Inzicht Magazine, in the Netherlands, recently invited me to write an article for them. The article titled, The Last Domino to Fall, was in the May edition. If you are fluent in Dutch, you can read it there. If not, I am posting the English version. It is a bit longer than my normal pieces, but worth the read. I think it is the best essay I’ve written on Free Will (free agency, self-determination, choice, control).

The Last Domino To Fall

I’ve been called a troublemaker and more than a bit crazy, so I trust this piece on autonomy won’t spoil my hard-earned reputation. It’s guaranteed to cause a little mischief. Such talk always does.

Why, having a blank page on which to write and an audience of spiritual adepts, would I choose to write about autonomy? It’s simple really. The idea of personal power is the last domino to fall. Even once we suspect it doesn’t exist, we continue to cling to it like a dog with a juicy bone.

I’m lucky, or should I say cursed? Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference. I have never fully embraced the idea that I have autonomy, even though many people accept it without question. For successful people, the certainty of personal agency is easy to understand. It’s more instinctive to take credit than blame, although the arrogance that often accompanies it can be blinding.

Self-blame, at its extreme, is a little trickier. It is hidden under layers of regret and guilt, beneath stories of what should have happened, until it sinks into the abyss of hopelessness. That one comes with its own tonic for the pain – deadening.

Those of us in the middle, not entirely successful, nor entirely failures, encounter a different adventure. We bounce like yo-yos between autonomy and fate, from willful ignorance to enlightened hopefulness, trying to figure it out, unwilling to pick a side, never quite landing anywhere.

I know that territory well.

Dangling between the obvious, ‘Of course I have it’, and the felt sense that free agency is totally bogus, the search for a definitive answer was my constant companion. Inhabiting no man’s land, untethered in the war of words, the war of worlds, I discovered that it wasn’t all that bad to be stateless.

Live in uncertainty long enough and it becomes cathartic. Not staking a claim fosters a breeding ground for unanswerable questions. What if there isn’t a right side? What if the answer is no answer? My nomadic mind easily entertained insane ideas. My favorite exploration: What if it is not just either or, but both and neither too?

I could eloquently argue for either side—I like words—but my primary stance was personal autonomy is ludicrous. I liked experimenting with the absence of control and feeling into the stories such daring evoked. To those who held the default view, my viewpoint was antagonistic or simply annoying, and either way, rarely worth debating.

In the default, autonomy is built in, generally with no questions allowed or entertained. Intellectual understanding, which by its very nature is dual, can’t think outside its tidy boxes. To the twinned mindset there must be a chooser and a choice. I find it hilarious (now) that the chooser—duality—sets off on a hunt for non-duality. Perhaps you can see why autonomy is the last domino.

Defaults have always cried look deeper, so being a rebel, how could I not?

I knew that life wasn’t what most thought. We’re all shown, but not all see. I was observant, irritatingly so, and not just to me. I could see free agency, if I had it at all, was limited. Sure, I made choices. I seemed to have it, but life had it too. Other people influenced what I did and where I went by their actions and words. I influenced them too, but it wasn’t what I’d call control. It was more like symbiotic dance steps to wondrously hip improvisational jazz.

Authority figures in my world were certain free agency existed, that is until mine conflicted with theirs. Then it didn’t feel free to any of us. I didn’t control my race or gender, whether my cells continued to reproduce, or my heart stopped beating. If my bicycle crashed, bones fractured. Experiences I didn’t choose happened every day. If I could count on anything it was that. Everything was visibly connected, intertwined, dependent. Life’s patterns had natural outcomes.

How could anyone control that?

And that didn’t consider account life’s totally uncontrollable domino effect, the conditioning born of previous decisions, the living, breathing, perpetually changing blueprint guiding the formation without input of any apparent new choice.

After too many heated arguments to count, mostly with myself—I’m a slow learner—I realized that my unwillingness to go out on the proverbial limb and choose a side wasn’t neurotic after all. Something relaxed, and I simply knew the limb would break if I did, that no choice was my only choice.

My conditioning made it seem like I had to pick, the same conditioning that damned me for not choosing, for not being in control of my life. To say this was a comfortable process would be a lie. Perhaps that’s the reason few are willing to enter into dialog with their innermost thoughts and beliefs.

It would be fun if free agency actually existed. I could choose which thoughts to think, pick which forks appeared on life’s winding road. But then I’d miss out on all the surprises I would never have chosen, the unbidden experiences that shaped me.

Living in a world that refuses to question autonomy, that instead of inquiring into it, fashions it into a golden idol, it is nearly impossible to discern what is real and what is not. The belief system discerns. We cannot see what we don’t believe. Question that idolic truth, and most people think you’re a lunatic.

