Freedom in God or slavery to the ego

It took a long time for me to see this. Just with so many things in life, I was blind to what was in front of me. But from what I can tell, there are really just these two options.

What I’ve come to realise is that as far as I’m concerned, I live in a very confused state. And I bet it’s the same for other people as well. My blog is probably a good place to start if you want to understand this confusion better, as it is basically what I’m analysing in my blog posts.

I have several wills inside of me compete with each other. Sometimes I decide on one thing. But then I talk myself into justifying the opposite. Not because of some new information. But because I argue myself into believing something else. Most of the time something that is in line with my lower nature and more instant gratification. And then I realise that I suffer because of it - or make other people suffer sometimes - and so I’m back to my original intent.

And even though I know this, I keep falling into the same trap over and over again.

I think that I’ve unpacked something of what is going on here. I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t know all the technical details when it comes to this. And what I’ve understood so far, can be summed up in a couple of sentences. We have our unconscious, that many psychologists, mainly psycho-analytics and the likes, governs most of our behaviour. In it, There we have a mess, consisting of our neurosises, our unconscious, repressed urges, wants, wishes, needs and desires. Then we have a neurological cocktail of neurological-transmitters in our heads and bodies, that call us to do certain actions. 

Then we have the details of the situation itself. Did you know that whether a criminal gets pardoned or not, is heavily influenced by what time and day of the week it is? Or that our answers to questions concerning well-being or the belief about someone’s character, is heavily influenced by the words and the order of the words in the questionnaire? What other unknown factors influence us in our lives? Could, for example, a background noise, that we have shut out from our consciousness, cause us to make a decision that we otherwise would not have made?

Furthermore, we have our habits. These habits are, on a neurological level, connections between different neurons, whose strength depends on several factors, mainly how long we have engaged in the habit, what emotions and memories that are connected to it, how much we focus on the habit mentally and how much importance we attach to it. 

I might have missed some important factor, but you get the idea. If we have formed the habit of reacting a certain way in a certain situation, you are will likely react in that way, unless some other factor compels you to do otherwise. One such factor, the most important one I would say, is becoming conscious that we are reacting in a habitual way. 

But even if we do realise that we are acting in a habitual way, we still have all of the other factors to consider. To try to be aware of even a fraction of all of these factors, is enough to go insane. Let alone to try and actually figure out what we are supposed to do with them. 

This could lead to the, in my view, pessimistic idea of determinism, which basically denies free will, even if there are many different philosophies about it, that view the free will, the lack and degree of lack thereof, in different ways. I will discuss the philosophy a bit more in future posts, but I will not talk that much about the specific kinds of determinisms that exist. What I find important, is what can actually be said of free will contra determinism and how this can be related to our spiritual lives.

Knowing that there is a God, that this God is personal, and that some sort of spiritual reality and at least strongly believing that there is a divine order to things, ordained by God, I can basically find only two appropriate responses to this. The first is to try to get a closer relationship with this God. And the other is to find out what this divine order is and try to live by it. These two choices can be made freely. If we trust that God is Almighty, and that he wants what’s best for us, we should also be able to make these choices knowing that they well produce the best results both for ourselves and others. 

In return, we will receive a compass. Not one that we will be able to always follow, or even read correctly. But it is something tangible. And if we have faith in God and his will, we can trust that it does its best to guide us right, while at the same time respecting our free will. And with time, we might get better at following it.