Who Is Ultimately the Decider – Free Will?

Written on July 13, 2008 by Tom Stine

I recently received an email from Ariel Bravy that I really enjoyed and couldn’t wait to answer. With his kind permission, I’m going to answer it here. Ready? I’m going to break the email down section by section and respond to each part. Here we go:

Hey Tom,

You seem to be a pretty spiritually advanced seeker as well and I was wondering
if I could bounce some ideas off of you. Perhaps you could help bring some
clarity to something I’m looking at…

credit: jfeuchter

I’m going to start off with one of the first things Ariel mentions, not because I’m nitpicky today, but because it is something that I feel should always be addressed. And that is the idea of “spiritual seeker.” While I’m grateful for the compliment I’m given, I also want to point out that letting go of the spiritual seeker is an important thing. We spend so much time seeking that we rarely find. So much of the spiritual journey requires that we stop, just stop, right where we are, and let what is be what it is. No seeking. No pursuing. Just stopping and looking at what we’ve already found.

None of which addresses Ariel’s email, but still, it is important to make this point over and over again as it relates ultimately to spiritual awakening.

Following the self-inquiry of Who am I?, I’m finding that there is no decision
maker. With that understood, how does decision making and free will operate?

You got it, Ariel. There is no decision maker. I know that will be a tough one for lots of people to accept, but that has been a central teaching of Buddhism, for example, from the beginning (and many other -isms for that matter). It just keeps getting brought to our awareness century after century. And yet, a careful looking within will always demonstrate this simple fact: there is no self. Self-inquiry is such a marvelous tool. Useful in more ways than just for spiritual awakening.

The way I see it now is that the ego is like an automated process that takes in
all data, memories, desires, experiences, and so on in order to calculate the
most likely choice which will lead to egoic satisfaction and pleasure.

credit: Georgieporge

Ariel, you are a lot more generous to the ego than I am. To be honest, I don’t know how the ego works. I simply know that thoughts arise, they pass through my awareness, and then they are gone. The vast majority of them have virtually no useful purpose as they simply are commentary on my experiences.

You know, I love what Eckhart Tolle said about the ego: “It is no more than … identification with form, which primarily means thought forms.” In other words, the ego is simply a thought about who I am, what I am, a placing of my identity in things and thoughts. If that is true, which I submit it is, then giving the ego any attributes or characteristics doesn’t quite work for me. I prefer to see it for what it is, a chaotic, conditioned collection of mostly subconscious thoughts, and then always look beyond it, realizing it is nothing more than the “noise in my head.”

The higher self, on the other hand, doesn’t really make decisions either. It
simply knows the “best” path to walk to head towards the highest truths. It’s a
knowingness, not a decision, per se.

Okay, to be honest, and again this idea won’t be palatable to some, I don’t believe in a higher self. I go with Ramana Maharshi on this one: there is only Self. Period. Who is looking out of my eyes right now? Who is typing these words? Who is thinking my thoughts? Who am I? Self. One Self. Undivided. One with everything and everyone. Self. One without a second as Ramana used to say.

Now, that Self can appear to be unconscious as it expresses itself as Tom Stine, Ariel, Madonna or George Bush, but it is still the same Self, One, whole. I know that this seems contradictory, but my experience would say that it is true. Always One Self. Spirit. Life. God.

And this, my friends, points to what spiritual awakening is all about. It is awakening from the delusion that I am a separate self, an ego, a Tom Stine that is a body in this world. That is the sum and substance of all of spirituality right there: awakening from the dream called “me.”

Let me go further with Ariel’s email before I discuss further the points he makes above.

The ego may consider listening to the higher self if it is understood that by
following this process, one could reach the bliss, joy, freedom, and security
associated with enlightenment, again using practices such as releasing or
surrender for its own egoic desires.

Again, given what the ego is, a collection of conditioned thoughts filled with misplaced identity, I don’t think the ego “listens” to anything. It just reacts. It is a gigantic reaction to what is being experienced.

The Self that I am, that which you are, the One, is simply being deluded in a sense by placing attention on these condition thoughts. What we are is temporarily lost in thought you could say. Lost in a dream of judgments and reactions.

So there is no decision maker making decisions. There is a higher self as well
as a false mentally projected self who has the thoughts and emotions of the
mind attached to it.

Who is ultimately the decider of how we use our free will? Who decides if we
listen to our egos or our higher selves?

Any ideas?

Now we come to the heart of Ariel’s email. Who decides, then, how to use our free will? Who decides? Well, first of all, I have no free will. You have no free will. It isn’t that free will doesn’t exist. It is just that “I” don’t exist and “you” don’t exist. There is no separate self. There is no one here. If you do inquiry, and look within, and discover there is no decider, there is also no self. No one home. In Buddhism it is called the Doctrine of No Self.

So who decides? The Self, which is synonymous with Life, the Universe, God, Spirit, Buddha Nature, whatever you want to call it. The entire totality of Life, that is what makes the decisions. The fundamental ground of being, that’s the decider.

credit: she_joker87

But even calling it decision making is missing the mark somehow. It isn’t really decision. Life simply flows. It arises from itself. It gives forth. It loves. It experiences. I think you could really say “It Operates,” but that doesn’t seem poetic enough. It simply IS.

But then, is there free will? Well, not in any human sense can it be said there is free will. But does the Self have free will? Does Life have free will? I think the question to ask would be “free of what?” Life is all there is. From what is it free to make decisions? It IS all decision making. There is nothing outside of it. It not only makes the rules, it IS the rules!

Answering your email, Ariel, was fun, and I’m deeply grateful for not only the questions but allowing me to answer them publicly. I hope all the above is clear to you and to everyone. And I hope I answered your questions! If not, hit the comments and let me know. I would love to hear from everyone. I always enjoy answering more questions. Namaste my friends.