Martin LeFevre: The Will Is Never Free

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Driving into Upper Park, the beauty of the escarpment sweeps away personal and political concerns as soon as it comes into view. And simply taking the half-mile walk to the overlook of the gorge spontaneously induces a meditative state.

For the first few minutes there is solitude for as far as the eye can see or the ear can hear, which is miles in every direction. Soon however, I hear the noises and see the activities of a group of young people playing at the bottom of the gorge. But the intermittent whooping and rock throwing doesn’t disrupt the sitting.

Observing without the observer (that is, without thought separating itself from itself and everything else), the mind/brain spontaneously becomes deeply quiet. The ‘I’ doesn’t do anything.

The stream roars up and envelops one, and the mind grows more deeply silent in the inclusive, passive, and goalless observation. Solitude has become the most rare and valuable thing on earth, all the more so in an age of meaningless online social networks. Very few dare to stand (or sit) alone.

This fact is driven home a couple days later, when, taking a sitting beside the creek in the park that runs through town, a man, his son, and big pug worked their way upstream just as a meditative state begins.

Absurdly, the large dog is wearing a florescent green life vest with a handle on top, which, even more absurdly, the man frequently uses to pull and prod the animal over the stones and against the current. When they get to the spot in front of me, where the creek narrows and the current ripples, the boy, who barely looks up, gets down on all fours, while the dog stops and stares.

“He’s just sitting there,” the man says to the dog. That says more about him than the man he thinks strange for “just sitting there” of course. I’m not the one pulling a recalcitrant, overweight dog in a green life vest up the creek, and talking to it like it’s human, I thought. But I just smile, and make a wry comment about the handle coming in handy.

It occurs to me that animals and young children sense a meditative state, but that fathers and mothers soon condition their boys and girls into obliviousness.

Meditation is a laser piercing through the material of content-consciousness, allowing the light of insight and intelligence to shine into and through one.

Thought is inherently separative, but the observer is the willful mechanism of separation in thought. When the observer is negated in inclusive, undivided, and lightning quick attention, one sees that thought is a single polluted river. But what’s observing if there is no observer?

The whole brain is observing, attending to its own movement (especially that dominant part called ‘me and my thoughts’) and including the movement of nature, others, and the world.

In the silence that ensues there is insight and renewal. Then, if one continues listening and is fortunate, there is something completely wordless, which can only be called sacred. That actuality has nothing to do with beliefs, religions, traditions, and all the rigmarole that goes with them. Those things block the awareness and reception of the sacred as certainly as dams block the flow of a river.

The whole idea of a ‘free will’ has always struck me as an oxymoron. And yet, we face choices all the time. So doesn’t that mean we have ‘free will?’

No, because the will is an expression of the ego, and what the ego chooses is always conditioned, never free. Socrates pointed out a long time ago that when one sees the right thing to do, there is no choice but to act in accordance with it.

We think we’re free because we can choose wrongly, but paradoxically, we’re only free when clarity gives one the feeling that there is no choice but to act intelligently. Life is a moment-to-moment matter. There are always choices, but the chooser is never free. One may not always come up to the mark, but at least one sees that there’s an unfixed mark that one meets or misses.

Though the will is never free, no matter how draconian our conditioning or dreadful our situation, ultimately we make ourselves what we are.

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher. martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net

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