Dolf's Blog
Integral thoughts about development, humanity, spirituality
Free Will does (not) exist
16 July 2007
The core discussion in Philosophy has been for ages whether man has a free will or not. Are we free to decide what we want to do or is there some higher force that pulls our strings without us noticing?
Often, this has been a debate between religious points of view and non-religious points of view. Religious traditionalists (of the mythical membership type of world-views) had it that God (man with a beard on a cloud) had all written in his cunning plan with the world and than man was just a puppet in his hands. No free will. Slightly more enlightened traditionalists would say that man did have a free will, but that actually behind the scenes God pulled the strings without us noticing.The opposite view came from - surprise - the more individualistically developed people, who of course claimed that they had their lives in their own hands and nobody could hold them back from making their own decisions.
I personally rather make a split between personal and trans-personal views. If you look at Free Will from a personal perspective, say, everyday life, then it is obvious that we make decisions on our own at every moment, based on our best knowledge of what is good. Every action has in that sense a positive intention, as it is aimed at doing some sort of good, whether it be for ourselves or for the world around us or for both. The influence on our decisions is the context, or environment + people, in which we live and the knowledge we have about the effects of our decisions. No further external influences are there to determine what we decide to do. So in that sense, Free Will exists.
Looking at it in a trans-personal way, though, we need to acknowledge that we are part of Spirit, or the overall inspiring field of consciousness. Or in short, we are nothing but a ripple in that field of consciousness that transcends our little personalities and unifies all there is. Does it then still count as Free Will that we seem to make our own decisions at a personal level? Or are those decisions not our own decisions but Our Own decisions: the decisions of all of us. Even better: they are the decisions of our common consciousness: my decisions are your decisions are our decisions are all of our decisions. Spirit decides, therefore nobody decides individually and Free Will does not exist.
Does this matter? Like so many seemingly unsolvable philosophical problems, looking at it from a trans-personal perspective makes these problems irrelevant, because they only exist at a certain level of consciousness. Growing to further levels solves these problems and therefore increases our freedom :-).
