The Philosophy of Everything 2e — Part II, Ch 8: Free Will or Determinism?

You can plant the tree. You cannot make it grow. Most of the misery I have seen, my own included, comes from mixing up those two.

In brief: In this chapter I take on one of the oldest questions about our lives: whether we choose anything at all, or only feel as though we do. I answer it the way I finally answered it for myself, with a tree that you can plant but cannot order to grow. It matters because so much suffering comes from pushing on what will not move, and because the part that is truly ours is smaller than we wish and larger than we fear.

By the end of the last chapter I had a universe made out of energy, moving under laws that nobody wrote and nobody runs. From a distance that was a clean thing to look at. Up close it turned cold. If I was made of that same energy, obeying those same laws, then was the life I thought I was choosing already settled before I arrived: every choice I was proud of, every mistake I still wince at, only the energy doing what the laws required of it? Was I steering anything at all, or only feeling as though I was, the way a passenger keeps reaching for a brake that is not on his side of the car?

The picture that finally settled this for me is a tree. You can plant a tree anywhere you like, on any morning you choose. You decide where, when, which seed, how deep. What you cannot do is reach inside the seed and order it to grow. You can water it, shade it, fence it off from the goats, dig better soil in around the roots. The growing itself is not yours to command. The rain may not come. A disease you have never heard of may take it in a week. The planting is in your hands. The growing is not.

I lost a long stretch of my life not seeing this. I stood over things that were never going to grow, no matter what I did. I ordered them to grow, and I broke myself a little more each season they refused. Most of the misery I have watched, in my own life and in the lives around me, is some version of that one mistake. It is a person throwing all their strength at the growing, which was never theirs to command, and barely tending the planting, which was.

There are two ways to get this wrong, and the tree holds both of them off. One is to decide the whole thing was settled before you arrived: the seed will do what the seed will do, so why trouble yourself planting at all. In its strongest form, this is what people mean by determinism. That is the mistake of treating a life like a film. A film is finished and shot long before you sit down to watch it, so that you can love it or hate it but never change a single frame. The other mistake is to decide that with enough will you can force any seed into any tree you please. Then you break yourself against the ones that will not turn. A life is neither.

It is closer to a live broadcast of a game that is still being played. It is the kind of broadcast where you choose where to point the camera, which language the subtitles come up in, where to look and when. You do not get to decide who wins. You do decide, all the way through, where you stand and what you do with what you are seeing. You change the direction of your own life. You correct your route towards what is true when you notice you have wandered off it. You make the small decisions that improve your odds of getting through, and the larger ones that decide what getting through is even for. Reality keeps throwing things at you that back you into corners. And most of the time, given enough time, you find your way out of them anyway. You are not the author of the match. You are not a passenger either. You are in it, with a set of controls that are smaller than you wish and larger than you fear.

So what gets in the way of even the planting, the part that genuinely is ours?

The same three things I have been pointing at since I started looking at the inside of a head. The tendencies you were born with. The conditioning that was poured into you by everyone who reached you first. And the consequences of what you have already done. That is your past karma. It presses on your present thoughts, your words, your actions, and it decides more of them than you would care to admit.

Together these are the mental modifications, and they are the actual chains. Not fate. Not a plan drawn up above. Just the old machinery, running you from underneath while you believe you are choosing freely. The freer you get from these, the more of your will actually reaches the world. By freer I mean the more of them you have noticed, questioned, and loosened. A person buried in unexamined conditioning has almost no will left over to plant anything. It is all being spent, without their knowing, on running the old programs. A person who has done some of the work has more to spend. This is most of what freedom turns out to be, looked at up close. Not the absence of all limits. The loosening of the ones that were put in you before you could refuse them.

Here is the part I most want you to hold on to, because it is where the suffering actually lives.

The moment you set yourself to control something that cannot be controlled, you have signed up to be miserable. Not that you might be. That you will be. The thing will not bend, and you will go on pushing, and the pushing wears a groove in you that takes years to fill back in. The work is to notice, as early as you can, when you have walked up against one of these things. It might be an outcome, another person's mind, the weather, the past, the growing of the tree. Then the work is to take your weight off it. Not to give up. To go around.

If the rain does not come this year, you do not stand in the dry field cursing the sky. You find another way to bring water to the roots. Every real problem has a way around it, and the way around is almost never the wall you were beating on. The whole skill is in telling the wall from the door. Most of us spend years beating on walls. We do it because beating on a wall at least feels like effort, like trying, while the quiet work of finding the door does not.

