The Ostrich and the Elephant

A blog on spirituality, science, philosophy, ETs, and mental health

Tag: Illusion

  • Ajata Vada

    A warning:

    I would probably only read this article if you are very committed to awakening. If not, it could be unnecessarily challenging for you. This teaching is about as radical as radical can get – and true spirituality is already pretty radical!

    I want to emphasise though that I do not know if this teaching is true, or if it is the full truth; however, I think something Jesus said is appropriate here if it is true:

    “Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find, and when they find they will be disturbed, and when they are disturbed they will be astonished, and will reign over the All.”

    A bit over two years ago now, I came across a video from the nonduality teacher Tom Das called “The highest truth is Ajata”. Hmm, I thought. I’d been on the spiritual path for 11 years at this point, and had never heard that word. I respect Tom as a teacher so I watched the video. (link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RTlr5GdZXc).

    It was radical. Like, really, really radical. World-ending radical.

    At first I was excited to hear it. My whole life had been focused on awakening for 11 years, and I was so frustrated with not making the “progress” I wanted. Not actually waking up. When I heard it, I thought to myself, “Okay, this is going to change things. This is big.”

    Ajata is a Sanskrit word which means “unborn”. “A” being the prefix “not” and “jata” being “born”. “Vada” means “view”. What this perspective states is that “there is no creation.” “Nothing ever happened.” The world is not just illusory, it never even appeared to exist!

    After my initial excitement of feeling like this could be a breakthrough for me, a bit of fear crept in. Quite a bit. “Well, this is just one teacher”, I said to myself; “he could be wrong.”

    In the following months and years however, I came across more and more teachers who were saying the same thing. Ramana Maharshi, Papaji, Rupert Spira, A Course in Miracles, some awakened friends on Facebook. The evidence started to mount up.

    I wrote to Tom, initially, when the fear crept in.

    “Is it scary?” I said.

    “No, it’s not scary at all, Will. It’s heaven,” he said. “Ajata = total endless peace, love, and bliss.”

    Still, there were things I wanted in the world. I wanted a deep relationship with a partner. I wanted to write my book. Will that all disappear?

    I don’t know the answer to this question, and really, before I see the ultimate truth myself, what I think about it means absolutely nothing. Whether I believe or disbelieve in ajata is kind of irrelevant. The truth is the truth no matter what I think about it. It’s impossible to know what the coffee in Paris tastes like until travelling to Paris.

    This teaching would say that the world does not exist in any way, but only “God”, “the Absolute”, consciousness, beingness, the I Am exists.

    As Rupert Spira said once, “When the somethingness of the waking state starts to appear less and less like something, the nothingness of the deep sleep state starts to appear less and less like nothing.”

    There’s a tendency for the human mind to picture “nothing” as just an endless black void. But apparently that’s not what is experienced. This state is impossible for the mind to imagine, as I’ve been told. Only that it is everything we’ve always been searching for.

    One thing that makes me hesitate with this teaching is my teacher Isira. As best as I could tell, she was the most awake person I’d ever come across, and I remember her once mentioning the book, “The Disappearance of the Universe”, and dismissing the idea as not true. The world does exist, only our thoughts about it do not exist, she said.

    That was always my position on this matter until coming across the ajata teachings. But I still just don’t know. I can’t know until I experience the truth, whatever it is, for myself. All the philosophising in the world means nothing. Truth is experiential. Philosophy and spiritual teachings can lead you to water, but they can’t make you drink. At a certain point you have to dive in, even though you don’t know that it’s safe.

    This is why I think faith on the spiritual path is so important. Faith doesn’t mean belief in something without evidence, it just means that at a certain point you have to have trust and let go into the unknown.

    What are the benefits of this teaching though? Well, what do humans want more than anything? Eternal life and happiness. That is, apparently, what’s on offer with these teachings. What you truly are was never born and cannot die, and it is bliss. Eternal bliss as “God”. That is where the spiritual path ultimately leads. Yet people are running around picking up scraps of temporary happiness, mostly struggling. As the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote: “People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.”

