Is There A Free Will?
“You can’t will what you want.”
(Schopenhauer)
The sentence above looks weird at first, doesn’t it? The great question is: Does the subconscious control our life? The subconscious is programmed through our parents, family, teachers, experiences, and our suppressed feelings. We act and decide upon our belief system what is programmed into our subconscious. In the first two years, we are mainly programmed through traumas and this is up to seventy percent of our belief system.
Within nine years, ninety percent of our belief system is programmed after we decide and act on it. Our mind/consciousness always finds a logical reason of why we decide or act, and the subconscious has already made the decision. If we look at politicians, they always find a logical reason why a decision is considered right or wrong, even if it is nonsense.
For Schopenhauer, free will doesn’t exist. We can’t choose our birth, our parents, or even the environment in which we were born in. Afterward, as a baby, we totally depend on our parents, and they programmed us. We had no choice. This looks like brainwashing. After the UN (United Nations), all people were born in freedom. When we were born we had no freedom to choose our parents or our environment, otherwise maybe we would have chosen lovely, rich parents. As a baby, we can’t even choose the language we want to speak.
“We only have the choice to go with our mind inside or outside.”
(Sri Aurobindo)
It makes sense to always watch our own feelings and thoughts. If we watch our feelings and thoughts, after some time we accept our feelings and thoughts as they are, then we relax and our feelings and thoughts are becoming better. In addition, there is the intuition, inner voice, divine voice, God etc., or whatever likes to guide us. If we are not aware of it, we can’t discriminate between our normal thoughts and our intuition. We have to learn to recognize this intuition/inner voice from the other thoughts in order to get guided from our intuition. If we choose to decide through our intuition we usually decide much better.