Science Meets Mysticism

No free will: What sounds crazy might be real

About eight years ago, I read the below dialogue between a spiritual seeker and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj for the first time, and I thought: “How strange. How crazy.”

This man turned all I knew on its head. I didn’t get it at all.

And yet, I could not discard it. A very tough seed was planted in my mind. No matter how much I ignored it, this seed would not die and dissolve. It just didn’t leave me alone. It wanted to sprout and grow.

Despite the apparent craziness of his statements, I trusted Nisargadatta instantly. At that point in my life, I had encountered and loosely followed several spiritual teachers (Gurus). The most infamous was Bhagwan, who later renamed and rebranded himself Osho. Osho was highly controversial for people unfamiliar with the ways of mystics. Wild, Wild Country is a fascinating Netflix documentary on Osho’s spiritual attempts to conquer the USA.

I benefited greatly from reading Osho’s books, and the Osho community in India helped me immensely through spiritual email counselling when I went through a rough patch of spiritual emergency.

I wrote about this spiritual emergency in Spiritual Emergency, Psychedelics and Mental Illness. I love and admire Osho, but trusting him took time and a more profound understanding of how enlightened Gurus work.

I did trust Sir Nisargadatta Maharaj instantly. Learning about his life, it was evident that this man had no reason or advantage to deceive or lie. He lived a humble, simple life, refusing every offer by disciples to build him an ashram.

Something in me sensed that this was an extraordinary man - a true mystic. And I wasn’t the only one who was awestruck with the literally mind-blowing lucidity of this man’s words. From the first sentence I read, I realized that this is the highest spiritual teaching available.

From the foreword of I AM THAT:

That there should be yet another edition of I AM THAT is not surprising, for the sublimity of the words spoken by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, their directness and the lucidity with which they refer to the Highest have already made this book a literature of paramount importance. In fact, many regard it as the only book of spiritual teaching really worth studying.

Osho’s beautiful and powerful stories teach differently but appear like children's books compared to Nisargadatta’s highly condensed, to-the-point wisdom penetrating every word.

Some people get that from the bible. I am happy for them. While I cherish some bible quotes, the bible never worked for me. I am not a believer. I have a very logical mind and a need to make sense of and understand. Each to their own. There are many ways to skin a cat. That is why spiritual and religious freedom is so important.

With Nisargadatta, every sentence is a full-blown, powerful spiritual assault on our conditioned minds, literally blowing it to pieces. This is not for the faint-hearted. There is no cosy new-age esoteric lulling trying to make us feel better. Every word is like a high-precision rifle shot into the heart of our egos. To see our imaginary false egos operating is at the core of non-dual spiritual teaching (Advaita Vedanta.)

Despite his extremely low profile, welcoming only a handful of local seekers into his humble, sweltering hot flat in the backstreets of Bombay in the 1970ties, he somehow came to the attention of some Westerners.

He didn’t speak English, so a translator and a tape recorder were brought to record his conversation with spiritual seekers. Nisargadatta never wrote a book. All his teachings are in a Hegelian dialectic format, similar to how Socrates taught his disciples. Only later did some of his disciples translate and print his teachings. I AM THAT is free to download in .pdf format.

Nisargadatta is probably the most crucial non-dual teacher of our times and introduced Advaita to the West. Mooji, Adyashanti, Rupert Spira, Eckard Tolle and many other current non-duality teachers draw on Nisargadatta.

So, with no further ado, consider this strange exchange:

Maharaji: All happens by itself. Neither the seeker, nor the Guru do anything. Things happen as they happen; blame or praise are apportioned later, after the sense of doership appearing.

Q: How strange! Surely the doer comes before the deed.

M: It is the other way round; the deed is a fact, the doer a mere concept. Your very language shows that while the deed is certain, the doer is dubious; shifting responsibility is a game peculiarly human. Considering the endless list of factors required for anything to happen, one can only admit that everything is responsible for everything, however remote. Doership is a myth born from the illusion of ‘me’ and ‘the mine

This is the absolute denial of any free will and the unconditional embrace of determinism:

All happens by itself […]. Considering the endless list of factors required for anything to happen, one can only admit that everything is responsible for everything, however remote.

He says whatever happens, whatever we do, has nothing to do with us. The act comes first; things happen, and only later, our illusionary sense of self claims to be the cause of it.

Surely, that is total madness, some of you might think, and I felt exactly the same when I read it the first time. But it didn’t leave me alone.

I wondered why he would say a thing like that with such confidence. He had no personal advantage or motivation to make things up. Granted, mad people say a lot of mad things just like that. They just come out of their mouths. That doesn’t mean they are true.

But mad people don’t attract or cause intense admiration and respect. They repulse people sensing the madness. This seemingly crazy man’s reputation and admiration spread worldwide from a tiny flat in Bombay without the Internet or marketing.

Further, brilliant people embraced and spread his teachings. I was introduced to Nisargadatta by Stephen Wollinsky:

Stephen H. Wolinsky is a founder of Quantum Psychology, integrating Western Psychology, Advaita-Vedanta’s Non-duality, Quantum Physics, Neuro-Science, and Buddhism. He is the author of fourteen books, audio tapes and a DVD series, I Am That I Am.
Wolinsky has a PhD in Clinical Psychology and began his psychotherapy practice in 1974. From 1975 to 1985 he met over thirty different Gurus, Teachers, Rinpoches, and Meditation Masters.
Wolinsky presently resides in Aptos, California.