    There really is so much denial going on in humans. People, on the whole, are suffering a lot. Yet we often refuse to admit it to ourselves I think because we’re scared that there is no solution. That if we faced up to how unhappy we are we would just get stuck there and it would make it worse. People think the best they can hope for is brief periods of happiness interspersed amongst long periods of struggle.

    The spiritual path says there is a solution. And it’s better than we could imagine.

    Another benefit is that this teaching really removes your attachment to the world. Regardless of whether the world exists or not, our intense focus and fascination on the vicissitudes of life can distract us from discovering our true unchanging Self (capital S indicating the ultimate Self, not the individual self or ego). This teaching is a very powerful means for shifting our attention in that way.

    One thing I have noticed, however, with most people who advocate for the ajata teachings, is that they think the world = suffering, and that it can’t be any other way.

    While I think there is both light and dark in existence, and there will always be the full array of human emotion experienced, I don’t see it this way. I believe it is possible to create “Heaven on Earth”. Will it take a while? Yes, but I do believe it’s possible. And I do wonder whether there is an emotional avoidance inherent in the ajata teachings. Maybe if you see the world as inherently just suffering, you are more likely to reject it, and stay in this “absolute” state because it is “safer”.

    I don’t know if this is true, but it is a thought that I had. Adyashanti once said, “Don’t get stuck in enlightenment.” If you get stuck in enlightenment, the world will seemingly make you aware pretty quickly of your neglect of it.

    As I said, that’s just a possibility for me. I don’t know the truth of this yet. All I know is that I’m going to keep exploring until I find the highest truth myself. Until then, I leave you with this image:

    Thanks for reading,

    Will.

    P.S. Something I’ve learnt a lot on the spiritual journey is to take the “middle way” approach. Buddha is credited with saying this, but in his case he meant it in terms of asceticism versus over-indulgence. The way I see it is that we should always plant ourselves firmly in the middle ground of any propositions and be open to the truth of each, if there is any. I’ve been surprised at how accurate the middle way generally is in this sense, and getting lost in extremes often indicates a blind spot. I don’t know if this is true of ajata, but it’s a possibility. Some teachers have often said the world is real and unreal at the same time. As I said, I will continue to investigate it either way, and even though it might take a while, I’ll get back to you with the results. 😉

  • Embodying the Divine Feminine

    In some spiritual circles, there is often a distinction made between what is called “The Divine Masculine” and “The Divine Feminine”. In Hinduism these are called Shiva and Shakti respectively.

    There is a lot written about these two principles, and I’m not here to write an intellectual rundown on these two ideas, not least of all because I’m not an expert in this field. Instead, I want to give a very simple rundown of how I see these two ideas relate to spiritual awakening.

    Shiva, the divine masculine, is often said to represent the absolute reality or consciousness; that which is beyond all form. Shakti, on the other hand, is often said to represent the manifest world, the life-giving energy of the universe, in all her beauty and horror.

    The type of spirituality I have mostly followed since my spiritual journey began 8 years ago is called “nonduality”, from the Hindu word advaita, literally meaning “not-two”.

    The basic premise of this school of thought is that all is ultimately consciousness, there is no true separation, and thus the separate self is ultimately illusory too.

    These teachings are really fantastic for those interested in ultimate truth and enlightenment. However, like all teachings relating to the nature of reality, they have their limitations. As far as I see it, the world is much more nuanced than can be simplistically put down into absolute statements about its nature, and too much emphasis on these teachings can lead to someone rejecting or neglecting the phenomenal world as merely “illusory”.

    As I see it, the world is only illusory in one sense – that is, its nature is very different than how most humans usually think it is. But that doesn’t mean it’s “not real”. If a magician performs an illusion, we don’t afterwards say “nothing happened”, we say “what we thought was happening was not what was actually happening.”

    This is the sense in which I see the world as illusory: It is made out of consciousness, not matter. The world is very much real as consciousness, but very much unreal as matter.

