Questions on Free will and Destiny

About Gita, Karma and more

These are responses to many follow-up questions from the earlier article “Is everything predestined?”.

Does the Bhagavad Gita refer to free will and destiny?

The most wonderful and awe-inspiring sight of the Gita is when Krishna shows his Universal form and all the warriors in the battle are entering His mouth like moths into a flame. And when Arjuna trembles at that sight and asks Krishna who he thought to be his friend, “Who are you?” and Krishna replies like thunder “I am Time”. He then tells Arjuna to act as a mere instrument because every event in this battle is already predetermined. The battle represents life itself and Arjuna represents every single being whose couse of action is predestined.

There is a more detailed explanation of Bhagavad Gita and free will at https://medium.com/@sureshn13/does-bhagavad-gita-support-freewill-ec4e1d5ee29b

Doesn’t it sound disturbing to know that I have no control?

On the contrary, this is the most liberating insight. Ramana Maharshi used to say if you are carrying a load on your shoulders while traveling by train, when you realize that the train carries everything anyway, then you just put that load down. All regret, anxiety, comparison, jealousy etc is the result of our imagined individual agency of ‘self’ and ‘others’. The realization that everything unfolds according to destiny helps remove the illusion of an individual doer. When this false ‘I’ goes, what remains is the simple peace of being.

Desire or goal cannot be fully warded off. Even consuming food has a goal of beating hunger or watering a plant has a goal of nurturing it. Don’t even realized souls have saatvic goals?

When we are hungry, we eat. It is a response to a fact. But if I want to eat a particular cuisine for my tongue, that is desire. If I care for a plant, then nurturing is a response from that care. If it is to show off my garden to others, that is desire. If the action springs out of love and not ego, then it is free. It is in this context that a realized being may seem to be outwardly working toward saatvic goals such as teaching, setting up an Ashram etc. out of love and care, but inwardly absolutely detached from the outcome. If he doesn’t mind what happens, there is no ‘goal’ as in a desired future outcome.

Hence Krishna says in the Gita that you have right to action, not to results so never attach to any outcome and not to inaction either. Because both desire for outcome and inaction deny intelligent response to what is. Desire comes from I-ness. For the I-ness to go, desires and suffering due to resistance to unpleasant outcomes need to go. This is helped by the realization of the perfect unfolding of everything as per the Divine will.

Supreme Intelligence has designed Nature based on some rules as seen in the entire cosmos. And being omniscient, He knows the past, present and future. But calling all events predestined could question the rule-based Nature itself?

If it is clear that everything is predestined, it removes resistance to what is. As you mention, omniscient means knowing past, present and future. If the future is known to Him before it happens, doesn’t that answer the question right there? Being predestined and a rules based Nature are not in conflict at all. The rules are set in motion to manifest what is predestined. Even in a movie universe (say Star Wars), there are many rules set forth by the director that are obeyed within that universe and yet the entire script is written already. And the rules are only a means to unfold that script.

So non-attachment and non-resistance is the way to freedom from I-ness. And predestiny helps remove that attachment and resistance. This is why Krishna teaches in perfect order first non-attachment to outcome and then drives home the teaching by revealing through the universal form that every outcome is predestined anyway.

You have used intelligence and nature (shakti) as almost synonymous. I know you might have done for argument sake, as Nature itself is not intelligent but been driven by Intelligence.

Yes it is correct that Nature and Intelligence are strictly not the same and I didn’t want to go into that subtle difference. But good that you pointed out. Intelligence is prior to Nature and permeates it.

The idea or the ‘assumption’ of predestiny will remove I-ness for sure. Is your intention is to cultivate such an idea more than its veracity?

Cultivating any idea or assumption or belief will never cause real change in the long run. Either we see something or we don’t. If we see and feel the Intelligence that permeates Nature from the cosmos to the quarks, then we don’t have to believe in God, it becomes self-evident. Same with pre-destiny. If we can see it, then we don’t have to cultivate any belief.

If we look into any decision we make at any moment, it is only a programmatic output of the conditioning that is already there. The data that is already there uniquely determines the output. There is no freedom over the data that is there which has come in due to nature and nurture. This is the implication of the ‘nature prevails’ as you pointed out. Since there is absolutely no way for me to free myself of the data that is already there, I cannot but decide in the way the data dictates. So who is deciding?

The German philosooher Schopenhauer captured this very point most succinctly thus ‘You can will what you want, but you can’t will what you will”. What you want is determined by your will. But your will is determined not by your will. It is there based on what is there!

Albert Einstein also made an unambiguously precise statement as a physicist would on this topic:

“Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”

And Ramana Maharshi in a remarkable coincidence had used almost the exact words well before Einstein:

“Everything is predetermined. What for then does the body come into existence? It is designed for doing the various things marked out for execution in this life. The whole program is chalked out. ‘Not an atom moves except by His Will’ expresses the same truth.”

So while we may think of religion, spirituality, philosophy and science as different fields, in reality they all have to converge. Otherwise they are not the entire Truth and therefore not useful in the ultimate sense. That convergence is expressed by seers in different language. And we can see that through our own inquiry of where decisions spring from. Having this clarity will make non-doership a natural consequence, to the extent the clarity operates unclouded by habituated egoic memory.

If everything is predetermined, where does one’s own Karma and its consequences come into play?

Karma or cause and effect is the way the script unfolds. Much like a movie has cause and effect within its universe while the whole thing is scripted a priori. Characters can’t ignore cause and effect but the actor is ever free. False identification with the character is the only bondage. The simple truth of predestiny enables surrender to the Divine will and be free of identifying with the character.

Does this mean that we are no different from a pre-programmed computer? Mere actors in a pre-scripted universal drama?

That depends on who ‘we’ means. To look into this ‘we’ or ‘I’ is the essence of self inquiry. The aggregate of matter that is the body/mind is what is pre-programmed. The Intelligence that animates the body/mind is ever free.

So who are we? The question to inquire into.