And sometimes you do everything right and the tree dies anyway. You planted well, you watered, you fenced it, you watched it every morning, and one day it is brown and gone. When that happens, two responses are open to you, and only one of them is any use. You can blame yourself, or blame the world, and carry the dead tree around inside you for the rest of your life. Or you can do the harder, plainer thing, which is to go and find out why it died. Study the failure the way you would study anything you genuinely wanted to understand. Was it the soil? The water? Something already wrong in the seed before it ever went into the ground?

Often, when you look honestly, you find the responsibility was never wholly yours. The odds were simply against that tree, in that ground, in that year, whatever you did. Knowing that is not an excuse to stop. It is information. You take what you learned, plant another in better ground, and put in the same effort or more. The people who become good at living are not the ones whose trees never die. They are the ones who stopped reading the death of a tree as a verdict on themselves, a judgement passed on who they are. They started reading it, instead, as a thing to learn from.

This is where the eight laws come back in, the ones I walked through earlier.

People hear "laws that never change" and assume the worst. They assume that if the laws are fixed, then everything is fixed, and we are all just energy rolling down a slope that was carved before any of us arrived. It does not work that way. The laws are fixed. The conditions they act on are not. Energy takes whatever form the prevailing conditions allow, under the laws. (By prevailing conditions I mean the ones that happen to be present at that moment.) The conditions keep shifting, which means the causes and their effects keep shifting with them.

A fixed set of laws does not hand you a fixed life. It hands you a life in which, if you study the conditions closely enough, you can change some of them. And by changing them, you change what the laws then produce. The laws are not your jailer. They are closer to the rules of a game you can learn well enough to win a little more often than you lose. Not always, not entirely, but to a real and surprising degree.

I know how easily a set of conditions can wear the mask of a fate, because I have mistaken one for the other more than once. Take debt. I mean real debt, the kind that wakes you at three in the morning. It feels handed down. It feels like something the universe has quietly decided about you. It is not. It is a set of conditions, and conditions can be studied. So you sit down and go through the whole year, honestly, and you find out what actually happened.

Say you discover you spent more than you earned, month after month. And say the spending began when a cousin was diagnosed with cancer and you decided, without hesitating, to help pay for the treatment. That was not a foolish decision. It may have been the finest thing you did all year. But your income did not rise to meet it, and you did not bring the rest of your spending down to meet it either. So the gap widened, quietly, until the savings were gone.

Now you know the shape of the thing. And once you know the shape, you can act on it. You can cut what can be cut. You can find work that pays more. You can do both at once. The debt that felt like a sentence passed on you turns out to be a set of conditions you can lean on and bend. That is what it looks like to use your will against what looked like pure determinism. You do it not by wishing it away, but by understanding the conditions well enough to move the ones that will move.

This is the one thing our species has that the rest of creation does not.

A stone cannot study its conditions. A tree cannot decide to grow where the light is better. An animal does a little of this and not much. We can do a great deal of it, because we have the thing I keep coming back to. That thing is consciousness, the part of us that can stand slightly outside the machinery and watch it run. With it, we limit determinism. Not abolish it. Limit it. The way you live, inside the conditions you were handed, is to a real and surprising degree your own choice.

Whether your life turns into something close to a heaven or something close to a hell is not handed down to you from anyone above. It is, for the most part, the long result of what you chose, day after day, inside the life you were actually given. That is a heavier thing to carry than the other story, the one where someone else keeps the ledger (the book of accounts) and settles it later. It is also the only one that holds up under a careful look. And it is the only one that leaves the controls where they belong, which is in your own hands.

Two things follow from this, and they pull in opposite directions, and a grown-up has to be able to hold both. The first is that consequences are real, the rules a society lives by are real, and having been badly conditioned is not a permission slip. A person whose past made them cruel still has to answer for the cruelty. The law still applies to them, and the rest of us still have to be kept safe from what they do. The second softens that without erasing it. Think about where a person's present actions come from. They grow out of conditions the person mostly did not choose: the tendencies they were born with, the world that shaped them, the karma they carry. Once you truly grasp this, it becomes possible to hold them responsible and to feel for them at the same time. The cruel man is accountable, and he is also a person whose tree grew crooked in bad ground. Both are true at once.