    That’s not to say we should disregard the idea of matter altogether – it is still the way consciousness is appearing so should still be taken seriously. I wouldn’t step in front of a bus just because I think matter is ultimately illusory. Illusory me would still die, and all the spiritual excuses in the world wouldn’t change that.

    So to just dismiss the world as illusory is to neglect the relative reality of the world, and often leaves people in an intellectual framework without embodying their awakening, or otherwise engaging in “spiritual bypassing”, which is using spiritual teachings as a way to avoid dealing with their issues.

    I recently came across a great spiritual teacher called Louise Kay, who I think embodies the balance between “masculine” and “feminine” perfectly. She is in part a nondual teacher, and simultaneously helps people come to terms with and embrace their emotions.

    A lot of nondual teachers reject the usefulness of meditation practise. They say, “you already are what you seek, all you need to do is recognise this.” And this is true at an absolute level, and in my opinion can even be a useful teaching at a relative level, but it often leaves people sitting around “waiting for enlightenment”, with no change in their everyday life.

    It is a paradox as far as I see it. Yes, you already are what you seek, and yes all you need to do is recognise this, but at the same time practises may be useful in helping you see this. I say “may be” because in my estimation there are no rules for awakening. Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie both woke up in the midst of severe depression, without any previous spiritual path.

    The way I approach it now is to keep reminding myself that I already am what I seek, but at the same time, I’m going to do the practises because I feel they help my relative life, and who am I to say that helping my relative life won’t help wake me up? Anybody who says they have a simple answer to that question I think is deceiving themselves.

    I had some sessions with Louise and she actually told me that I’m already awake, just that it hadn’t sunk in fully yet, which was great to hear. I still struggle with a lot of depression and anxiety, largely related to my experiences over the past couple of years, so it’s a bit hard to be excited about while I’m still suffering so much, but it’s nice to think that my path is paying off.

    In conclusion, I think the Buddha’s teaching of “the middle way” is most appropriate here. Don’t get stuck in absolutes, and don’t get stuck in relativity – embrace both and see where it leads you.

    I’m personally excited to see where this path of opening up to my emotions will lead me. I’m only a beginner on this path but I feel it’s perfect for me, as my emotions were what so often made meditation difficult to maintain. A meditation practise that specifically focuses on embracing your emotions in unconditional love feels perfect for me.

    I’ll see how it unfolds from here…

    Much love,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

  • So… something happened to me

    So… something happened to me.

    About 3 weeks ago, something changed for me. Or didn’t change. Or, the change was that I was no longer looking for a change.

    I realised that what I am – consciousness itself – is already awake.

    The “shift” I have been trying to achieve for 8 years finally happened. Or, again, didn’t happen.

    It’s tough to talk about.

    Around 8 years ago I came across some “enlightenment” teachers, and since then I have been ardently striving to achieve this myself. I’ve been obsessively fixated on achieving this realisation, even to the point of it being detrimental to my regular life.

    Over the past few months, certain teachings had been hitting me more deeply. Then I started to look into the notion of time, and this is what apparently changed things for me. Or, again, didn’t change them.

    I realised that notions of future and past are merely concepts in the mind which occur in the present moment. There is no real “future”. And so my whole house of cards of “I’m going to get enlightened in the future” collapsed. I realised there was only now, and there was only ever going to be now. The “enlightenment in the future” bubble totally popped.

    I didn’t realise it at the time, but things were different after that.

    I went to listen to a meditation recording and despondently thought to myself, “hmm, maybe this will wake me up.” Then I paused, reflected on consciousness, and thought, “What? Wake me up? How could I be any more awake than I am now? How could awakeness be any more itself than it already is?”

    And I suddenly realised, “Oh my God, I’ve stopped seeking.” Consciousness was already conscious. Awakeness was already awake.

    The “shift” I had been striving toward for almost a decade had finally “not occurred”. It was instead to see that there was never going to be any “shift”. That… this was it.

    It no longer feels like I’m trapped inside my mind. It feels much more like I am consciousness itself, and the mind is merely an appearance in this consciousness, made out of this consciousness.

