Is There Free Will?
Does mankind have free will? Where I come from, certainly not. Man loves being unhappy. If you were free, would you enjoy being unhappy? But that’s man’s free will: To go and be unhappy whenever he wants.
Free will, the way we talk about it, is free choice – the right to choose. So, mankind is unhappy because he and she choose what they want. They choose the love they want. They choose when they want to be emotional. I wouldn’t call that ‘free will’. The state of cosmic love, the state of absence of self, is 'no choice’. In the enlightened state, you have no choice. And that is to be one with the will - as in that hoary old expression, ‘Thy will be done’.
If ‘Thy will be done’ then there’s only one will. And if you are one with that will, then you don’t have any choice. You don’t have any other will, only that will. But the human race lives off its wilfulness. Everyone wants a different thing. You want to be a doctor. You want to be a novelist. You want to be something else … We don’t all want the same thing. That’s not universal; it’s selfish. But underneath that selfishness we do all want the same thing. We want to be free.
What do we want to be free of? We want to be free of this incessant choice. I can choose to be unhappy if I want to be. Isn’t that an awful choice? You can actually choose to be angry. You can choose to be resentful. You can choose to be jealous. You can choose to be envious, anytime you want.
Anything you’re unhappy about today, you once chose. Now you want to get rid of it. Whatever you choose, you want to get rid of – sooner or later - because it’ll turn to unhappiness.
To be choice-less, to have free will, is to say no to unhappiness. I have no choice, because I know what I’m doing: I am not being unhappy. That’s my will. I know that what makes me unhappy is to have a choice – a choice to be unhappy. I don’t have that choice anymore. I have learnt that if I think it will make me unhappy, because I can only think about unhappiness. Oh, I think I can think about the good times, but it won’t be long before I think about the bad times. All thought will make me unhappy. As I have learnt that, am I foolish enough to choose to be unhappy?
Free will is the will to be one with the divine will. And I tell you that it is the divine will that each of us be free of choice and unhappiness. When you start to give up choice, you can accept your life as it is.
Honest to the Situation