Choice and free will, as we understand in modern society, require us to make rational choices guided by some basic rules of morality and ethics. In the Yogic paradigm, this is a poor oversimplification of truth. First, because no action is wrong or right per se and the motivation for choosing is either evolution or devolution. Whether or not you are aware of it, you will evolve up or devolve down the Yogic track which runs in the background of your life. Second, we are hardly rational people. That is a just a self-righteous delusion. The loop of our samskaric psyche-minds is playing us like dumb puppets. We have no free will till we notice this puppeteer. This real master behind the curtains; this pernicious samskaric cycle.
‘You must not do this and do that’ and such dictates as the ‘Ten commandments’ are just unhealthy devaluations of truth. At any instance you have two choices; you can either chose Yogic devolution or Yogic evolution. The yardstick for morality and choice is only one; your specie evolution. The point of reference is just one: your Yogic evolution.
We can break down the above graph into its components like this:
X is the current identity structure of an individual
Free will is a binary choice system. It is the choice between an evolved response or a devolved one.
Choice A moves identity structure X to identity structure X-
Choice A’ moves identity structure X to X+
Choice B moves identity structure X- to X- –
The trajectory of choices A, B onwards to dissolution of the identity complex occurs in the unfolding of the yogic process.
When you activate your yogic program and it plays, your identity structure begins to change, from X+ to X to X- to X – – and beyond. The choices you make lead you away from extroversion, out of your fears. Toward introversion and transmuted desires. Free will, as we have understood before, becomes active only when the Yogic process kicks in, only when you realize the need to break away from the unmanned, uncontrolled cycle of your psyche-mind feedback loop.
When you make the choice A’, you feel yourself making it, but you are not really. You are under the stupefying effect of your inadvertent psyche-mind, i.e. you are on auto-pilot. Your motivation for this choice is a fear. It is a response to a threat, so you act to protect or fortify your identity. So that the world accepts you more, loves you more. You have no real free will in this case. Such a choice is hardly a choice even if it were to appear so. The move from identity structure X to X+ is in essence a step towards strengthening, fortifying your identity.
When you make the choices A, and subsequently B, you must have lost some fears from your psyche-mind. These choices must have coincided with a desire for introversion This is the true realm of free-will.
As the Yogic process urges towards its consummation, towards it peak, the degree of this true free will increases. While earlier you were hapless and servile before the master of your samskaric loop, now, after the activation of buddhi, you are in far greater control. In fact, as you urge for the Yogic process, it yields. Like a pre- programmed software, it runs its course towards consummation, toward the peak. As does life! Life yields right into your hands as the yogic process culminates inside you. You become its master, you mould it in shapes you wish to. Your desires rush towards manifestation, your subtle thoughts convert to gross things almost instantaneously. Of course, your desires are barely the ones you had before; the desire for things, phenomena and people to make life comfortable. Not at all, none of that. You desire to serve now, to tell the truth of life, the truth of Yoga. You desire to share its treasures, you desire to release everyone else from their delusions! This desire, it engulfs you, possesses you like a shivery fever, you burn to share this truth.
As you burn with this superlative desire, to emancipate others as you have been, the world bends at your will. Your erstwhile desires rush towards fulfillment without your conscious effort. Such is the degree of your free -will now that the universe bends down like an army of liveried servants at your beck and call. To bring all you had ever demanded and more. While the desire to emancipate others consumes you, small dreams which once motivated you come together in a grand, sparkling manifestation.
The Vedas say that all people realized their desires spontaneously in the Golden age. People of this time, the consummate yogis, they merely thought, they dreamt, and it all took shape. Such was the degree and power of their free will.
“Men neither bought nor sold; there were no poor and no rich; there was no need to labour because all that men required was obtained by the power of will; the chief virtue was the abandonment of all worldly desires. The Krita Yuga was without disease; there was no lessening with the years; there was no hatred or vanity, or evil thought whatsoever; no sorrow, no fear. All mankind could attain to supreme blessedness.”
Even though you might brush off this idea of a golden age as anecdotal, the truth of Yoga will remain. Yogic technology is the only way to gain any free-will, or in fact anything worthwhile at all.