    This is why in Buddhism they often call enlightenment “the gateless gate”. You have an image of this event that will happen to you in the future, some sort of transformation that will occur, but once it “occurs” you realise there was never anything to occur. There was no gate.

    Rumi put it more poetically:

    “I have lived on the lip of insanity,
    wanting to know reasons,
    knocking on a door.
    The door opens.
    I’ve been knocking from the inside.”

    Or, to illustrate the point somewhat humorously: Two Zen monks are standing on either side of a river. The first monk says to the second, “How do I get to the other side?” The second monk yells back, “You are on the other side!”

    This is a humorous little joke, but it also illustrates the point perfectly. In terms of awareness, you already are what you’re seeking. What you’re looking for is what is looking.

    Now, I don’t think I’m totally enlightened. There’s still a hell of a lot of clearing up to do. There’s still suffering, there’s still a lot of mind activity. The only difference is I no longer feel trapped inside of those things. I feel much more now like I am awareness rather than my mind.

    For most of my life, it’s felt like there was an energetic contraction in my head. This fuzziness. This lack of clarity. This blurriness to life.

    I was so much asleep to life that for the majority of my life I didn’t even know there was this contraction – until I started to meditate and began to “wake up” a little.

    But it finally feels like I’m no longer caught.

    I don’t know what’s going to happen from here. “Time” will tell as far as that is concerned. There’s definitely still a lot more to unfold. But this feels like the biggest shift that has occurred since I began this journey 8 years ago.

    I spoke to a friend about this realisation, and he said, “Oh, it’s like you’re finally out of the prison of Will.” And I said, “No, it’s more like someone came and opened the door to my cell, but I’m still just sitting in the same cell, only now just looking around going, “well this is different…”

    I think the process from here on out will be me gradually coming out of my cell. I have no idea how long it will take until I feel like I’m out, but it feels like the door is definitely open now. 🙂

    Thanks for reading,

    In love and light,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

  • Enlightenment is an Illusion Too

    Eternity is in love with the productions of time

    William Blake

    I had quite a deep realization a few days ago regarding the nature of “enlightenment”. That is, enlightenment never happens in the future.

    I had heard this type of teaching from many teachers in the past, but this time it struck me more deeply.

    Enlightenment is a useful word in one way because it suggests to us that there is a very different way of perceiving the world than the way most humans generally do.

    This is very useful because it’s true. There is a very different way to perceive the world.

    The word becomes a double-edged sword though, because it then suggests to people that enlightenment is an “event” that may happen to “me” in “the future”.

    This is where it becomes problematic, because the future doesn’t actually exist, it is just a collection of thoughts that occur in the present moment.

    We have learned from Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity that the nature of time is very different to how we usually conceive of it. It fluctuates depending on the observer and their particular reference point.

    Time literally slows down as gravity increases. As an object increases its speed, time runs slower relative to objects moving slower. This was exemplified in the movie Interstellar, where, upon returning to Earth, the inhabitants there had aged significantly quicker than those who travelled at high speeds through space.

    Usually this effect is so small we don’t notice it. You need to be travelling very fast for it to become obvious. But it still exists in our world too. Walk from your room to the living room while someone is sitting on the couch watching TV. You have aged less in that time than the stationary person, only so minutely you haven’t noticed it.

    Of course, in our universe, nothing is ever truly “stationary” – the person sitting on the couch is spinning around the axis of the Earth at roughly 1,600 kilometres per hour at the equator, which is rotating around the sun at roughly 107,000 kilometres per hour, and our solar system is moving through our galaxy, which is moving through space itself. This is why Einstein’s theories were called “relativity” and not “absolutivity”. Everything is dependent upon the observer and their particular reference point in space-time.

    Do you live in an apartment block on the second floor? Because of the (very slightly) reduced gravitational field of Earth where you are, the people living below you age slower than you. Again, so minutely you can’t perceive it except with the most accurate clocks available. And don’t worry about trying to get the ground floor – to you it won’t seem as though you’ve aged quicker, time will appear to you as having gone on at the same rate. It will only be in comparison to the person living below that time will have appeared to go slower. A total mind-job I know.

