Please note: The following article was written while I still believed Sathya Sai Baba to be a genuine, honest person, even though I found his reasoning faulty and his ideas often superficial and confused. Since then I have had all reason to reconsider his so-called 'teaching' on this matter and have found it to be a hodge-podge of untenable and tenable standpoint, often conflicting with one another.
Liberated from taking account of what he has stated, I was able to clear away the resulting confusion and present a more unitary view of the issues here involved. See an improved view of Freedom and Fate here The problems with Sathya Sai Baba's views are expounded under 'Sathya Sai Baba and Free Will' here.
FREEDOM AND FATE
* * * * * * *
Few words have been used for so many things
as 'freedom' has. The term is imprecise and so can have many different
meanings. As preliminaries for discussing the nature of freedom and trying to
decide what is true or false about the subject, we may try to make it clearer
by asking 1) freedom from what? and 2) freedom for
what?
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL FREEDOM
Political freedom is desired from supression of individuals or groups and for individual
justice appropriate in each case. Nations or races seek freedom from certain
external forces, whether military , economic or
otherwise and for socio-economic and political justice. Democracy is based on
the freedom of the individual to vote on who should govern. That such freedoms
can and do exist is a historical and social fact. But the particular extent or
scope of such 'social freedoms' obviously varies with time and place.
Social freedom is also for the good of all
society, being the rights a person should have so as to be able do his duty
(dharma) as a member of society. It is not a right or an open license to do
whatever one wants; that is anarchy. Our 'human rights' are whatever is
necessary or reasonable to enable us to serve our fellowmen and thereby also
God. Whatever denies human beings the minimum of means of doing those duties is
a compulsion from which they must seek freedom. Some examples of compulsion are
the suppression of the right of religious belief or worship and the denial of
the general opportunity of caring for others through work (and of not being an
undue burden oneself).
FREEDOM OF THE WILL
"At first the will is your own which has
to be strengthened by the thought of God until you convert it into the almighty
will of God." (My Baba and I p. 144)
Christians hold that freedom implies the
capacity to deny God and err from the right way (i.e. dharma). Some people use
their freedom to act well, some to err. Moreover,
The will is what enables us to choose a
course of action and decide to follow it, after having arrived at a judgement
of how to act in the given circumstances. The freedom to discriminate morally
(or not do so) is a human faculty which other living
beings do not have, nor do they suffer as we must from the necessity of having
to choose.
When Baba always asserts that we must
discriminate and make efforts to do good, not bad, He
is therefore also referring to individual freedom, even though it is always
bounded by limiting circumstances. If our choices between alternative actions
were not willed 'voluntarily', all moral exhortation would be futile because
moral effort (exertion of will power) would be impossible. There could be no
such thing as responsibility and no philosophy other than fatalism could be
true. To hold anyone responsible for their conscious acts (such as in law)
would be an injustice if they had no freedom to do otherwise.
OMNIPOTENCE AND FATALISM
At the same time, Baba has said that no blade
of grass can move without God's will and that we are all but actors in a vast
play written and directed by God, one of which we do not know the whole script
or the outcome. He even uses the image of 'puppets on a string' to describe our
predicament. Though probably no-one can claim to know what Baba really means by
this, it surely cannot be in support of fatalism. At the same time Baba insists
that we try to play our parts well! I take this to mean that everything,
including the power we have to exercise a limited 'free will', depends for its
existence on God's all-sustaining Will, just as does the entire cosmic
continuum of space, time and matter. I can see that we are like puppets in that
nothing we do, from moving our limbs to digesting our food, from thinking to
dreaming, is done without the motive power of some mysterious energy that is
created somehow beyond our ken.
Does our having a measure of freedom conflict
with the omnipotence of God? Can these apparently opposed views really be
reconciled? If we see the connection between two viewpoints between which we
are necessarily always moving, either that of the mundane ego or that of the
sublime 'I', the questions of freedom and destiny become easier to understand.
THE WORLDLY 'EGO' VIEWPOINT
Though we appear to have the free will to do
anything we like this is the illusion of the individual ego viewpoint, Baba
says. The freedom to pursue one's 'individual' instincts and inclinations,
whatever they happen to be, is a miasma for no good purpose and is therefore
really not freedom at all. It may seem to be freedom but it is really only
bondage to one's karmically-obtained inclinations (vasanas) and one's acquired desires. What one thought were
'free choices' are sooner or later seen to have consequences that work back
upon the doer (both of the good or pleasurable and bad or painful sort). One's
free will was thus 'used' only so as to create future limiting conditions for
oneself.
From the mundane viewpoint, the conditioning
of our minds by our wants and desires is itself obscured... and the more so the
stronger the ego. The sense of 'me' and 'mine' hides from us the operations of
the law of karma. Even the 'me' (i.e. the passive aspect of the ego) is itself
formed as the (karmic) end result of many previous acts (whether before or
since birth).
