I will tell you about free will then. This is mainly based on my personal meditation experience.
When you meditate, you explore different levels of your consciousness. This is an experiential process. To fully appreciate what I am saying, you have to do it yourself.
Eventually through meditation, you will understand the meaning of free will, or conscious choice. You will realise that while human beings can have free will, most of the time they do not have it.
Most of the time, we operate from conditioned responses. Our minds are very chaotic. Our thoughts drift everywhere. We have very little control over our thinking processes - just how little, we do not know, until we begin to meditate.
To give you a simple example, a very basic meditation exercise is simply to concentrate on your breath. Think of nothing, just focus on your breath, observe the sensation of breathing, as air passes through your nostrils etc. That's it. Do that for 7 consecutive breaths.
Sounds simple? Go try it. As a beginner, you probably cannot do it for even 7 consecutive breaths, without your thoughts drifting to something quite random. Like what you want to eat for lunch tomorrow, and what your ex-girlfriend is doing now, or which team is going to the World Cup finals.
Go try it. Really. Try it now.
And for your next seven breaths, don't think of a pink elephant.
See? You can't even, for seven breaths, not think of a pink elephant.
You now realise that you don't control your thoughts. Your thoughts control you. And your thoughts go wherever you please, and you don't even know it. (That may be why students sometimes look at their textbooks for half an hour and suddenly find, to their surprise, that they are still on the same page).
When you have so little control over your thoughts, do you really think that you have free will? Conscious choice?
Of course not.
Most of the time, you do not even know what you are thinking. Your will was not free. Your choice was not conscious.
Free will can be cultivated. Conscious choice can be cultivated. It is not easy. If it were easy, people wouldn't have problems, say, quitting smoking (simply choose not to put a cigarette in your mouth). People would choose not to be afraid of heights/water/public speaking/ {_insert phobia}. People would choose not to be annoyed by annoying posters on the Internet. People would choose to stop doing things that they already know at the time of doing that they are going to regret later (which is a lot of things).
Etc etc.
Even in IM theory, there is a lot to be said about this. We know that people have many subconscious beliefs about many things. In other words, they do not even know what they are thinking. If you do not even know what you are thinking, how could you be really said to have free will?
|