The deepest place this lands is in how we raise children. If present actions grow out of conditions, then the conditions we build around a child are the most powerful instrument any of us will ever hold. Picture a child taught early to look at their own mind, to question what they have been handed, to live with attention rather than on autopilot. That child does not grow up needing to be policed into decency. Their will is freer from the start, because less of the bad conditioning was ever allowed to set. This is the whole case for building a society on education rather than on punishment. You free the will at the root, before the worst of it hardens, and you raise people who become better instead of people who have to be watched.

Living, then, is not walking a single line that was drawn for you before you were born. It is the crossing and re-crossing of all those threads of cause and effect. They are the causal planes I spoke about earlier, now seen from the inside. They branch and rejoin, none of the branches certain, all of them real, with you standing at every fork choosing the next step. You cannot see far down any branch. You can only choose the next step with whatever clarity you have managed to gather, and then the next one, and the next. As long as you are moving in harmony with the way reality actually works (inside the real conditions, not the ones you wish were true), you have very little to be afraid of.

Sometimes you use your will well, within the limits of what is actually there, and in a way that does not buy your gain with someone else's loss. When you do, it strengthens your life and the lives nearest you. When you use it against reality, by pushing on walls, taking what cannot be taken, gripping what cannot be held, you manufacture the very troubles that then come back for you. The will is powerful. It is not magic. It works with reality, or it breaks against it.

I will not pretend the freedom is larger than it is. There is no such thing as absolute free will, the kind where you stand outside every condition and choose with nothing at all pushing on you. Nothing in the universe has that. The stone has none. The tree has none. The animal has almost none. What is unusual about us is not that we are free. It is that we can become freer, on purpose, by patient work, in a way nothing else on this planet can. That is the whole of the offer. Not freedom handed to you finished. The capacity to free yourself, a little more each year, by loosening the chains you can actually reach.

So this is the work, and it does not end.

Every moment you are alive, the old machinery holds out its defaults to you: the tendency you were born with, the conditioning you soaked up, the karma you carry. And every moment you have a small chance to notice the offer and choose something else. Most of the time you will take the default without seeing it happen. Some of the time you will catch it. The catching gets easier with practice, the way everything does, until one day a thing that used to run you cannot any more.

A whole life, looked at this way, is one long slow project of getting your own will back from the things that were holding it. It means learning to be the master of your own thoughts and words and actions instead of their servant. It goes on until more and more of what you do is genuinely chosen, in the present, by the part of you that is actually awake. You will never finish. There is no finished. But there is freer, and freer is enough, and freer is available to you in the very next thing you choose to do.

The trees out in the field will live or die on conditions you only ever partly hold. The one planting that is wholly yours, from the first morning to the last, is the slow planting of your own freer will. And that tree, tended a little every day, does grow.

There was one question left, after all of this, and it was the one the whole book had been quietly circling from the start. I had taken the controls of my life back from everyone I had handed them to: my parents, my teachers, the people who spoke for God in my house. What I had not yet done was turn towards the one I was supposed to have been handing them to all along. If no one was writing my life, if the controls were genuinely mine, then what had God been, in all those years I believed someone above was holding them? That was the thing I had spent most of a lifetime postponing. It was time, at last, to walk up to it.

Words to Keep

• the planting and the growing: The planting is the part of any effort that is truly in your hands. The growing is the outcome, which never is.

• determinism: the view that every choice was settled before you arrived, so that a life is a finished film you can only watch.

• karma: as this book uses it, the consequences of what you have already done, pressing on your present thoughts, words and actions.

• mental modifications: the three real chains on the will: the tendencies you were born with, your conditioning, and your past karma.

• the wall and the door: The wall is whatever will not bend to you. The door is the way around it. The whole skill is telling them apart.

• conditions: the shifting circumstances that the fixed laws act on. Unlike the laws, many of them can be studied and changed.

• consciousness: the part of us that can stand slightly outside the machinery and watch it run, and so limit determinism.

• causal planes: the threads of cause and effect that cross, branch and rejoin through a life, with you choosing at every fork.

• absolute free will: choosing from outside every condition, with nothing at all pushing on you. Nothing in the universe has it.

• freer will: not freedom handed to you finished, but the slow, lifelong work of freeing yourself a little more each year.

Sources and Further Reading

• This chapter comes from my own life and observation, not from any one book.

• The idea of karma, as it runs through Indian thought, is the one inherited idea this chapter leans on. I use it plainly, to mean the consequences of what you have already done.

• The question of free will and determinism is one of the oldest in philosophy, in India and in the West. I have not argued here from any one school's books.