Yoga gives a far more penetrating understanding of the fractious idea of free will. To explain free will in the Yogic model, we will have take another look at our psycho-mental complex.
We know samskaras are latent impressions from our previous experiences. They manifest as Vasanas (tendencies) and these tendencies are largely subconscious. You do not really understand the source or reason for your tendencies. The stronger Vasanas convert to Vrittis or the fluctuations of your psyche-mind. Note, fluctuations of, not fluctuations in your psyche-mind. The truth is that there should be no fluctuations or Vrittis at all, in an ideal state. A state where you will be truly happy with perfect free-will. So these fluctuations make up your conscious cognitions. Your world views, conceptualizations, thoughts, ideas, desires, preferences and revulsions. Naturally, our cognitive frameworks can vary as much as the number of people on this planet!
In your interaction with the outside world, you seek experiences aligned with your cognitions i.e. you want experiences to fulfil your desires and avoid experiences which repel you. When you interact with the outside world this way, your experiences leave subtle impressions which are both positive and negative. You might have loved a certain experience and hence its subtle impression will have a positive emotional charge. You will want to experience it again. On the contrary, you may have abhorred another experience and its subtle impression will carry a negative emotional charge. You want to avoid it in the future. These subtle impressions with their emotional charges vary in strength too. For example, we may have loved one experience more that another, or disliked an experience more than another. As a result we create strong and weak impressions, both of the positive and negative type.
Now these newly created samskaras add to the bank-vault as old ones are exhausting themselves through experiences. An active samskara urges to animate and consummate itself through an equivalent experience; that is its nature. Just as potential energy coverts to the kinetic. In this way samskaras are the fuel for the cycle of human life; they convert to experiences which in turn create new impressions, new samskaras. The cycle goes on until you become conscious of it and put a break in it, throw a spanner in the works. Hack it so that it breaks. Yoga is that hack.
So why is the world required, why is it there? Can’t you tell? We need our world of phenomena so that these samskaras can run their course and exhaust themselves. Rolls of film will be no good lying around, until there is a screen to project a movie on, right?
So when our samskaras compel us, our impulses guide us, we seek aligned experiences. One type of samskara tends to create a new similar type of samskara. Remember the four types of samskaras; active, dormant, weak and intercepted? Usually when you are blind to this cycle, one type of samskaras dominate while other types lay dormant and weak. This creates a closed, endless feedback loop which is self propagating and self sustaining. Our psycho mental complex is forever trapped in this loop, and we essentially have no free will at all.
There would have been no problem with the lack of free will if our experiences were all positive and beneficial. As long as your experiences are good why bother if you have any free will or not. No? Sadly, life is rife with dissatisfaction, frustration, pain and agony. Our experiences cause depression, confusion and countless such feelings. Another problem with positive experiences is that they are transient. A beautiful romance ends, youth and beauty fade away, money can only buy so much happiness, separation follows all such pleasurable union. Eventually all positive experiences create negative impressions of loss and disappointment because they are not permanent.
So you see why there is no free will in the closed, feedback loop of our psyche-minds? Our impulses fuel our experiences and their impressions form similar impulses. Where are you choosing when your impressions and tendencies become desires which you hanker after? Any feeling of ‘choosing’ is illusory because your impressions are playing you like a puppet, hidden deep within you. Are you choosing differently from your impressions? Hardly. You are at the mercy of this closed loop, a slave of your psycho-mental complex. You think you are free, but we have seen even this ‘you’, your identity is a deceptive illusion.
In this sense then the Yogic model agrees with the neuroscientists and determinists when they claim we have no free will. But only until we decide to break out of this cyclical samskaric loop. When we decide to not be under its fettering control. Only a hack can break a feedback loop, one which can steal energy out of the system. It is a closed loop where potential energy (subtle impressions) converts to kinetic energy (experiences in the outer world) which converts back into potential energy again (new impressions from new experiences). Naturally, this closed loop will conserve its energy. Energy is only changing form, from the subtle to the gross and back. Thus, only a hack which drains energy from the system can break it. In Yoga that hack is buddhi. True intellect. True discretion.
Buddhi activates our free will, it activates the software of Yoga in the system. Until then it was lying dormant from lack of use, running slowly in the background. Now this fast-growing organism take charge of your life!
So the Yogic truth is that Your free-will does not function ordinarily, you must activate it.
The idea is to burn samskaras in a way other than through experience so that they do not leave behind more residues. Yoga is the hack that kills off these samskaras, these impressions right at the root. We have already looked at the troika of the yogic technology, its three principles of cognitive renovation, meditation and emotional processing. We already understand how each principle improves the actions and effects of the others in killing our samskaric baggage. Yoga is the software that burns away all samskaras consciously, in a structured, effective manner. The first taste of free-will comes only when you exercise your choice to break away from this pernicious loop operating in your psycho-mental complex. When you realise you can de-condition your samskaric cycle. Real free will, true choosing comes into the picture only after Yoga has established itself in your system.
I have a rudimentary, basic example of how buddhi becomes active in your system. Have you had that rare, earth-shattering, life-changing incident which completely altered the course of your life? Where you dropped the old in an instant to began afresh, from scratch. A terminal illness, a tragic accident or loss of livelihood. Although these experiences felt cruel and unfortunate, they propelled you out of your old ways to a new way of being. Onto a new level of existence. Different people interpret a terminal illness in different ways, don’t they? It makes one person bitter, angry and fearful while it makes another humbler, more peaceful and gives them a new zest for life. It pushes one to create negative impressions about life, hurls them into depression and isolation. For another, it slows down the fast pace of their life, brings them closer to family and makes them more grateful. It pushes them to form more positive impressions of life. Although these two individuals face the same situation, their responses and reactions are totally different. For one, buddhi has been activated. They have had their first taste of free-will.
Not that only a tragedy can and will activate your free will, but unfortunately, we tend to remain in a slumber of existential inertia, unable to imagine a better way of living and being. We don’t wake up from the feeble beeping of our ‘alarm’, but only when the roof comes down tumbling and crashing, breaking down our home. Suffering has a very beneficial role in evolution, remember that.
However, the highest, most pertinent use of free will or ‘buddhi’ comes in only when we consciously choose samskaras favourable for liberation from human suffering. When we embark deliberately, purposely on the Yogic path. When we are so dissatisfied with the world of phenomena that it is unbearable. When we start to desire deeply for true, lasting happiness. Not that we give up the world, but rather we want to give up the dangerous loop running in our psyche-mind which feeds off the world. We urge to give up, unfetter, disentangle ourselves from that imprisoning samskaric loop. We truly exercise our free wills, we truly activate it when we urge to get off it.
Real free will, true choosing comes into the picture only after Yoga has established itself in your system. When Yoga matures, your desires rush towards fulfilment without delay. When you are a consummate yogi, your will is so strong and clear that all your desires become real spontaneously. The thing is that these are very specific desires for service. You now want nothing but to serve the world in the highest manner possible; to help activate Yoga in everyone’s systems. To push as many as possible on the Yogic path so they can all become supra-humans, achieve ultra-knowing and feel ultra-bliss. So that Yoga can emancipate each one from suffering forever. When you are such a consummate Yogi yourself, this is your sweetest desire, and it consumes you. You ache to tell each and everyone about this highest human potential, having known it first-hand and having tasted its bliss. You urge to scream from rooftops about this ultimate goal, this highest purpose of each man’s life. To educate them of our evolutionary imperative, our specie imperative. When you have such desires in your system, your will moves mountains. You are in complete control, free-will is your slave. That is because Yogic consummation is our collective destiny and you are taking it forward. Nothing can be more benevolent, more worthy of fulfillment that to lead humanity to its highest destiny.
In a fleeting mention, Mahabharata describes a Golden age where most people had consummated Yoga in their systems:
“Men neither bought nor sold; there were no poor and no rich; there was no need to labor 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”
Until you are such a consummate Yogi, all you can have is partial free-will. Sadly, when you are not aware of this most important phenomena and program of human life, you have no free- will at all. You are the slave, completely out of your control.