Life is divided between destiny and free will. But free will can change destiny. - Sadhguru
The problem
Have you ever been amazed by the weight of your own actions, good or bad?
Have you ever grown cocky, arrogant, or the opposite, being a people pleaser, a doormat, a person deprived of personality?
Have you ever said, "I had the most amazing idea"?
Have you ever considered why some people have so much and other people have so little? Those who are born with mental illness or physical impairments?
What is the role of fate? Does free will actually mean something?
My experience
My experience with this subject is a little rarer than usual. This is because I have suffered from depression for a long time, most of which was undiagnosed, so I wondered all those years what in the living hell was wrong with me.
While my older brothers strived for success and had somehow adventurous lives, I grew insecure, shy, and with terrible self-esteem. I had to be shepherded by others so I could experience the outside world. I envied them, for their lives seemed so effortless, and natural, and yet I had to bring all my strength to do basic things that most people did easily because it was in their best interest. Like bathing, working, and having a romantic relationship.
But today, I am grasping the fruits of such a condition. When you are a slave of your brain you have no choice but to wonder what's the face of your tyrant, its weaknesses, in everlasting dreams of rebellion. That's how I stumbled into the realms of psychology, nutrition, philosophy, spirituality... whatever can lift me out of the prison. And this, I had to do on my own, for other brains allowed their hosts to live an easier life. Surely in today's world, someone like me would have visited the psychologist from an earlier stage, but there were different times back then.
My point is, that you can live a relatively quiet life if your ruler is kind (the brain), but if you don't have one, you have no choice but to dwell in the dark corners of your mind to find the key to reboot it all.
I had to lose my religion, my family's trust, and the friends I had back then at the church. As one of my favorite games of all time, Dark Souls would say, "You will lose everything once branded".
And of course, eventually, you have to face this question. If I didn't suffer from all this, would I have had any need to face the consequences of not embracing my tribe's beliefs? Sometimes I doubt it. Who doesn't want to be loved, to be accepted, to be embraced by your family or school friends? Who would choose to be weird in a state of total ignorance?
Sure. You could choose to be wise the minute you realize its potential. But as a child? or as an adolescent? Highly doubt it. Rejection is not a soft bullet to bite at that age.
I realized fate had shaped me. Even my will to become something more comes from a place of desperation where the choice was fairly simple. Keep being nothing or reach out to something more, whatever that is, it's just better.
Someone would argue that if I didn't choose to embark into such dark waters I would still be in the same place. I would answer: And who is to blame for that threshold of tolerance, where the pain was so great I could lift some of my depression back to reach the light? It is the same culprit.
You see, sometimes is easy to forget every single little thing we feel comes from the brain. Motivation, demotivation, happiness, sadness, willing to or not willing to, and so on. This is why psychiatry exists. They give you some pills to change that although, no one is really sure how they work. I was a patient, they gave me an antidepressant and told me to test it for up to 2 months. They didn't work, so I came back and gave me another.
So then, what's a more powerful steward of fate than our very own minds? I am sure people wake up and say: "Thank you, god, for I have food on the table", with a materialistic approach. I rarely ever hear anyone saying "Thank you, God, because I can feel good things instead of bad things' '. Because in the end, you realize... Most of the time it is not the world that is always against you but it's your own mind, keeping you back from your goals. And you have to push through, and you don't know that "pushing through" is also a brain-made chemical wich determines how "free-willed" you are.
Tadah! Some subject to be talking about in the morning huh?
Some objections
1.- Free will doesn't come from the brain but from the ethereal body, soul, etc.
1A: Semantics. What I mean is feelings come from somewhere and we follow them when they go. This is why we try to do what feels good and avoid what feels bad. With cognitive development, some of these things change and we find pleasure in things we did not in the past.
2.- If you change your habits, your life changes. Free will makes that possible.
2A: Yes. But still, why do you want to change if your brain didn't feed you the motivation to do so in the light of possible consequences? Feels good to change toward success, right? Who is to blame for that bliss? Today, science believes self-control is in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. source
So if you train your prefrontal cortex with meditation, you become more self-controlled. But you see, it's still a biomechanical process.
3.- Humans are not robots.
3A: They are, but they are not identical, like industrial copies. I would say genes are the culprit of differentiated functions in the human brain, joined with cultural exposure. So, some genes develop in response to our environments and there you are, Suddenly your brain rewards you very well when you do a piece of art and makes you hate being an accountant.
Conclusion
Free will to me, is when you give more strength to a different side of your brain: The prefrontal cortex. Meditation does this. But it will only give it the power to do things inside of its own pre-design likings. Of course, this is very useful for survival because imagine feeling pleasure from throwing your head against a wall? And still, I don't doubt some brains might have this glitch. You can help that part of your brain by doing meditation. Makes sense right? You sit down and you constrain yourself from binding the orders of your fears and desires. That's prefrontal exercise, so to speak!
You are already here, and you are already on a roller coaster that drives you pretty fast into life. There are two choices you can make, try to enjoy the ride or hate it until the journey ends. For some people hate feels good, so then again, being miserable it's always a strong choice!
Thanks for taking the time to read. What do you think? Is there actually free will or not? what are your exercises to make it stronger?
Images from pixabay
I don't know if there is freewill at all, but we do have the illusion of control. We do not know where thoughts spring, we do not know how the wiring parses information, but we can perhaps get the sense of freedom when we observe the processes and take a more active role in their direction, so our brain in the background makes slightly different decisions for us.
I agree. Some more consciousness, people call it today. For some reason, having a more active part in the experience, rather than just being lost in thought every step of the way, produces more changes than automation by impulse pleasing. There's something there, like a chance of another way of living.
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