Even at the level of behavioral psychology, which is probably the most superficial version of psychology, free will has already been vitiated by the fact that we have all been conditioned by past experiences. But if we add on to that all of the observations that have been discovered in the field of psychoanalysis, then how much freedom does consciousness have (we’re talking now about ego-consciousness) in relation to subconscious drives, and the conflicts between different drives, and all of the subconscious fantasies that got input during infancy and childhood via the influence of the external world? What about the censor and the fact that there is a constant state of repression of information and unconscious projection into the field? I think it’s fair to say that, if you are in a state where all you are seeing of the other is your own projections on them, then you are not really free to relate to what is Real. You are relating only to a predetermined set of images that constitute the subconscious belief system of the ego mind.
So the freedom of the ego mind is extremely curtailed, even if we just take it at the psychoanalytic level. But then if we also consider that there are superconscious factors (interventions of inspiration, of ideas, of insights that could not have been willed by the ego but that occur to the ego) . . . and then if we add the fact that the ego itself is structured by the family system (internalized as a command system and a set of superego figures telling you what you should and shouldn’t do and creating emotions of guilt, fear, anxiety, and shame, etc. that are not free-will choices), then the amount of free will that the ego has is clearly even less than that. And if we add to that the fact that things can happen that trigger a latent psychosis if someone is in a psychotic state (and that’s just a label for a state that everyone is prone to, given a sufficient amount of environmental pressure to produce psychological effects), then we have a situation where someone may hear a voice that will be taken as the voice of God telling them to kill somebody. . . . Remember we were listening to another video of a psychiatrist who worked with psychotic people with such voices, and when he retired he had his own psychotic break. Fortunately, he could remember enough from his professional days that he took himself to a hospital instead of acting out the murder of a child. But those who don’t have that conditioning of professional training—would they have the free will to defy what they took as some divine imperative to commit an act that in another state of consciousness they’d be horrified by?
So if we understand that the ego does not have any control over its structure or its subconscious semi-agential elements (because the drives that are embedded in the subconscious are not under the control of the will of the conscious ego), then it becomes clear that free will is a myth. It’s not real; and it’s very important that we understand that, because that’s just the preliminary analysis that would be given by anyone who had studied these disciplines of psychology and psychoanalysis. One of the problems that the symbolic field and the whole culture have today is the fracturing of academic fields into departments that do not communicate with each other. So it’s very odd that one could even be a cranium-cutter without understanding psychology or psychoanalysis and be free (be licensed) to mutilate people’s bodies without any idea of what one is really doing or of its effects on the function of a brain or a nervous system or of its relationship to consciousness.
Add to that our understanding that consciousness is not only a mind that is outside of the brain and outside of the body (the ego is not in the body, and the appearance that there is consciousness in the body is what a psychoanalyst would call a projective identification) . . . but further—as Sri Ramana and all the sages of the yogic and the Eastern spiritual traditions have made very clear—the consciousness is neither in the body nor even in the dimension of the physical, but the physical (all that appears) is an appearance within consciousness. So if we really understand that everything that appears (because your split mind is not a brain split by cutting the corpus callosum but a mind split into subject and object duality) . . . all that the mind can see it projects as being outside of itself, and it imagines that its self is inside the body because of the sensory data of the body. But this is a delusion, and even this brain-cutter was aware of that.
But physics is becoming aware of that in general. We saw that Federico Fagin had that extraordinary experience and recognized that the intelligence is in the field—the morphogenic field, as Sheldrake has written about and experimented with for so long (as well as many, many others). Once we understand that and we begin to recognize that there is one consciousness—one consciousness that determines everything that appears in what is mistaken for a world but is not outside consciousness and is more like a dream that the consciousness is having—because of that, the only free will is in the dreamer, not in the consciousnesses that are being dreamed. They have no agency whatsoever, no will at all.
That’s an extremely important point, and it’s a point made by all of the traditions. It’s a doctrine that, in Sanskrit, is called pari purna ek atmya. That’s the basis of all the traditional yogas, whether Buddhist or Daoist or Vedic or Shaivite. What does that mean? Purna, you understand, is full, complete. To add the pari purna means that it’s total, it’s absolute, it’s perfect, it’s without exception a single (ek means one) self, atma. So all of this—all of what you might think of as an “us” or a “them” or a cosmos—all of it is a single consciousness dreaming, at play within itself. And that consciousness indeed has free will. But that consciousness is the only being with the power of will. It wills the existence of the universe, but existence only as a dream within itself. And when that Self chooses to awaken, the world disappears (in the same way that, when you go into deep sleep at night, the world disappears because it was only a dream within a dream).
So the ego has no free will even to determine when it goes into deep sleep. It usually won’t do it at night, but it’ll do it the moment you start meditating. You don’t have free will; you don’t have control over your mind. We’ve been practicing having a silent mind. Do you have the power to will your mind to stay silent? It’s not very common because you can’t do it. It’s impossible. It’s really important that you get this . . . that you have no free will over anything that you think you have decided to do. That will (we could say its proximate cause) is the conditioning of the past and the superego voices and the fantasies, etc.; but even that proximate cause (which you could say would work in a law court) does not have any reality outside of the consciousness that’s dreaming all of those factors that the individual mind mistakenly believes are the reasons for its actions or its reactions.
This is known even in law. I remember back in law school, when you had to take a course in criminal law and the first concept was that of mens rea, which is Latin for an evil mind. If the prosecutor could not prove criminal intent on the part of a person who acted in a way that was technically considered a crime, they were innocent. It’s a very famous type of verdict to say one is innocent by reason of insanity, even temporary insanity. You’d get off scot-free under the law. (You might have to go to an insane asylum instead of a prison, but you would not be guilty.) So it’s very important to recognize that even the law sees that you can be in a state without any free will. But the truth is, even the lawyers and judges, none of them have any free will. It’s all frozen, it’s all determined at a higher level of consciousness that transcends any individual node of consciousness that is an appearance of a dreamer within the dream.
Like those nested Russian dolls, the consciousness of the ego is entirely subordinate to the higher levels of consciousness; all of those higher levels are subordinate to the Absolute One Self; and that total complete Absolute Oneness is the Truth, is the Real.
