Attaining Free Will By Overcoming the Sense of Individual Separation in the Manifestation and Our Bondage to the Cause and Effect Trajectory That Creates Our Present Opportunities and Choices

As the mental being develops and we begin to experience the sense of separation from the other beings who are part of the creation, we also begin to have a sense that we have “free will” and make our own independent choices. To a great degree, this sense is misplaced, insofar as our current decisions and choices are very much controlled by both past actions and their trajectory, as well as pressures and manipulation by forces active upon us, both in the past and the present. As a result, human behaviour can be calculated to a great degree of statistical precision as to a mass of individuals, although this level of precision is missing from trying to identify the choices of any particular individual because we do not see and recognise all of the antecedents of that individual’s path of development.

The true question of free will arises when the individual is able to shift the standpoint outside that of the individual mind-life-body complex and thereby be free of the cause and effect pressures exercised on that individuality. This occurs when the soul, the psychic being, comes forward to take charge of the outer being and its actions, as the soul is aligned with the spiritual purpose of the divine manifestation, and thus, overcomes the illusion of separateness, while associating with the free will of the Divine in its intention in the evolutionary procession.

The Mother notes: “With the mind individualisation began and a very acute feeling of separation, and also a kind of impression, more or less precise, of freedom of choice — all that, all these psychological states are the natural consequences of mental life and they open the door to everything we see now, from aberrations to the most rigorous principles. Mind has the impression that it can choose between one thing and another, but this impression is the distortion of a true principle which would be complete realisable only when the soul or psychic being appears in the consciousness and if the soul were to take up the governance of the being. Then man’s life would truly become the manifestation of the supreme Will expressing itself individually, consciously. But in the normal human state that is something extremely exceptional which to the ordinary human consciousness does not seem at all natural — it seems almost supernatural!”

“Man questions himself because the mental instrument is intended to see all possibilities. And the immediate consequence of this is the concept of good and evil, or of what is right and what is wrong, and all the miseries that follow from that. One cannot say that it is a bad thing; it is an intermediate stage — not a very pleasant one, but still… one which was certainly inevitable for the complete development of the mind.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 6, Some Answers and Explanations, pp. 161-162