The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [76]
The question of free will versus determinism is huge, of course. In the one reality, every pair of opposites is ultimately an illusion. We’ve already blurred the division between good and evil and life and death. Is free will going to turn out to be the same as determinism? A lot seems to ride on the answer.
FREE WILL =
Independence
Self-determination
Choice
Control over events
Future is open
DETERMINISM =
Dependence on an outside will
Self determined by fate
No control over events
Choices made for you
Future is closed
These phrases sketch in the common understanding of what’s at stake. Everything in the free-will column sounds attractive. We all want to be independent; we want to make our own decisions; we want to wake up with hope that the future is open and full of endless possibilities. On the other hand, nothing seems attractive in the determination column. If your choices have been made for you, if your self is tied to a plan written before you were born, then the future cannot be open. Emotionally at least, the prospect of free will has already won the argument.
And at a certain level nobody has to delve any deeper. If you and I are marionettes operated by an invisible puppeteer—call him God, fate, or karma—then the strings he’s pulling are also invisible. We have no proof that we aren’t making free choices, except for the occasional spooky moments of the kind I began with, and mind-readers aren’t going to change how we fundamentally behave.
There is a reason to delve deeper, however, and it centers on the word Vasana. In Sanskrit, a Vasana is an unconscious cause. It’s the software of the psyche, the driving force that makes you do something when you think you’re doing it spontaneously. As such, Vasana is very disturbing. Imagine a robot whose every action is driven by a software program inside. From the robot’s point of view, it doesn’t matter that the program exists—until something goes wrong. The illusion of not being a robot collapses if the software breaks down because then, if the robot wants to do something but can’t, we know the reason why.
Vasana is determinism that feels like free will. I’m reminded of my friend Jean, whom I’ve known for almost twenty years. Jean considers himself very spiritual and went so far in the early nineties as to walk way from his job with a newspaper in Denver to live in an ashram in western Massachusetts. But he found the atmosphere choking. “They’re all crypto Hindus,” he complained. “They don’t do anything but pray and chant and meditate.” So Jean decided to move on with his life. He’s fallen in love with a couple of women but has never married. He doesn’t like the notion of settling down and tends to move to a new state every four years or so. (He once told me that he counted up and discovered that he’s lived in forty different houses since he was born.)
One day Jean called me with a story. He was on a date with a woman who had taken a sudden interest in Sufism, and while they were driving home, she told Jean that according to her Sufi teacher, everyone has a prevailing characteristic.
“You mean the thing that is most prominent about them, like being extroverted or introverted?” he asked.
“No, not prominent,” she said. “Your prevailing characteristic is hidden. You act on it without seeing that you’re acting on it.”
The minute he heard this, Jean became excited. “I looked out the car window, and it hit me,” he said. “I sit on the fence. I am only comfortable if I can have both sides of a situation without committing to either.” All at once a great many pieces fell into place. Jean could see why he went into an ashram but didn’t feel like he was one of the group. He saw why he fell in love