In my Insights newsletter, I occasionally have a segment where I answer common questions I receive from students, spiritual seekers, and curious souls. Below you’ll find them archived for posterity. If you’d like to sign up for my periodic newsletter, please feel free to do so at the top of my Connect page. And of course, thank you to all the wonderful people who write to me with their questions. If you have any, I invite you to send them in. Happy inquiring!
A: Despite the fact that this debate has raged on since the beginning of human history, I find myself continuing to receive many inquiries on the topic. Here’s my best attempt at a concise answer.
Just like most everything else we encounter on the spiritual journey, the concepts of fate and free will are paradoxical. And there are different angles from which one can understand them depending on where one’s consciousness is situated. I’ve outlined four basic viewpoints and listed them below in order of decreasing ego/duality perception and increasing awareness/unity perception. In other words, as we travel along the path of Self-realization, our comprehension generally shifts along the following lines. Choose whichever one works best for you!
1. When we’re at our most dualistic vantage point, we generally see fate and free will as opposites, and we’re unsure which one is correct. Sometimes we wonder if determinism is really what governs all actions, and other times we speculate whether our freedom of choice is the more accurate truth, but rarely do we consider that both may play a role in the outcome of our lives.
2. If we move a notch toward Unity, then we grasp that both destiny and self-determination exist, but on a spectrum. The more egoic and less aware we are, the greater our fate. The less egoic and more aware we are, the greater our free will. In this context, fate means we are being run by subconscious forces and patterns, and free will means we have liberated ourselves from such designs. Thus, the depth of our awareness – and conversely, the density of our unawareness – is what influences how much our lives are shaped by these particular forces. Unlike the previous way of seeing things, this mode of thinking at least offers a solution: do the inner work to strengthen awareness in order to increase self-agency.
3. Moving even closer to Oneness, we appreciate that fate and free will are actually two sides of the same coin, and therefore the same thing, but seen from different perspectives. Both are true! Fate is what life looks like from the perspective of our limited ego, and free will is what life looks like from the perspective of our liberated soul. Likewise, fate appears to be operational when peering into the past, whereas free will seems to be active when gazing into the future. Shift our perception and we shift our reality.
4. Finally, when we are firmly established in the Oneness of true nature, we realize that these distinctions – aware vs. unaware, duality vs. unity, ego vs. soul, past vs. future – are simply mental constructs and ultimately unreal. This means that from a relative level, we can acknowledge them to be legitimate and useful models, yet from an absolute level, there is no such thing, and so the entire question and debate becomes irrelevant. In conclusion, when we can get beyond the mind, we clearly see that there is no fate or free will. There is only What Is.
If you’d like a deeper dive into this elusive topic, I encourage checking out Essay Ten in Philip Weber’s second book, Reflections of Consciousness.
A: There are many great spiritual teachers who equate Self-realization with the deep sleep state, but I feel that they use this as an analogy to help people better understand what Realization is like. The deep sleep state is a temporary state, therefore it cannot be the same as Realization. Self-realization is not a state, but rather the Beingness that exists beyond, within, and as all states. You could say there are three states of consciousness: waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. Self-realization can be considered the fourth stateless “state,” known as turiya in Sanskrit, which underlies and transcends these three states due to it being eternally our true nature as pure awareness, one with all things. Perhaps a better analogy for Self-realization would be like being a newborn baby who has no sense of identity yet, just a pure open awareness of What Is without any mental overlays.