Had I blindly trusted in self-determinism, I wouldn’t have glimpsed the contradictions that drove my inquiry. My unfounded trust would have hardened the belief in control, shamed me, tamed me, into conforming to the material world view, what most of us call life: lives lived tiptoeing around fear. When we realize, even subconsciously, that we don’t control our lives, fear infiltrates the house where the myth of control hangs out.

Free agency and determinism, control and powerlessness cannot be separated. They are pages in the same story, a story populated by master storytellers. Living outside of an answer, I tended to shore up my utter inability to assume control with delusions of worthiness and adequacy, with arrogance born of ignorance. Others meet the stubborn dissonance in their own inimitable ways. There is no right way, just ways with varying degrees of pain.

No matter how well I play my role, success in my story will never be enough to eliminate images of unworthiness. The separate story is one of unworthiness, and the idea of autonomy is its stage buddy. Aliveness, This That Is, doesn’t prop up the fallacy. Winning and control are egoic constructs. Life’s schtick is disclosing what this is, what we are. Belief in self in any capacity blinds us, but it also reveals a game of lose-lose, a game no one wins that is magnificently illuminating.

The idea of control is tricky. Even though I’d repeatedly seen it was conjecture, I still dreamed my success was just around the corner, that I could find a way to be in control. I could wake up. I could be somebody. This hope kept me on my personal stage, even though the big finish I sought was always just off set. Until I irreversibly saw it, I was compelled to keep playing, and even now I play my role. It’s just takes a lot less effort.

That’s life. No matter what I do, I won’t win the game, so it’s a good thing that control wasn’t what I was after. I don’t have to figure it out (as if I could). Life does that for me with each new experience. That’s its gig. It builds new experiences out of the bones of the old, dancing on the grave of what came before. With every new breath, aliveness itself shows me what I trust in, what truths I believe, who I think I am. It is a burning effigy of actuality.

The game is rigged, and that’s wonderful. Seeing it cracks me open, allowing the recognition of what actually is rather than the hand-me-down story I’ve been understudying. It doesn’t change the storyline. It does, however, change my experience as a character in the story, which curiously enough, is always changing the story.

Actuality isn’t tricky. It doesn’t create the appearance of control, the lived-in, cell-deep sense of sovereignty, in order to control us. This isn’t a game of reward and punishment. Actuality isn’t hiding, or if it is, it is hiding center stage. There are no perfect lines to read, no villains to overcome, no coveted roles to achieve. We merely need to stop believing we know what’s going on, and let life show us who we are and what this actually is.

Life is living paradox, and we will not recognize that with intellect in the lead role. Two opposites can be true at the same time; nothing is true; everything is true. Reasoning minds don’t like that and that makes it not only easy, but automatic for them to trick us into choosing sides. Intellect is part of the appearance, a precious expression of Isness. In the appearance it seems reasonable that we have free agency, but without the thought, ‘I am’, who has it? And is erratic agency actually free agency or just a wish and a hope?

We trust in our ability to determine our lives because it seems to be our experience, but we distrust it too. We sense that it’s not the whole story. It feels safer to believe we have it than to walk off the cliff of common sense into unsubstantiated emptiness. That’s certain to infuriate the mind. Letting life be whatever it is feels delusional to the intellect, so with our focus on the appearance, we miss the mystery. We blind ourselves to the actuality that what we call ourselves is not a world of eight billion people, but infinity at play, the dance of infinite aliveness.

You see, it is both. There is and there isn’t free agency. There is the appearance of agency, a felt sense of control in the dance of aliveness. Beyond that lies nothing but speculation.

https://inzicht.org/

Amaya Gayle is the author of Actuality; infinity at play, published by New Saram Press. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY

Biographical Nonsense: There is no appropriate bio for Amaya Gayle. She doesn’t exist other than as an expression of Consciousness Itself. Talking about her in biographical terms is a disservice to the truth and to anyone who might be led to believe in such nonsense. None of us exist, not in the way we think. It’s actually much better than we can imagine. Ideas spring into words. Words flow onto paper and yet no one writes them. They simply appear fully formed. Looking at her you would swear this is a lie. She’s there after all, but honestly, she’s not … and she is. Love a paradox and life is nothing, if not paradoxical. Bios normally wax on about accomplishments and beliefs, happenings in time and space. She has never accomplished anything, has no beliefs and like you was never born and will never die. Disclaimer: Engaging with Amaya may be risky to your well-honed identity.