Patterns of Spirituality

Is Our Life our Choice ?

In eastern moral thinking, a lot of beliefs revolve around the idea of life being a journey of free will, with no room for accidents in life. So, for example, if an aeroplane crashes and there are no survivors, then the people who died must have wanted to die. Those people had had a death wish and hence they had congregated by choice onto a flight which was doomed to crash.

This simplistic kind of thinking is caused by a lack of understanding of how the subconscious aspects of the mind work. Free will is emphasised because the opposite ideas, those of determinism and psychological confusion, are not understood. Teachers without this understanding can focus only on what the conscious mind does. So spiritual theories based on free will are inaccurate and can generate much confusion about the meaning and purpose of life.

In more subtle explanations, the teaching is that we attract what we are deeply feeling. Hence if we are always thinking negative, then we attract the negative situations into our life ; if we think positive, we attract the positive.

As in all moral issues, there is some truth in this idea, but the truth is not what the advocates believe it to be. My view is this, based on the few successes and many disasters in my own life. Consider an introvert, who has a sensitive and wary approach to life. When a negative situation happens to him, because he is already somewhat negatively inclined, the negative impact is maximised. Conversely, when a positive situation occurs, its degree of positivity is reduced by the degree of negativity already present in the introvert. So an introvert tends to get the maximum negativity out of a negative situation, and the minimum positivity out of a positive situation. The reverse happens to an extrovert - he gets the maximum positivity out of a positive situation and the minimum negativity out of a negative situation. You can see how this leads a simplistic thinker to believe that the introvert is simply attracting the negative to him and repelling the positive.

The simplistic thinker believes that the introvert is acting from choice, because the thinker has no alternative theory to explain the introvert's actions. In my way of thinking, the introvert has a lot of determinism acting on him, and hence it is not his conscious mind that restricts him but his subconscious mind (since determinism resides in the subconscious mind). Hence in situations where determinism is affecting him, he cannot be said to be acting from choice. The extrovert, on the other hand, has little determinism acting on him, and so his subconscious mind is not having any major influence on him. So it is basically true to say that the extrovert acts from choice. What is lacking in standard moral theory, whether eastern or western, is knowledge of how determinism limits or prevents personal choice.

I sum up my belief in this way.
Life is a journey in which we have to respond to opportunities. Our childhood joys and sorrows shape our character, together with what we bring from previous lives. Then our character shapes the way that we respond to opportunities. This shaping creates determinism. In situations where determinism is not functioning, we have choice. But in situations where determinism is being influential, our choices can be restricted in varying degrees. And so life becomes a journey between the opposing limits of free will and determinism.

Overall, whether life is experienced as our choice or as fate depends on the degree of determinism that affects us.

I give an example on how free will and determinism affect moral issues.
On the issue of cancer, my belief is that the basic psychological root of cancer is self-hatred, mainly in the form of guilt (mode of self-hatred). Now a person who suffers from a lot of guilt is being heavily influenced by his subconscious mind, in that the subconscious mind is keeping the guilt fairly active in the background of the person's daily life. Over a long period of time, the regular presence of self-hatred in the subconscious mind begins to affect the physical body and so the body begins to destroy itself (the cancer is a psycho-somatic symbol of the self-hatred ). The body develops a cancer in whatever is the weakest part of the physical body. It is correct to say that the perpetual guilt creates the cancer, but morally incorrect to say that it was done by choice. Morality is exercised in the conscious mind of the person, whereas the cause of the cancer resides in the subconscious mind. Hence the person is not morally responsible for the cancer.

Copyright © 2002 Ian Heath
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