    So, we have learned from Einstein’s equations that time is not a static construct, moving along at a fixed rate, but instead a perspective that changes relative to the person observing.

    At the very least, we have learned that time is not what we usually think it is.

    Many philosophers, and any enlightened person worth their salt, go further. They suggest time is not actually real at all, it is merely a construct created in the mind of the conscious observer in order to, in a sense, categorise our experiences.

    But there is no real evidence for it in our universe. As the scientist Robert Lanza stated, “you can’t put it in a bottle like milk.”

    The only evidence we think we have of it is that we have a memory – in the present moment – of something having been one way, and now being a different way, and we surmise that this supposed change that occurred has occurred in “time”.

    But as the Greek philosopher Parmenides once annoyingly said to a friend of his, “just because my hand was over here and now it’s over here doesn’t mean that anything has changed.”

    This is something that on initial inspection can sound completely ridiculous, but to illustrate this point, I’ll give an example philosophers often use as a model to explain this called the “block universe”. This is the type of universe many philosophers believe we live in (pictured below), where the past and the future both simultaneously exist as set constructs. From this perspective it’s easy to see how someone could claim that “nothing ever changes”.

    The block universe theory, where the past and future are set in stone and each slice of the block constitutes a present moment experience

    In my opinion the block universe is an incorrect model of our universe because quantum mechanics still leaves open every possible future state, and even, mind-bogglingly, past states, from the present moment. But it is a useful model to illustrate how it’s possible that time doesn’t actually exist as an independent entity, it is merely created from a perspective in the present moment.

    Have you ever experienced this thing you call “the future”? Have you even ever experienced this thing called “the past”? Or have you only ever experienced *thoughts* about these things in the present moment? Have you ever been anywhere else but the present? So why believe in something you have never experienced? In other words, why believe in something there is no evidence for?

    This is why enlightenment can never be an event that happens in the future. There is no real future, there is only now. Believing enlightenment may happen in the future will actually prevent you from waking up to the now, which is what enlightenment is.

    Enlightenment happens now or never. Because there is only now. Literally.

    In love and light,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

  • There Are No Others

    I’ve been reflecting on this a lot lately. One of the greatest enlightened sages to ever live, Ramana Maharshi, was once asked, “How should we treat others?”

    He replied, “There are no others.”

    To a lot of people, this won’t make any sense. But when you look closer, what he’s pointing to is that what you really are deep down – consciousness itself – is not different for any person.

    The consciousness that is shining out of my eyes is exactly the same consciousness that is shining out of your eyes.

    It is all one. Literally.

    The reason most people don’t see this, apart from the enlightened few, is because we have been taught from the time we were little babies to regard ourselves as separate and distinct from everything around us.

    But this isn’t how we start out.

    When a baby is born, they have no sense of me vs other. Their experience is just a whole bunch of sights, sounds, tastes, smells and touch.

    They’re hard-wired to have preferences. They like the sound of their mother’s voice and dislike loud noises. But they don’t see themselves as separate from these experiences.

    Then people start pointing at them and saying this weird sound that they eventually come to know as “my name”.

    A mental construct of them as a distinct and separate self then starts to build.

    This is very convincing. The mind is extremely powerful at clouding over the blatantly obvious fact that everything is one.

    And this is reinforced and reinforced by society to the point that it really feels like we’re a separate self, distinct from everything around us.

    Then some people start to question this through various means.

    Maybe they see that it doesn’t make much sense from the point of view of neuroscience that there’s a special place in the brain where our “self” resides.

    Maybe they come across the teachings of an enlightened person and start to examine what experiential evidence there is for this self.

    Maybe they have a spontaneous awakening where they see this clearly with no clear “path” to this realization.

    Whatever the case, these awakenings are taking place in greater and greater number all around the world. There really is a great rise in both the realization and discussion of this topic.

