Why did you click this video?
You had hundreds of options, but you clicked on this one.
Was it your choice?
Did you do it out of your own free will?
Or did every single incident in your life, over the course of your brief existence led
up to this moment of you clicking this video?
Were you always supposed to click it, at this time of this day?
We think we are free.
We believe in choices, at least I did, when I was growing up.
The idea that things are pre-determined, and I might just be a puppet in this show, offended me
I thought, “You always have a choice.”
But now, I am not so certain.
But I understand choices.
Choices create drama.
The thought that we could have prevented an accident, or chosen another better path, gives
us a sense of control, which in turn gives this existence, a texture.
If everybody knows, everything is determined already, and this is how things will unfold,
then there is no place for that sense of control; you are just watching a movie, and that has
terrifying implications.
My dad is intensely religious.
He believes in a deterministic universe.
According to his religion, everything that’s happening has already happened and will continue
to happen.
It is an infinite cycle.
There is no doer, but just an illusion of things being done.
This thought is ingrained in him.
But no matter how deep someone’s belief of a deterministic universe goes, they still
can’t let go of their sense of control.
Wouldn’t a deterministic universe free you from all possible responsibilities?
If everything is pre-determined, then what are you really responsible for?
The word Karma means action.
It is the concept of eternal cause and effect.
It has its origin in ancient India and it is the principal idea behind many Asian religions.
Karmic activity is said to be an action performed with an intention.
Reflexes and unintentional actions are not karmic activities.
Beating heart and muscle reflexes are not karmic actions, as you don’t have to decide
to do that.
Imagine you are sitting still in a beautiful garden.
The garden has trees, flowers, flowing water and the songs of various birds.
You could be sitting, breathing, and just being.
You hear the songs of the birds, you notice the colors of the flower, and without any
sense of the self doing something.
The minute you think, “I am going to hear the sound of this bird”, that begins the karmic activity
It is an intentional cause, and according to karma, that cause will have an effect.
Karma is said to be an eternal cause and effect, with knots interlinked, which in turn provides
all the texture and drama that we witness all around us.
But it is not as simple as it sounds.
Today I had a pizza for lunch, at a new pizza shop in the city.
I only went to that pizza shop after I saw an ad poster during my visit to the
visa processing office.
I only went to the visa processing office as I was in the process of immigrating to
another country.
I only decided to move to another country as I applied for an overseas job on LinkedIn.
Did I eat pizza for lunch today, only because I applied for that job all those months ago?
And what influenced that decision?
But one could argue that it is possible for a completely different scenario to have happened.
But the truth is, it didn’t.
This was the only outcome.
If you focus on any of your decision, you would always find another previous decision
that influenced the one in focus.
So do you think you have a say in any of this?
Can you control and redirect the events in your life?
Or are you just a kid in a toy car, pretending to drive.
Some time ago, my friend casually said something while addressing free will and determinism.
He said, “you have a choice until you make a decision, after that it was always supposed
to happen that way.”
It might sound like a nonsensical statement at first, but when you closely examine it,
you realize that it is not nonsensical.
It is paradoxical.
It is in line with all the other laws of paradoxes that seem to govern almost all aspects of
our reality.
We looked at this through the lens of cause consequence cycle and determinism
but what about free will?
What are its implications?
Free will is the ability to make a conscious choice at any given moment, without any external
coercion, while also accepting the responsibility for one’s action.
This is where the concept of morality comes in.
According to free will, you are morally responsible for your actions.
You chose to do it, you could have prevented it, and you didn’t, so you are responsible
for it.
So, what is true freedom?
Being caught in an infinite cause consequence cycle, and going through the motions, while
watching your life, like a movie without any responsibility, or consciously choosing to
do an action, and being responsible for that action and its consequence?
It doesn’t seem like it was our choice to come into this world.
We didn’t seem to choose our family.
We even appear to be pre disposed to behave in a certain way.
The idea of psychological archetypes was researched and advanced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung
Archetype is a collectively inherited idea or a pattern of thought that is universally
present in individual psyches.
Jung divided the mind into three layers.
According to Jung, these three layers shape a person’s identity.
The first one is the Conscious or the Ego world, which is formed by your direct experience
of this world through your senses like sight, sound and smell.
The next layer would be personal unconscious, which includes anything that’s not blatantly
accessible to our awareness but can be.
This includes both memories that can be remembered and the painfully suppressed ones.
Then he adds a spectacularly unique world to our mind, called the collective unconscious.
It is a river of humanity’s experiences; a knowledge that we are all born with.
Although we can’t be conscious of it, it strongly influences our experiences, behaviours
and our relationship with our reality.
According to Jung, this collective unconscious begins even before we are born, like how the
physical organs form in the mother’s womb.
The contents of this collective unconscious are called The Archetypes, and it is there
to influence how we behave in certain situations, and it stands outside of what we call reality.
The Innocent, The Caregiver, The Orphan, The Hero are some of the common ego types that
Jung describes.
But we could have endless debates about whether we are really free, or merely unconscious
actors mouthing dialogues and actions that the invisible script demands of us, but it
doesn’t change the fact that we still feel in control, we feel guilty, sad, happy, proud,
and emotionally responsible for our actions.
These built in emotional responses go hand in hand in thinking that we are free, and
in turn I realize that the very construct of this reality depends upon this illusion
of freedom.
We might very well be puppets, but the whole existence depends upon us not realizing that.