THE DIVINE 'I' VIEWPOINT
In contrast to the mundane self, there is 'The I'. 'I' am not my ego, but a spark of Divine
Consciousness. Is not this witnessing awareness an expression of Divine energy working in and through us? Scriptures tell us that
human beings are created in his own image by God, who is All-knowing and has
Almighty will. Firstly, an omnipotent being is free to will that human beings
have some share of this potency and to apportion some responsibility to us,
whether we like it or not. Secondly, God does not have to exercise omnipotence
in all things to remain omnipotent. Christian divines, such as
As the divine qualities latent in us are
realised and become actual, the reflection of God's will within us as moral
intelligence (or conscience) enables us to do what is right. Selfless and
dedicated action is the cessation of egoistic 'doership'.
We progress very gradually from the mundane to expand towards the divine
viewpoint.
We regard the omnipotent Divine Will as that
which encompasses sustains and orders the entire cosmos. Yet latitude is
somehow allowed in the plan of creation, some divergence from the general rule,
some chance in the play of events (what physicists have proved to be
'indeterminacy' in microphysical events). Otherwise it would be as if the rules
for the 'game of life' that we are to play determined every tiniest movement in
advance and left nothing to the players' initiative or efforts. However, if we
could but know directly the inconceivable intricacy and vastness of Creation
from God's eternal viewpoint and the plan that lies beyond our ken, would not
even real individual freedom and chance be seen to be so minimal in effect as
never to be able to upset universal order? Well, certainly not when God himself
comes as the avatar to re-establish right and save the world.
A 'WORKING RULE' BETWEEN FREEDOM AND
FATE
How can we in practice meet the challenge of
surrendering our will to God without thereby giving up positive action based on
self-confident willpower? To counteract the passivity of fatalism, we can quote
the Jewish sage Maimonides: "We ought to exert
our efforts in everything as though they were absolutely free, and God will do
as he sees fit". On the other hand, against an excess of active
(self-willed) voluntarism, we must learn from experience how identifying with
our own acts and their fruits is but ego-attachment that further binds us up in
accumulating karma. Then we realise more how destiny and fate (karma) do set
bounds to our ambitions.
So as to reconcile our worldly perspectives
with the eternal viewpoint that we cannot yet experience as such, God may be thought
to be 'behind' any action in a similar way that a President is behind the
actions of the many executives of a government. He leaves some judgement, the
details of the doing and some responsibility to them, yet he never loses
control of the overall plan nor fails to know what his delegates are up to.
Similarly, when in doubt we would refer to the highest authority of which we
are but instruments. He then guides and corrects us.
A president who establishes a law doesn't himself physically do all the things the law is intended to
regulate. Nor does the author-director of a drama himself script all the parts
in every detail. God's (latent) knowledge of every single thought and act,
therefore, need not itself mean that each of these is directly pre-ordained by
God's will. If they were, then God would directly responsible for every error,
unrighteous and evil act too, which seems totally absurd. That would also have
absolved us from all moral responsibility.
SACRIFICE AND FREEDOM AS LIBERATION
When I choose an end and a means to reach it,
some of my freedom is then expended to that end and I am bound to all the
consequences. However, Baba assures us that there is one great exception to the
entangling web of karmic action and reaction. It is being able fully to
surrender the act and its fruits to God (nishkama karma). To the extent that my aim is to become a mere instrument of God's
will, I sacrifice my selfish choices (desires) and do whatever duty that arises
for me.
We might say that a great devotee 'invests'
her or his freedom by doing nothing from selfish interest and thus becomes
'duty bound'. Is not the same also seen in Swami sacrificing Himself by always
using His freedom for the good of all of us, for dharma. Scriptures assert that God uses his Omnipotence for ensuring the good of all
mankind, just as Baba has said that the devotion of exceptionally great
devotees binds Him (for example to ensure their liberation).
The most ultimate freedom we can think of is
for liberation (Mukthi or Nirvana) from
the karmic cycle of birth-death , yet no mortal soul
can presume to know its full meaning. Those who surrender totally to Divine
will presumably have no desire to exercise individual freedom or act separately
from the Universal Will. It is self-evident that Liberation cannot be an
absence of freedom! Do not the Liberated use their will freely in unity with
God and as God? Full equanimity and thus detachment from all sense of good and
bad, pleasure or pain is what Baba tells us is freedom. The best we can do is
quote what the illumined tell us, such as:-
"...Swechcha means the free will of the Atma. Swechcha in ordinary usage means freedom or liberty. We should not take it in the
ordinary sense. Swechcha means the will of the Atma. If we take it in the true sense and follow it
up, we will be much benefitted by our action." (Summer Showers in Brindavan. 1972. p. 141)
(Robert Priddy. June 1993)
The above material is the copyright of Robert Priddy,