that on the one hand he sees the consequences of his worldview – that people do not have freedom and therefore does not have responsibility. On the other hand he's a deeply moral person, at least in certain areas, so that he fights evil and oppression. But how does those two things fit together?"
The right knowledge is essential in order to attain free will. The ones who think they have free will are the ones who lack it the most. You do not want modern secular humanism, or modern Christian apologetics. You want Timeless Education.
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