Free Will According to Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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19 thoughts on “Free Will According to Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj”

  2. The pas­sage from the book is very inter­est­ing but I would have to read the whole book to make up an opin­ion.
    Thank you for bring­ing up this book to people’s attention!

  3. “To be free in the world, you must be free of the world.” This is a very pow­er­ful state­ment. Let­ting go of judge­ments about a deci­sion is your free will. you have the fee will to choose what­ever you wish, be it Love or Fear. But the point of this state­ment and free will, is not to make judge­ments on those deci­sions. Life takes both the good and the bad, the up and the down. To deny one is to only live or expe­ri­ence half of the other. We know some­thing con­cep­tu­ally, like the cold, but unless we expe­ri­ence hot, we will never appre­ci­ate the cold. In the same way, une­less we expe­ri­ence hell, we will never appre­ci­ate heaven. By this I mean heaven and hell as a frame of mind, peace and chaos. The ying-Yang depicts this per­fectly. There is both dark and light in the world, and it takes a small amount of each to make the other exist. Another way to look at this is if you are diet­ing or fast­ing, and you decide you really want a ham­burger or pizza, then don’t judge your deci­sion, eat the ham­burger or pizza. Say­ing that it is wrong for you to is a judg­ment about some­thing you were doing in the past, diet­ing or fast­ing. If in the next few moments, you decide you want to con­tinue diet­ing or fast­ing, then do that, but don’t judge your­self by say­ing it wouldn’t be right because you just decided to eat a burger or pizza. Liv­ing life in the moment if God’s will for you, and it is your free­dom to choose what­ever you desire. So sit back, relax, eat some pop­corn, with salt and but­ter, and enjoy the movie of life. Some­times you will laugh, and some­times you will cry. Some­times you will be calm, and some­times you will get angry. But you will still enjoy the show. Liv­ing in the moment is not easy by any means, it’s a mat­ter of doing it, you mid always wants to flee to the past or project to the future. But, Liv­ing in the moment is the only way to freely and will­fuly live your life, and the freewill you have. There is some­thing always hap­pen­ing, So enjoy it!

  4. Hey, it should be so per­fect tim­ing that I had men­tioned about free will in my lat­est entry in my blog http://​inside​my​bub​ble​to​day​.blogspot​.com/​2​0​0​9​/​0​2​/​l​a​w​-​o​f​-​a​t​t​r​a​c​t​i​o​n​-​w​h​y​-​i​t​-​w​o​r​k​s​-​f​o​r​.​h​tml yes­ter­day. We are cause and effect in action every­day of our lives. Each deci­sion taken and each act made after that deci­sion deter­mines our path in this jour­ney of life. I do not believe that we should live as des­tined. I believe we can change our des­tiny and we have the free will to do it, only if we so DESIRE, life’s one com­mon mean­ing:
    1. A desire to live
    2. A desire to love
    3. A desire to pro-create
    4. A desire to change
    5. A desire for Happiness

  5. I was mean­ing to respond to this arti­cle the moment it came out.

    I have had a new expe­ri­ence in my life that has caused an aware­ness that I never quite expe­ri­enced. I under­stood this aware­ness log­i­cally but never emotionally.Yet, even while I am in this aware­ness with logic and emo­tion, I see that nei­ther one of them are relevant.

    My whole life I was try­ing to be spir­i­tual. Try­ing to take the non­phys­i­cal (my idea of it) and project it into this phys­i­cal place. Of course I saw the non­phys­i­cal to be pure, per­fect, pos­i­tive energy.

    Now in this aware­ness there is no per­fect or imper­fect (or any oppo­sites) and there­fore either or is irrel­e­vant, it just is. Ever present being­ness, noth­ing­ness, awareness.

    Just try­ing to explain it, you must reach the level of the mind/ego. It really is not explainable.

    How­ever, It’s not what you do, what you say, how you say it, the actions peo­ple see. It’s the instill­ness in your voice, the no thoughts in your paus­ing, the non-movement in your actions that spreads this awareness.

    To actu­ally under­stand this is one side, but to be it… Is an expe­ri­ence of OH THAT… yeah.

    I under­stand now what all the gurus where teach­ing. They were teach­ing this aware­ness, but it’s not a teach­ing and can’t be taught or learned. I thought I under­stood before but I was not in this aware­ness to expe­ri­ence it because I was try­ing. The try­ing is what holds the illu­sion in place.

    I heard that guru derives from mean­ing gu=dark ru=light. I thought I under­stood that. They merge both and see no duality/mind/ego, I get that… but to ‘get that (the ego)’ and actu­ally ‘BE (instilled noth­ing aware­ness) that’ is such an obvi­ous dif­fer­ence once you are allow­ing this awareness.

    (as you know) I slept on a sleep­ing pat­tern were I was only sleep­ing 15 min­utes every 4 hours around the clock. It aver­aged 1.5 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period. I did this for 273 days. When I did this, my mind stopped. There was no thoughts going in or out. It has been that way ever since, even when I returned back to monopha­sic sleep and even as I merged into Pow­iull sleep. How­ever even with the mind/ego/fear/opposites stop­ping. This aware­ness I am now was not my experience.

    It’s funny for me to be in this now when I was always in it, just was not expe­ri­enc­ing it. Even as the strug­gle was stopped, I still didn’t expe­ri­ence this aware­ness even though it was present. Never-ending it is present.

