Deep Sleep & Sub-conscious mind...

[Guest guest]

Namaste Shri Shyam,

In your message #41960 (Thu Sep 25), you reproduce a portion from a prior post about 'free will':

 

.....In and through all this "theistic" determinism - is there any scope for this infinitesimally small human being to have free will? Yes - the very Order has bestowed upon the human - a power - that is called icchAshakti - the capacity to desire, to have an intention, or sankalpa. This icchAshakti, a deliberate capacity to choose - is lacking in animals and plants - the tiger has to choose between two deer and decides to run after one of them - it looks like he did exercise a choice but it really was no choice - were the scenario to replay a hundred times over the tiger would have chosen that one deer only, at that one time and place only, as such alone is the diktat of the Order. In the case of humans alone, is a very small and limited capacity "to willfreely".

The freely is in quotes because there are constraints. A big percentage of what he wills is pre-determined by a variety of factors that have led-up to that one point in time and cannot truly be considered as being a component of his freedom to choose. However it cannot be denied that there is a very small portion of his subsequent action that is completely untainted by any colourations from the past. This is what gives rise - simultaneously and seemingly paradoxically -to the twin concepts of moral responsibility as well as forgiveness ...

From a strictly non-dual standpoint, 'free will' is an inherently confused idea. What we call 'will' is an instrument of mind; and any such instrument is itself an object, driven from elsewhere. No such objective instrument can possibly be free. Because it is an object in the physical and mental world, its actions must be pushed and pulled by other objects elsewhere in the world.

And the more we know about these pushes and pulls, the more we know that our bodies, our senses and our minds have been made to act by a conditioning which drives them from beyond their limitations and their partialities. In the end, it's only ignorance that can make our bodily or sensual or mental acts seem to be free at all. If all events in space and time were fully known, then it would be fully clear that no body nor any sense nor any mind could be seen to have any free choice of its own in determining personally what happens.

Wherever we claim to have any personal freedom that belongs to our limited bodies or senses or minds, this claim is possible only because we are personally ignorant. All claims to be personally free must depend of necessity upon a personal ignorance that thereby undermines such claims and makes them logically confused.

It's never any body, nor any sense, nor any mind that can in truth be free. Freedom can only be attained by detachment from personality -- by ceasing to identify with any body, sense or mind. That detachment requires a reflection back from outward personality, into a depth of mind beneath all changing form or name or quality.

It's only there that freedom can be found, at a subjective depth of consciousness beneath all personality. To the extent that anyone may act from any personal conditioning, this kind of action is not free. It is personally driven, in a bodily and sensual and mental world.

But, to the extent that someone may reflect back down, beneath the personality, there an impersonal freedom is attained. That freedom is experienced in the deep sleep state, where an impersonal consciousness shines free of all bodily and sensual and mental appearances. That same free consciousness keeps shining always, remaining utterly unchanged beneath all changing appearances of waking state and dream.

It's from that unchanging consciousness that freedom is expressed, in all living actions that appear in our personalities and in the world. No personal or worldly action can be free of nature's objective causation in the world of appearances. But personal and worldly actions can be found to express a freedom that arises from an impersonal consciousness to which we may reflect.

It's only by reflecting there that freedom is attained. And having thus reflected to an unaffected ground of impersonal knowing, it is only by acting from there itself that freedom gets to be expressed.

Ananda