Fate, karma, causality, laws of nature, determinism—all these are different expressions of a conception that the universe follows a predictable logic. They imply that what happened arose consistently from what preceded it, and that the now is likewise determined by what came before. We consider this logic reasonable and rational, logically correct. Yet if we assume that the future is likewise determined by the now and the past, we dismiss this as superstition, irrationality, a lack of scientific rigor. We resist it with all our might—at least in Western cultures.
None of this is true. The future is not determined, the past cannot be described in purely logical, rational, scientific terms. Historical scholarship shows this in its disputes over methods; psychology offers numerous paradoxes, reaching back to Zeno’s paradoxes, which show that time is not a measurable quantity but, as duration, a quantity of the world of experience, that is, of consciousness.
“Everything is predetermined; our fate is written in the stars.” This conception is actually a beautiful image, because it points to something larger. Instead of placing our own fate in the hands of astrologers who oversimplify, however, we should understand this image as a way of pointing out larger connections. The cosmos does not follow our little rational logic; the universe is not contained in a linear book of life, where sentence follows sentence, page follows page, event follows event. Rather, from today’s scientific perspective, the “book” of life is more like a quantum book or a neural network, but certainly something completely different. The “book,” which in prehistoric times, before the invention of writing, was the cycle of sun and moon, stars and seasons, became through written language a narrative, a mythological story that sorted and structured phenomenological experiences. In the modern era, rationality took up the sword and tidied the ontological garden with Occam’s razor. Everything that could not be explained rationally was put to the test and bracketed out. Some things simply could not yet be explained rationally. And because this advance of rationality was so successful, since it gave wings to science and fed technological progress, the central questions about consciousness, the soul, meaningfulness were simply relegated to the back bench. I think we are slowly beginning to understand that perhaps this was not a good idea. Those new ideas from quantum physics and neural networks show us that there are alternatives to linear causality, determinism, fate and karma. They are similarly complex to the starry sky. In a certain sense we are returning to a state of being in which we accept that there are processes that elude our rationality, even though they only became visible through our rationality. That is a little paradoxical.
Structurally, we are back in the world of the Vedas. Consciousness has brought forth a model of reality whose complexity exceeds what seemed thinkable within its axiomatic framework. And precisely here, for me, lies the question of freedom and spirituality. It has something to do with making conscious. Some basic assumptions are necessary, however: namely, that what my outer senses can perceive does not depict the whole of reality. Intuitively we all know this, and in everyday life we live this way and speak this way too; only in scientific discourse do we deny it. So let us stop denying it for a moment. Let us continue to accept that the material world is not wholly arbitrary but can be explained, and let us hold on to the experience of consciousness and the openness of our consciousness to what is new, to an open future. If we now continue trying to hold on to the idea that this should not be an irresolvable contradiction, the central question of freedom arises. We are in a state of consciousness that is enlightened, phenomenally rich and open. This state is part of the book of life, though not that somewhat naive linear book, not even those great books of the Rigveda, Genesis, Copernicus, Hawking. It is part of Brahman, part of the whole, part of universal consciousness. We have no influence on the course of that universal consciousness, which eludes our consciousness; it does not belong to us – ‘I am that’. The only thing we can do is allow our state of consciousness to unfold richly.
There are moments in life when we have an inkling of this. When we are in extremely critical situations, such as near-accidents or states of shock, we experience how space and time change, our perception expands and something opens. For a fraction of a second, perhaps even for a few seconds, we see into a cosmic state in which time seems to stand still, where many elements of consciousness appear clearly, where the illusion of an option for action reveals itself. In those moments we see behind “reality.” An indeterminacy becomes perceptible; as with Schrödinger’s cat, the situation is not yet unambiguous. It is this indeterminacy that we experience as the moment of freedom in a decision. Whether this is in fact a decision is somewhat academic at this point. We are shocked out of our illusion of reality into a state of consciousness that tries to make sense of the utterly unforeseen.
I would like to suggest taking this image as a starting point for thinking differently about consciousness, freedom and the book of life. We can accept that cosmic reality follows a principle, and our consciousness can expand the experience of that principle. The book of life can become experienceable as such, and we, as part of that book, can realize our own rootedness by “opening” a page and through conscious, expanded perception. It now seems to me that if we raise the moment to a higher level of perception, the options multiply. The field expands, the room for maneuver grows. We free ourselves from the stimulus-response pattern; degrees of freedom are activated. It is not my Self that acts, my ego is an illusion, but making a portion of cosmic reality conscious creates spaces for action for life itself. The experience of being part of it is spiritual practice, is bliss and freedom