    Yet, I can not pin-point a time or thing that caused this aware­ness to be present in this expe­ri­ence now (even though it was always there). Yes it was ear­lier today in that aspect and yes it was a build­ing up of many things in my whole phys­i­cal expe­ri­ence in that aspect. And yes there is no time asso­ci­ated with it, in that aspect. The merg­ing of the log­i­cal aspect of this with the emo­tion aspect.

    This aware­ness is so instilled of silence and there is much silence in the noise. This aware­ness is the all of every­thing, the one­ness. That is a flood of emo­tion to just cry in this aware­ness for no rea­son of it but that is just is.

    I could be in this aware­ness and be here always, there is no sense to do any­thing or say any­thing and not react to any­thing other than this awareness.

  6. Hi Anmol, Bud­dhaOfHol­ly­wood, Tait, Wenny, Nicholas,

    Sorry for not reply­ing to your com­ments sooner. As you know, when on a spir­i­tual path (or any path for that mat­ter) you need to take some­time off from outer expres­sion and spend some time in inner silence and fig­ure out a few things.

    I am really grate­ful for your com­ments. You are all correct.

    What I real­ized recently is that Sri Nis­ar­ga­datta and Sri Ramana chose a dif­fer­ent path of going into and stay­ing in the void, and that is what they advo­cated. It was fine dur­ing the times and places they lived in. How­ever, dur­ing my con­tem­pla­tive period, I real­ized that it is their truth, and I can choose my truth, and live dif­fer­ently. And, that is my free-will.

    I hope to share my real­iza­tions soon in an article.

    Thanks,
    Desika

  7. Wel­come back my friend, so delighted to hear from you indeed!

    Your energy feels vibrate and alive with such clar­ity and light.

    I look for­ward to your next arti­cle my friend.

    Thank you for being you and doing what you do through your being­ness. :)

  11. When you study your thoughts I mean observe them objec­tively with­out bias you begin to real­ize your not in con­trol of your thoughts at all. They just seem to jump, pop up from now-where but where that is I don’t know and accord­ing to our pro­gram­ming we choose the most appro­pri­ate action. Yes we are robots, but this is all done uncon­sciously but the funny thing is most peo­ple are not ware of it and attribute it to so called free-will which I sup­pose is the snare of Maya. If you seri­ously want to study free-will start observ­ing your own thoughts and how you came to those deci­sions that you think you chose, if you seri­ously scru­ti­nize it enough the free-will con­cept just seems to break-fall apart and you begin to real­ize who is really doing the choos­ing and it’s not you. Try this some time, reflect on major events of your day and exam­ine how much they really hap­pened through your free will?

  12. When you study your thoughts I mean observe them objec­tively with­out bias you begin to real­ize your not in con­trol of your thoughts at all. They just seem to jump, pop up from now-where but where that is I don’t know and accord­ing to our pro­gram­ming we choose the most appro­pri­ate action.

    Yes we are robots, but this is all done uncon­sciously but the funny thing is most peo­ple are not ware of it and attribute it to so called free-will which I sup­pose is the snare of Maya. If you seri­ously want to study free-will start observ­ing your own thoughts and how you came to those deci­sions that you think you chose, if you seri­ously scru­ti­nize it enough the free-will con­cept just seems to break-fall apart and you begin to real­ize who is really doing the choos­ing and it’s not you.

    Here is an exer­cise try this some time, reflect on major events of your day and exam­ine how much they really hap­pened through your free will?

  13. Mits,

    You are right. This was also my expe­ri­ence as I men­tioned in the first para­graph of my article.

    Thanks for your thought­ful com­ments you have been post­ing on my blog.

    –Desika

  14. Inter­est­ing arti­cle about the exis­tence or non-existence of free will. You are say­ing that there is no such a thing that free will. I agree that will is a com­mit­ment, a goal to move for­ward. You have to have some­thing you want in order to use your will to accom­plish it.
    You have to have a strong desire to ‘give birth” to your will. So basi­cally is not free since it has been cre­ated by your desire or want. The ques­tion is: Do you have the free­dom to choose your desires?

  15. I think too that we form our future and can cre­ate basi­cally what­ever we want from it. You need strong desire, sta­mina and moti­va­tion in order to succeed.

  16. It’s the eas­i­est thing you can do. True medi­a­tion acts like a mind emp­tier, leav­ing you open to the whole flow of the sen­sa­tions and expe­ri­ences you would oth­er­wise ignore. You don’t even need a com­pli­cated tech­nique, med­i­tate as you see fit.

  17. It’s pretty easy to mess up your own life. A wrong move here, a mis­un­der­stand­ing there, and you sud­denly feel like your whole world’s falling apart. How­ever, most of the trou­ble seems to come from within. With tips like “Take no notice of your inter­nal crit­ic” and “Don’t let oth­ers use you to avoid being respon­si­ble for their own deci­sions”, you’ll even­tu­ally find that all-elusive inner peace.

  18. Get­ting to know your­self is the first thing you can do. Once you are clear about your true being than you can start re-building your­self from a very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive. Every­one should look inside for answers and the guid­ance for a bet­ter and more pros­per­ous future.
    There are temp­ta­tions though you have to be aware of. Fol­low your heart and every­thing will fall into its own place.

  19. Hello, you used to write fan­tas­tic, but the last few posts have been kinda bor­ing… I miss your tremen­dous writ­ings. Past sev­eral posts are just a lit­tle bit out of track! come on!

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