    So what about you? How would your life change if you were to see clearly that everything is one and there is no true separation? How would the world look if a great mass of people started to realize this?

    As the late comedian Bill Hicks once famously said, “What’s going to happen to the arms industry when we realize we’re all one?”

    In love and light,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

  • Enlightenment, The Ultimate Perspective

    Yin Yang: An image that perfectly encapsulates the paradoxical “half-truth” nature of reality

    I’ve been mulling over the most recent article I wrote – “The Illusion of Free Will” for a couple of weeks now, and the thing is – I don’t really agree with it. At least, not fully.

    This is going to be an article where you don’t get any set, defined answers, so if you don’t like articles of that kind, skip over this one now.

    The question of whether humans – or any sentient being – has free will was one of the first big philosophical questions I ran into in my undergraduate science degree.

    At the time, I had an assumed belief that humans had free will, that we were ultimately responsible for the decisions we made, and should be held accountable for our actions. The more I looked into this belief, however, the less it seemed to make sense.

    In order to really explain my “position” on this, I’m going to have to get quite deep. Think ultimate nature of reality deep.

    I think the best way to do that is with a diagram. This will obviously be limited too, but it’s the best way I know how to convey my perspective.

    The Three Levels of Reality

    At the ultimate level, there’s the Source of all existence. The ultimate One. The Infinite reality.

    This is beyond the dualistic mind of humans. Beyond good and evil. Beyond right and wrong. Beyond this versus that.

    As the Heart Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism states: “Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha” which translates to “Gone, gone, gone beyond, totally gone beyond.”

    Welcome to reality. This is the annihilation of the separate self. The ultimate perspective on reality. The eradication of distinction.

    Not everyone wants this. Even those on the spiritual path, not many of those truly want ultimate truth – they want to just make their lives a little better.

    That’s fine. Everyone has their path to walk, walk it freely as long as you choose!

    I think this is the path I have chosen, however. Do I know that for a fact? No. It’s quite possible to me that I could stop short of this so long as my life was enjoyable.

    There’s a part of me that feels I won’t be satisfied until I know the ultimate perspective however. Time will tell as far as that’s concerned.

    Which brings me to the point of this post, which is kind of a rebuttal against my last post.

    Even though ultimately everything is one, and ultimately everything comes from the same source, there is still simultaneously distinction. The Infinite reality can split itself up as much as it likes and still remain infinite.

    And that’s what humans are. A splitting off of infinity.

    Life is simultaneously all one and yet has distinctions within it.

    Which is where the question of free will, along with the existence of the self, becomes a bit blurry.

    Ultimately if there is only one and no separation, then obviously there can’t be any true free will or true separate self.

    But within that reality, there exist the *appearance* of distinction. And those appearances are still relevant. They still have their own unique makeup. Their distinct preferences.

    This is where, from my perspective, life becomes not a simple yes or no answer, but more like a three-layered answer.

    There’s the ultimate perspective. Then there’s the unique individuation. Then there’s the mental construct or ego level of identification.

    The third layer, the ego layer, is the one that I think is entirely illusory and that humankind would be much better off getting rid of entirely.

    But that still leaves the unique individuation level. The level where life is seen from the ultimate perspective but acknowledges the distinct manifestations of that ultimate one.

    And that’s where it could be said that “free will” is not an entirely erroneous concept.

    If a unique individuation has a desire, and the freedom to act upon that desire, then for all intents and purposes that could be said to be a free choice.

    The issue is not so much about answering a question definitively as it is about removing set belief systems.

    The belief in true free will is problematic, just as the belief in no free will is problematic. The question instead becomes “from what perspective are you asking that question?”

    Because the answer differs depending on what perspective you’re asking the question from.

    So, do we have free will? Yes and no. Does the self exist? Yes and no. Is this answer going to satisfy you? Yes and no.

