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Zen freedom

Free will and fate are both illusions. The trick is learning to sail with the winds the world has dealt you

by Tim Lott

inShare1 There is a line in J G Ballards book The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) thatstrikes at the heart of the issue of free will versus fate. Ballard writes: Deepassignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences. It is an arresting line and no doubt many of us at one time or another have felt just this wayabout our lives, that they have a fated quality to them but just what these deep ssignments consist of is unclear. The issue of free will versus fate might, for many people, feel a little rarefied, and irrelevant. Yet it seems to me it is absolutely crucial to how we approach the countless dilemmas that confront every one of us each day.

Perhaps its peculiar, but this question has vexed me for as long as I can remember. At one point in my life, this challenge pretty much sent me crazy. In the late 1980s, when I was studying history at university, I found myself grappling furiously with the question of why things happened this question being, really, atthe heart of all historical analysis.

Why did the Russian Revolution happen in 1917 rather than the first time round in1905? What caused the Second World War? Was it larger historical forces? Or just individuals making individual decisions? And, at the same time, in my own life after I had split up with my then long-term girlfriend I was left asking, what hadI done to make that happen? What did I have to do to get her back? Was it in mycontrol?

After three years, I was no wiser than when I started. Did we choose freely? Orwere we just victims of larger historical, social and biological forces? It wasimpossible to tell. What I did realise was that philosophers had been strugglingwith such questions for thousands of years, but were no closer to understandingthe answer than they were when they started out. Today, the consensus among most modern physicists, chemists and biologists is that free will is impossible it

is simply an illusion generated by a consciousness that is itself illusory. Thisexplanation didnt satisfy me. After all, if consciousness is an illusion, who isgenerating the illusion, and who is perceiving it as an illusion? For me, mechanistic determinism that there is a sort of fated cause and effect at play in theuniverse, with no room for choice raised more problems than it solved.

Consider your breathing: are you breathing, or is breathing happening to you?

It also just felt wrong. I felt so sure that I could decide whether or not to drink the glass of water in front of me that I would find it impossible to be convinced otherwise. That direct experience of reality is valid, particularly sinceit also takes into account the fact that I might drink the water without consciously choosing to, without thinking about it first.

At the same time, it seemed impossible to believe wholeheartedly in free will. At one level, I intuited that there were paths that you just had to take, even if you didnt want to. When I decided to leave my publishing company to go to university later on in life, it felt like something I had to do. When I ended my marriage, I felt I had no choice but of course, in theory at least, I did.

More objectively, there is no doubt that we are profoundly affected by our genesand brain chemistry. We are created by our social and parental environment, shaped by the language we speak, and fashioned by the things that happen to us, acc

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identally or otherwise. Our character is subject to so many forces beyond our control. How can any choice, then, be said to be free?

It was only after I finished studying history (or to give it another name, Western notions of cause-and-effect) and began to study Zen Buddhism that some kind ofmeaningful answer began to occur to me. No one could resolve the question of free will versus determinism because, fundamentally, it was the wrong question. Thereal question was not: Do I have a choice? Rather it was: Who is the me thats asking if I have a choice?

If there is no I to make a choice, then there is only one process going on that ofexistence as a whole. No one no fate, or brute circumstance is pushing you around because there is no one to be pushed around. Or to put it another way, you areboth simultaneously the one who is doing the pushing and the one who is being pushed. To think of this process in another way, consider your breathing: are you breathing, or is breathing happening to you?

Of course, this is no simple solution. It merely shifts the focus and takes us on to another equally dense philosophical question: Who am I? Individuals in theWest tend to consider themselves as a sort of first cause, an isolated ego that somehow acts on the world out there. We see ourselves as struggling against our external world, as that same world struggles to dominate us. And it feels, for some,like a fight to the death.

The view that there is no you for things to happen to is a hard, even painful oneto accept

But what if, for a moment, we entertain the possibility that there is no me. No I wo can act freely or be fated to become X or Y. What if, as Carl Jung suggested,the ego is simply a complex of the unconscious, a mere concept, and as such quite powerless? This might go against everything we have ever been taught, both overtly and subliminally, but to me, it seems and feels convincing. After all, canyou show me your ego? Where is it? How can you be so certain that it exists? Itsnot a tangible sensation, like love or fear. Rather, its an idea that perhaps we deven realise is an idea, so much do we take it for granted. Maybe its just an abstraction like the number three.

If you take this admittedly large leap that there is no such thing as the you that you imagine yourself to be then what? Then you at the deepest level are simplye particular expression of everything else that is going on. Or as the Zen writer Alan Watts put it: Will and fate are two aspects of the same thing. Life livesyou, you do not live life. Everything that happens is of itself so.

What you do is what the whole universe is doing now. In the same way, a single wave is something the whole ocean is doing you cannot point to a discrete end orbeginning of a wave. You are experiencing different aspects of one thing happening, not separate events linked by cause and effect. Imagine a dance between twopeople that looks so seamless you cant tell whos leading and whos following. Is itthe you who is called Tim Lott or Joe Doakes or whatever, or is it the sum total erything thats going on? Ultimately, whats the difference?

But where does this leave you? Free to do whatever you want to do? Possibly. Or perhaps its means youre absolutely unfree. It depends which way you look at it. Theview that there is no you for things to happen to is a hard, even painful one toaccept. There is only a continuum: you, everything. There is no such thing as progression in time, with one cause pushing a certain effect. This is also an illusion.

For some this could be a terrifying prospect. But for me this is a good arrangement. It involves a universe full of surprises rather than a dead machine, as the

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determinists would have it. And neither is it a factory of regret, guilt and anxiety, which tend to be suffered by those who believe in free will too much. Itleaves existence as a profound mystery and, without mystery, life would be intolerably boring.

Let your brain do the work without interference, just as you let your liver oryour heart do their jobs

When I am faced with a difficult choice now, I neither make it nor dont make it.As Zen teaching has it, I try to await the condition of being choicelessly aware.At some point, the choice just happens, in the same way that your breath just happens, when youre not thinking about it. Let your brain do the work without interference, just as you let your liver or your heart do their jobs without interference. Dont let your ego your centre of conscious reflection get in the way. In otherwords, you are trusting nature or if you prefer, your unconscious to make the choce for you. Nature is not always to be trusted, but it is a better bet than so called rational action; it contains a wisdom that is far deeper than reason.

If you think too much about a choice, it is bound to go awry. The same instinctthat governs, lightly, your decision whether or not to go out for a walk shouldbe the same instinct that decides whether or not to stay in your marriage. It isnot motivated action. It does not involve a cost-benefit analysis. It just recognises when, and if, the door of action is open, and suggests whether you mightwant to walk through it or not. What happens next is not a matter of reason, but

only of courage, and faith.

Tim Lott is the author of The Scent of Dried Roses (Penguin Modern Classics) andUnder the Same Stars (Simon and Schuster).

Published on 28 March 2013

Aeon Magazine Ltd 2013