There is a lot of debate on free will. Do we have a free will or is it all happening with a design and we do not have a say but to go by the design.
There are many school of thoughts, two significant and radically opposite being the physicalists and the consciousness based.
If we have to be brutally honest here then, who has the answer ? Does anyone on this planet has a concrete answer for anything ? Aren't we all living with a faith that if we exist there should be a higher power existing which must be the reason we are here. I respect people who seek and I stay away from those who say that they have the solution or answer for everything that happens because if that was true they would know everything about their own lives and be able to change it in all ways.
I am not questioning the awakening and enlightenment that we go through, those who seek will find, but there are so many mysteries to this puzzle that even the brightest scientific and spiritual minds have said that they have only been able to touch the tip of the iceberg.
Having said that the fundamentals of this universe are based upon cause and effect principle and so if there is an action there must be a cause that determines this action. So, if we take an action it always has a predetermined cause and so then where is the free will ?
The way I understand it is that if you will try to look for proofs and parameters to evaluate it with your limited analytical mindset (limited with what has been discovered till date), the question of our existence will be in a never ending loop because nobody knows what happened at the very beginning and how we landed up with this universe and solar system and this planet earth. When we were not there, all the hypothesis will be there but there can be no concrete conclusions. Does that mean we stop looking for the truth ? The answer is we have to seek but what we must remember is that if we just see this universe caged in the dimensions of few physics laws that we have been able to decipher till date then we limit the possibility of more that is yet to be discovered. Also, what we know till date is limited in many ways and so we should be ready to embrace new possibilities.
Now coming to the topic of free will. Here is what I think. Yes we all have the free will to do whatever we wish for. To put it very very simple, you have the free will to get out of your bed and exercise or remain in bed and sleep the whole day. You have the free will to have lunch or skip it. Nobody can take away your ability to choose these small events in life. Now, you suddenly waking up one morning to find out you have flu, or your office building had a fire outbreak last night or the important meeting you had today which was life changing for you got cancelled because of some emergency and you lost that one chance you needed so badly, these are events not under your control and so isn't free will debatable ? Our actions and our thoughts both have a free will but you must know that both the thoughts and actions have a Karma factor attached to it and you must remember this that you can control your actions and thoughts but you cannot control the consequences and results. That is why they say watch your Karma, your Karma will come back and you will have to face it. Now, some would argue that today the thoughts we have and the actions we take are also influenced by some past conditioning and karma. This to me is what I call "the path of finding an excuse ". For sure, your conditioning has a lot to do with your thoughts and actions but you have the power to still make choices free from that conditioning and that is where we have the blessing of free will that we can take total control of our lives and choose from the two roads that lay in front of us. Those who say they don't, they are basically saying my life is on an auto-pilot and I don't want to take any responsibility for anything I do. In any case whether they make a conscious choice or live on auto pilot every action will have a consequence.
I have pulled out a simple way to decipher this.The universe works on an equation where the left side of the equation is our free will. We can make the equation as complicated, simple, negative or positive we want but the right side which is the result will come exactly in accordance with what we feed in the equation on the left side.
Consider this universe as a system with two sides, the left side being the free will zone, there is a system that processes this information fed on the left side and the right side brings out the consequences of the information fed on the left side but both sides have to equate at some point.
Unlike mathematics sometimes on the right side of the equation the result may not appear at once but in phases and even when your equation's design on left side is a net negative you might see the initial phase results on the right side to be net positive, the same way how we see people with destructive actions succeed a little before that equation has to settle itself to equate on both sides and it would have to go exponentially negative in order to balance it out. The graph on both sides will not look the same but the numbers will balance out a 100%.
That is the very reason why we say please watch out your Karma, what goes around comes around and might not happen right at that point but when it happens it does bring everything to an equal.
Karma in end will always balance out.
Your thoughts and actions are your choice, yes it is a free will there but the consequences and results are not your free will but a result of a beautiful design which will reflect in equal proportions to what has been fed in the system.
What you sow, so you reap. This old saying holds true and will always be.
Sometimes the time taken for the equation to balance out is long but the longer the time the exponential the results will be. There is one more factor that I take into consideration. I believe that compounding works here a big time and both on negative and positive outcomes when the time is long the compounding effect will bring in the results in proportion to the time invested in.
Why the time varies ? I don't have the answer to that. How we can understand is that some events have an underlined lesson attached to it, when that journey to that lesson completes the result is also delivered. So, time is a factor of that event which is yet to happen for your journey to encounter that learning. That is the best I can tell about why time is different for different equations.
When they say fear God, they are basically referring to the system through which your actions and thoughts will be filtered and so the consequences that will come with what has been fed into it will be in equal proportions.
I hope this article made some sense and hope it keeps you going when it gets tougher. If you are doing everything right and still not getting results, hold on there, be persistent and stay on the path, the results are due and when they will come they will happen with an exponential effect and will balance out your actions.
Until next time,
Rise and Shine
Hurratul Maleka Taj