Freewill And Responsbility

Do I have free will?

No. I am not separate from the perceptions, thoughts and actions that make up my world. And if I am what seems to be the world, then we are in this together. Me and the world, world/me are doing all these actions that now just seem to act of their own accord.

But help!!!

Surely this means that I am not responsible. This is terrible.

I have played around with this question intellectually since my teens, when I first worked out that free will must be an illusion, but it was only after many years of meditating that I confronted the problem directly.

I was on a Zen retreat at Maenllwyd and practising intensely. Our teacher for the week was a Zen master visiting from California, and he was pushing us hard.

I signed up for an interview. I bowed in the prescribed way, sat in the prescribed posture, looked straight into his shining eyes, and plucked up the courage to tell him what I thought: that ultimately no one is responsible for anything.

He chuckled.

“Yes” he said with a delightfully warm and encouraging smile “Ultimately, that’s true.” He seemed to emphasize the “ultimately”, and I thought of the Zen distinction between the ultimate view and the relative view, wondering whether there’s some other way in which it’s not true.

“Then what do I do about responsibility?” I blurted out.

“You take responsibility” he said.

Help, help, and again help. Who takes responsibility? Isn’t “taking responsibility” doing something?

Gradually over the years, as the sense of having free will has slipped away, I have remembered this advice and it has helped.

The illusion of free will does not survive the kind of scrutiny I have given it here. It simply melts away. I no longer even feel its pull. People sometimes ask me how I did it; how I gave up free will, but I cannot tell them. I know that I battled intellectually with it for years, but thinking only creates a mismatch between what one intellectually believes and how the world seems to be. I never felt comfortable with this mismatch, and didn’t want to go on living as though free will were true when logic and science told me it could not be. So this great intellectual doubt drove me to look directly into how decisions are made, and on to examine the self which ultimately underlies the feeling of being someone who freely acts.