I heard a saying once, attributed to Paramahamsa Ramakrishna: “Everybody has free will to choose the form in which they want to worship Krishna”, as an explanation of free will. I reduced this to the core statement, that free will exists only for God and the saints, because everybody else has so many conditions imposed upon them, it would be ridiculous to even speak of any kind of freedom of will. However, it is intuitive to people that they have this or that kind of freedom, and my parsing of Ramakrishna’s dictum is usually rejected on the intuitive level. Also, the concept of desire is very quickly introduced in any discussion about free will, so we’ll need to deal with that, as well.
I have a nasty joke from the former Yugoslavia as an illustration of the relationship between freedom and desire. The adapted version would go somewhat like this:
A guy was cornered by the street gang, and they asked him, do you want us to do it with or without lube? The guy thinks and answers, “with lube”. The gang leader shouts out: “Hey Lube, come over here, this faggot wants it bad”.
That’s the position we’re in, while in this world, and I remember this every time I hear some Hindu preacher start about how the desires need to be controlled because they somehow stand between ourselves and God. The guy cornered by a gang of sodomites actually has a hierarchy of desires; he wishes never to have found himself in that situation in the first place. Barring that, he wants to be out of there unharmed and instantly. Barring that, he would prefer to fight his way out of the situation, but there are too many of them and he assesses his chances and concludes that his options are to be either killed or beaten up first and then raped, and to be raped with varying degrees of bodily harm, and then appears to choose the option with the least harm.
That is what I call a conditioned desire, and all the desires we ever had in this world are likely of this kind, and when someone takes the last iteration of the process and claims that this thing is an actual desire, I think of that joke instantly, because one’s desire for a new car or a house or a new phone is exactly as free as that guy’s “desire” to be fucked with lube, and the Hindu or Buddhist preacher talking against desires is basically humiliating the victim of violence by claiming that “he wants it bad”.
Let me illustrate this with my own hierarchy of desires.
I want to be in God forever with no limitations of any kind, to either my consciousness, form of existence, memory, knowledge, power or freedom. I can’t have that, because reasons. OK, if I have to be here in this lunatic asylum / prison, can I have at least some of my stuff back so that I don’t have to feel like a bonsai kitten in every way possible? Nope, because reasons. [several iterations later] OK, I see where this is going, I’ll go buy a lawn mower to trim the grass on someone else’s lawn that I’m renting because I don’t have anything better to do anyway and I need a workout.
At this point the Hindu preacher pisses himself with happiness because he found the reason for all my problems: it’s the desire for a lawn mower that was preventing me from being with God all this time, and if I only gave it up and not act on it everything would be great, to which I roll my eyes and think “please kill me now”.
Basically, you’ll know what your desires actually are only as you start approaching the actual freedom. I would classify desires as intrinsic and extrinsic, where the intrinsic ones are the ones you would have in your pure, unlimited state, and for all I know, you might still want lube at that point, but I somehow don’t think so. The extrinsic ones come from the circumstances, and can be described as a desire for hell not to be as hot, or a desire for some toy so you don’t go crazy thinking about all the things you can’t do. Basically, the desire for sun block with protective factor of ten million ends as soon as you’re removed from hell.
pozdrav! naletila sam na ovaj blog jer tražim tiskani primjerak tvojeg prepjeva Bhagavad gite 🙂
dugo me mučilo to sa slobodnom voljom, jer sam bila uvjerena da ne postoji. ali si to nisam mogla objasniti od početka do kraja. čitala sam od Devashisha “When the time comes” gdje jedan jednostavan ali prosvijetljen čovjek (na kraju svog puta u ovom pojavnom svijetu) kaže kako “čovjek ima nešto malo slobodne volje”. ok, on valjda zna, ali koliko? 2 krumpira? 3 sata? uglavnom, s vremenom mi je sjelo kako nam je slobodna volja ograničena samskarama.
naše želje oblikuju samskare koje se moraju ispoljiti na našem putu iz nepojavnosti, kroz pojavni svijet, pa natrag u Nirguna Brahmu. vrlo malo je tu praznog hoda, svodi se možda na, recimo vezano na želju za BMW-om koju spominješ, hoćemo li nabaviti sivi ili crni. što je manji pritisak samskara i što smo bliže povratku u Nirgunu, kristializira se jedna jedina želja – spajanje s Najvišom Svijesti. što smo bliže Nukleusu, ta centripetalna sila se pokazuje kao ljubav prema Bogu, prakrti popušta svoj stisak, a mi kužimo da SVE “svoje” ionako samo želimo dati onome tko nas je za svoju zabavu propeljao kroz svoj virtual reality mnogih života i smrti.
hvala na sjajnim tekstovima, idem čitati dalje!