    In love and light,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

  • The Illusion of Free Will

    Free will may be an illusion, but only because “you” are an illusion too

    Update: I don’t fully agree with everything I’ve written here, and I gave a different perspective in my next post: “Enlightenment, The Ultimate Perspective”

    During my undergraduate science degree, I became more and more interested in the big questions of life. What is the universe, how does it function, where does it all come from? I thought studying a science degree would be the best way to answer these questions. As I went along, however, I started to see that philosophy had just as crucial things to say in this matter as science did, so I became more interested in these matters as philosophical questions rather than just brute scientific “facts”.

    The first big philosophical question I ran into was the one of free will, which we examined in my class, “Evolution and Human Behaviour”. You see, the more you look into the notion of free will, the harder it becomes to defend it. At least the type of free will most people are referring to when they think about free will: that is, there was a choice or action to be made and they could have acted differently than they did. This idea I will term “true free will” – that we make independent decisions based solely on what we want to do free of any constraints. There is another type of free will – a “relative” level of free will which also needs to be discussed, but as you’ll see it doesn’t give you the type of free will most people believe they have.

    The first sledgehammer to my belief in free will came when we studied the famous Benjamin Libet experiments from the 1980s. In these experiments, Libet got people to do simple tasks – e.g. press one of two buttons or flex their wrists – and note the time they made the conscious decision to do so. While they were doing this they were hooked up to an EEG machine to record their brain activity. What Libet found was that he could predict, based on prior brain activity, what the person would do before they consciously made the decision to do it. This experiment has been repeated many times with different types of equipment, and the results all point the same way: in some cases what the person is going to do can be predicted a number of seconds prior to their conscious recognition of what they decided to do.

    This is a big one. If our brains essentially operate by the laws governing our universe, albeit with a little quantum uncertainty (though it’s very sketchy to try and sneak free will in here), then none of our thoughts, none of our actions, none of anything about us can actually be claimed to be a truly free choice.

    There are many ways to debunk the notion of true free will. There’s the laws of the universe argument stated above, there’s the gene-environment interaction which makes up literally everything we are in this moment, then there’s the more philosophical arguments, for example: you can’t choose what you desire, and your greatest desire will always win out (even if you try and trick the universe by doing something that is not your greatest desire to prove your own free will, that has then just become your greatest desire). Think about it: Have you ever done anything that was not your greatest desire unless you were forced to by someone else or by society’s expectations? When did you ever have two options in any moment, no matter how small it is, and went with the less desirable action. (If you think you can come up with one, let me know in the comments and I’ll explain why it was still, as far as you could tell in the moment, your greatest desire).

    Let me throw out a bone though. Even though I think the lack of true free will is true, there’s still a “relative” level of free will as I stated, which, while not giving people the true free will they want, at least doesn’t completely negate the relevance of choice and deliberation. Even though there’s no true free will, choices and actions should still be undertaken as though there is such a thing as choice. It’s sort of a yes and no answer to the question of free will. Yes, from an absolute view the notion of true free will is, I maintain, not just unlikely but an impossibility, but down here at the relative level choices and actions still matter and we shouldn’t just become lazy thinking, “there’s no free will so what’s the point of doing anything.” That’s becoming fatalistic and taking the idea that there’s no free will too absolutely. Even if there’s no true free will, it’s still important to deliberate over choices, weigh up the options, act in the best way you know how. But when it’s all said and done, don’t take any pride or any shame in the outcome. You did the best you could given the conditions you found yourself in. In fact, in every single moment you have always done the best you could for where you were at, even if the outcome was horrible.

    Now I will get down to the main reason I think true free will is an illusion. As many mystics and sages throughout the centuries have claimed, the self, or ego – the little homunculus pictured above, the little man or woman we think we have inside our heads thinking and making decisions – that itself is an illusion. In short, the self doesn’t exist. In reality, thoughts occur but there is no *thinker* in addition to the thoughts. Actions take place, but there’s no *actor* making them take place. Can you predict what your next thought will be, or do they just arise of their own accord? In order to predict what it would be, that would mean we would have to think the thoughts before we think them. Actions may appear to occur simultaneously with thought, e.g. a desire for coffee arises, then the thought, “I’ll go make some coffee”, and then the action of making coffee. Did you choose for the desire for coffee to arise, or did it just happen? And if there’s no other thoughts which say, “no I’ve had too much today I won’t make another one”, then coffee-making usually follows. All of these things can take place without there being a true thinker in addition to the thoughts or a true “do-er” in addition to the actions taking place.

    This is not just a spiritual claim, however. As the neuroscientist Sam Harris points out, there’s no special place in your brain for the “self” to reside. There’s just a whole bunch of sense data being interpreted by your brain which then post-hoc decides on the idea that there is a self here, separate and distinct from everything around it. Here is a video of Sam discussing this illusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fajfkO_X0l0 (7 minutes)

    There’s also a great and entertaining video by CollegeBinary on the philosophy of David Hume, who also came to the conclusion that the self is an illusion. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3QZ2Ko-FOg&t=89s (3 minutes)

    A lot of people find these ideas depressing – both the illusion of free will and the illusion of self – but it really shouldn’t be, there’s a much greater perspective to be gained when these illusions are seen through. As the nonduality or “enlightenment” teacher Gary Weber said at the beginning of his book “Happiness Beyond Thought”: “The bad news is you don’t exist; the good news is you’re everything.”

    This is what happens when you begin to “wake up”. When you begin to become “enlightened”. You begin to see through all the illusions your thoughts have created about the world and about yourself, and you see reality as it really is, rather than how human minds say it is.

    This is what spiritual awakening really boils down to: it is simply a case of mistaken identity. We have taken ourselves to be these bodies/minds when in actual fact what we are – what everything is – is consciousness. And there is no true separation. This is why Gary Weber said the good news is you’re everything.

    The American spiritual teacher Adyashanti put it another way (paraphrased): A lot of people don’t like this idea, they want to be in the driver’s seat. They think just sitting in the passenger seat watching everything would be boring. But that’s still clinging to the illusion of the self, just as a watcher. When you begin to realise, you are the steering wheel, you are the car, you are the scenery you’re passing by, you indeed are everything, it starts to become a lot more interesting.

    The illusion of free will isn’t just a fanciful philosophical idea to consider though, it has very real world implications. When you begin to see that people are not absolutely responsible for their actions, compassion arises. You see everyone as a product of their genes and environment, and realise – if *you* were born with their genes and grew up in their environment, you would be exactly the same as them and have lived their exact life.

    It also has profound implications for the notion of blame and punishment. From my perspective blame and punishment are antiquated notions which only still exist today because people believe in true free will and that people are solely responsible for their actions. The illusion of free will says they’re not. They are a product of their genes and their environment and their particular neurochemistry at the time they made any decisions. Which again, if you happened to be born with their genes and grew up in their environment, you would have made exactly the same choices they did. This isn’t to say people should not be put in jail for crimes – we need that in order to protect the public and act as a deterrent for others. But, I argue, we should stop short of blame and punishment. That is a misperception about the nature of reality.

    There’s a story I love about how an African tribe has songs for each member of their tribe, and when one of their members does something wrong, they don’t punish them, they gather around and sing their song to them to remind them of who they truly are. If people who commit heinous acts are treated with compassion and understanding and forgiveness, while obviously still needing to protect the public from them, I believe the rate of heinous acts would decrease dramatically. Often those who commit heinous acts are actually those who most need compassion and understanding.

    So what am I going to do now? Well, I’m going to have a cigarette. Why? Because I’ve had a very stressful year and I don’t yet have the willpower to quit. My desire for a cigarette outweighs my desire to quit smoking for the time being, as stupid as it is. I’m going to do my best to quit, but I won’t be able to until I’m able to. Until my desire to quit outweighs my desire to have a cigarette. Even though I know whatever happens could not have happened differently, I’m still going to try and exercise my “relative free will” and do my best to quit.

    For those who want to delve into these ideas more, here is Sam Harris giving a talk on his book “Free Will” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCofmZlC72g

    Thanks for reading, and as always,

    In love and light,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

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