I read some of Wollisnky’s great books and was in awe of his intelligence and wisdom. Still, he constantly referred to Nisargadatta Maharaji, and it became apparent that this PhD in Psychology and brilliant author in his own right bowed his head to an uneducated Indian peasant and cigarette salesman. No madman would impact bright and educated people like Wolinsky. And he is just one of many.

So, I decided to do a thought experience. I would pretend that everything Nisargadatta said was true. I assumed I just didn’t understand it yet. I accepted him as an absolute authority and became a student who knew nothing.

As soon I adopted that attitude, his wisdom penetrated me - drop by drop. Many more seeds were planted. Many are still dormant; some have sprouted somewhat, and others have grown into trees of wisdom. One of these trees is the realization that determinism - the will of a nameless, shapeless, all-encompassing God if you prefer that framing, is real, and the idea that I shape life with my “free will” is an illusion and unreal.

The other thing that happened was that spiritual theories and conceptual thinking became embodied in everyday moment-to-moment situational wisdom. Whenever I consciously became aware of this deterministic force penetrating every moment of living, whenever I fully accepted it and surrendered to it, I entered a “flow state”. My little ego surrendered and aligned with this deterministic force. In that flow state, everything unfolded perfectly, and my life was in total harmony.

No “free will” is needed in that state to get things done or make decisions. Surfing this universal will is by magnitudes more efficient, wholistic and simply perfect. When the whole universe creates the next moment, how can we ever question or improve on it with our little egoic illusion of free will? It is preposterous.

The opposite happens if we conceptualize “free will” and take it for real. “Free will” is an ego state because it is based on an individual “willer” trying to change and improve on what is actually happening. This isn't very easy to understand. I wrote a trilogy about “free will” a few months ago.

Just briefly: A response happens to painful and harmful events to avoid and improve them, no doubt. Habitually, this response comes from a self-conscious conceptual illusionary state assuming “free will”. This habitual response often does more harm than good and is imperfect.

In contrast, if the response comes from this flow state, it is the best possible response because it is guided by determinism.

While the conceptual understanding of determinism is relatively easy, it is insufficient. It can even be harmful and detrimental to a rich and fulfilling life, as the atheistic “free will” researcher Robert Sapolsky testifies in this article:

He lost all agency after abandoning “free will” and doesn’t get his head around his concept of defining us as “self-reflecting and self-conscious biological machines” only.

His confusion, however, isn’t based on an incorrect assessment of free will and determinism. He is spot on.

His confusion is based on the fact that he never left the conceptual realm and experienced the submission and alignment of his ego to said determinism in a practical, experiential manner.

Then he would know that personal agency can’t be lost because it never existed in the first place - it is an illusion. Our personal life is a microscopically tiny part of a colossal living organism - called the universe - and gets moved in sync with it - from the day we are born to the day we die. We only think and dream up personal agency because we lack understanding and trust.

I probably will leave you with more questions than answers. Otherwise, I will still be typing at midnight.

What might convince some of you more than anything else is these scientific tests that confirm what Nisargadatta said above. Any action (deed) comes before the person is even aware of it, and the egoic doership is appointed in hindsight:

Scientists had people perform actions and measured the build-up of three markers:

What does it mean?

On several different levels, from neurotransmitters through neuron firing rates to overall activity, the brain seems to "ramp up" before movements. This image depicts the readiness potential (RP), a ramping-up activity measured using EEG. The onset of the RP begins before the start of a conscious intention or urge to act. Some have argued that this indicates the brain unconsciously commits to a decision before consciousness awareness. Others have argued that this activity is due to random fluctuations in brain activity, which drive arbitrary, purposeless movements (emphasis by me)

One significant finding of modern studies is that a person's brain seems to commit to certain decisions before the person becomes aware of having made them. Researchers have found a delay of about half a second or more (discussed in sections below). […] These and other findings have led some scientists, like Patrick Haggard, to reject some definitions of "free will".

In other words, a decision is made about an action before we are aware of it. Then, in hindsight, we attribute the action to ourselves as if we made the decision. This brings us to the millennia-old wisdom repeated by sages in many different spiritual traditions: “Free will is an illusion.”

But it gets even better than that. Not only is free will an illusion, but scientists discovered that “the sense of I” might also be a mental illusion. Which, again, has been repeated by mystics throughout the ages.

However, we tend to believe it much more if it comes from science. Much neuroscience research has been done with a part of the brain called the Default Mode Network (DMN).

Our brain automatically brings together memory and thought and integrates both of these with our sense of self. Some scientists have said that the DMN is where the ‘self’ is located; it is the “me, myself, and I” network.

Researchers did brain scans on people under the influence of psychedelic drugs and on experienced meditators. They found that, in both cases, the DMN network was more or less disabled, and the subjects experienced states of ego dissolution, including profound life-changing mystical experiences. A summary of the link between DMN, the ego and psychedelics can be found here.

Spirituality could, therefore, be defined as “the absence of ego”. But, once again, advanced meditators knew that two thousand years ago.

So, if the “I” is simply a part of our brain called Default Mode Network that can be switched on or off, we may have to redefine our relationship with this “me, myself and I”. We also have to think about that part of ourselves that isn’t “me, myself and I”.

Did the people in the brain scan who had their sense of “I” taken away “disappear”? Obviously not; something was still there. Ego dissolution didn’t make them unconscious.

Finding and being this “something” beyond the ego is maybe our only essential spiritual task. Completely understanding determinism, the illusionary nature of “free will”, and, more importantly, allowing this understanding to shape our lives in experiential moment-to-moment conscious daily exercises can be one path leading to it.

It won’t happen overnight. It took me eight years, but I took it leisurely. But time and effort don’t really matter. The master explains: