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Fate vs. Free Will

Posted February 24th, 2009 by Corey deVos in The Daily VOS

Over at the Integral Life facebook page, someone asked an interesting question:

I've been thinking about the idea of free will recently, mostly about how the enlightenment and its mechanistic metaphor for reality has destroyed the concept of free will.

What is the integral response to free will? Does it exist? How? Or is it a yes no question?

 

It's a question i've long been fascinated with, to the point of thinking the "will" needs to be a "fifth element" of Integral Life Practice: Body, Mind, Spirit, Shadow, and WILL.

Still, it's a complete and utter mystery to me, which prompted a vague poetic response, pasted below.  I'd love to know what you all think!

 

Hey Ron--wonderful question, and i think it is one of the great unaddressed mysteries of the human condition, right alongside the question "what makes people transform?" I am not sure we will ever know the answer, at least in our lifetimes. But as i've spent a lot of time trying to wrap my mind around the concept of synchronicity (where questions of fate vs. free will are unavoidable) i have come to a vaguely poetic way to look at it, which for whatever reason has helped settle my mind a little bit.

In a way, fate/free will seem to be two sides of the same paradoxical coin--a coin that will invariably make you crazy if you try to look at both sides at the same time. But in a sense, it seems like "free will" is what life looks like when viewed from the perspective of the past looking into the future, and we see all the choices that have yet to be made, all the forks in the road that have yet to be taken. Fate, on the other hand, is what life looks like when viewed from the perspective of the future looking into the past--did i really make all those choices, or did they somehow make me?--and we gain a clear understanding that we are standing exactly where we are right now ONLY because of previous choices, choices that often feel like they were decided long before we were ever born.

We are living a script that was somehow already written way before the Big Bang--a script that is simultaneously being written by each of us at every moment. Both seem fundamentally true, though both are incomplete, even when taken together.

 

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prerogative and imperative

Posted February 24th, 2009 by Kerry Dugan

Corey,

Reading your response to Ron I recalled a related line of thought sparked by one of Charles' comments in Fr.Isaac's thread about belief.

The Three Pillars of Zen (Great Faith, Great Doubt, and Great Determination) seem to bear a specific relation to the Big Three of the quadrants. It occurred to me that Zen practice either progresses or stagnates by where in the Big Three the student holds The Three Pillars.

Great Faith, in Zen, works best in Zone One. Great Doubt works best when directed toward the LL cultural conditionings, language, contexts, patterns. The rubber-hits-the-road for Great Determination, or Will, in the exterior. The way practice really comes together and functions how it was designed to is by maintaning that placement or location of the Pillars.

By the same token, practice falls apart and doesn't work by great faith being put in the cultural, great doubt in the external, and great determination in 1p interiority.

Likewise, as the self system grows, I think we see changes in the definitions and views of Fate (variations on manifest involution?), and Free Will (interpretations of Eros?).

For someone whose got, for instance, Servant Leadership at Kosmoscentric going on, fate and free will are likely a whole other ball game than they are at earlier stages. I'm thinking that with increased depth greater spans become our objects of care. And how the set of concerns that qualify as being subject to volition can change as we grow. Choice itself gains new meanings. I'd imagine that for a servant leader at kosmoscentric there's a great deal more overlap between prerogative and imperitive than there is for most of us. It's easy to see how, early in life, prerogative and imperitive are generally experienced as very far apart in our motivations and decision criteria. These seem to merge more and more as we grow.

all for now,

Kerry

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Present is the starting point- keep it simple

Posted February 25th, 2009 by janine rickard

 Corey, Nice thinking. 

You said:

"But in a sense, it seems like "free will" is what life looks like when viewed from the perspective of the past looking into the future, and we see all the choices that have yet to be made, all the forks in the road that have yet to be taken. Fate, on the other hand, is what life looks like when viewed from the perspective of the future looking into the past--did i really make all those choices, or did they somehow make me?--and we gain a clear understanding that we are standing exactly where we are right now ONLY because of previous choices, choices that often feel like they were decided long before we were ever born."

I think the simplest way to talk about this is to keep the entire narrative in the stream-of-consciousness mode and say-

free will is what life looks like when viewed from the present looking into the future...gee all those choices ahead (subjective view)

fate is what life looks like when viewed from the present looking into the past...wow all those choices made me thus (objective view)

 

In other words, is there a good reason to complicate your formulation with the mental gymnastics demanded by imagining your future self looking back into the past in order to undesrstand the concept of Fate (and the inverse procedure for free will). I can't quite see it.

Cheers,

Janine