To što si ti napisala izgleda kao sažetak stava Vedante na tu temu, ali problem s tom teorijom je da je pogrešna u apsolutno svakom smislu koji sam bio u stanju osobno provjeriti, i moje mišljenje je da se radi naprosto o racionalizaciji, odnosno o teoriji izvađenoj iz dupeta kako bi autor imao dojam da sve razumije, a to sad ostali copy-pastaju okolo misleći da se radi o nekoj kozmičkoj mudrosti.
Slično važi za teoriju “guna” – sve ima smisla osim što gune ne postoje, i to baš empirijski testirano ne postoje; stvar je intelektualna izmišljotina smišljena kako bi vedanta imala neki svoj alternativni model kojim bi parirala budističkoj teoriji elemenata i kalapa.
Ukratko, postoji tu jako puno toga što sam ja prije dvadesetak godina prvo prihvatio po principu da je izvor autoritativan, stvar ima smisla i logički je konzistentna, a ja nisam u stanju osobno provjeriti kako stoje stvari, da bi se onda nakon nekog vremena desilo da budem u stanju stvarno osobno vidjeti neke stvari i tu se u pravilu pokazalo da stvari rade po principima koji zapravo negiraju i vedantu i sve što se obično misli pod budizmom, zato što “praktikanti” budizma uglavnom isto imaju glavu punjenu teorijom a iza toga ne stoji nikakva praksa na razini stvarnosti, nego su to sve nekakva salonska izdrkavanja tipa zen mudrosti i nekakve kakti askeze koja je sama sebi svrha (ako ne uračunamo čisto pozerstvo kao svrhu sve takve “duhovnosti”, gdje smatram da su pošteniji oni koji si kupe BMW i Hermes torbu za poziranje jer su oni barem osvijestili svoje pobude).
BTW to da je brahman nirguna i da je cilj “evolucije” reintegracija u nekakav bezlični “pool” svijesti, to je zapravo najdalje što može biti od mojeg iskustva s tim stvarima, i što sam više vremena provodio direktno promatrajući stvarnost, tim više mi se sve ljudske teorije o tome kako to sve skupa funkcionira čine kao mlaćenje prazne slame, osnosno, točnije rečeno, kao usporedba ideja starih Grka i moderne astrofizike. Oni su se bavili time je li prvobitni princip zemlja, voda ili vatra, magičnim svojstvima kruga i dodekaedra i time kako mora izgledati idealno biće, a sve to skupa je luk i voda, odnosno juhica od ničega. Isto tako, Vedanta sa svojim idejama na temu “valovi mora dio su mora”, kako bi to rekao Yogananda, objašnjava apsolutno sve, isto kao i fizika brončanog doba, koja je isto imala objašnjenje za apsolutno sve, a s fizikom brončanog doba dijeli i to da se radi o sustavu koji zadovoljava psihološku potrebu za posjedovanjem odgovora, a koji jako loše reagira na empirijsku provjeru.
Isto tako, zanimljivo je da u toj sferi postoji ogroman broj ljudi koji svi imaju autoritativna mišljenja o prosvjetljenju, svijesti, brahmanu i nirvani, nagledao sam se “prosvijetljenih” i “buda”, a kad nekome daš zadatak da energetski počisti kuhinjsku krpu i pretvori ju u objekt moći, broj onih koji su to u stanju napraviti globalno pada na ono što bi Štef iz pilane mogao nabrojati na prste jedne ruke.
So, desires are conditioned with circumstances and physical body is a circumstance, with many unknowns in current state of mind – for instance, why the hell am I here in the first place – but a circumstance never the less.
Does that mean certain desires would be automatically removed once the body is gone?
For instance, desire to eat food.
However, there are people who eat to live, but there also those who live to eat – one seems to be strictly body-related desire, while other seems to include more restrictive circumstances and removal of body would not remove those desires?
Desire for sex is another thing that comes to mind, but let’s include more difficult scenarios where this desire can not be practiced because, I don’t know, you want to have sex exclusively with best friends wives 🙂
So, sex itself looks like body related desire, but any “addition” to it complicate things with other, additional circumstances, not necessarily body related.
But what if you do not want to have sex with your best friend’s wives, you know it’s wrong on every level and you fight it, but even though you mentally know it’s wrong and you do not want it – sexual urge torments you your entire life, regardless.
Does it torment you because it is body-related condition which will disappear with body itself or because you never really, truly let it go, instead you fight it because you know it’s wrong, but subconsciously you hope for conditions which will allow this desire to be physically manifested?
I would really hate to come back here because of some unresolved stupidity like that, but I can’t figure out if such things are designed to be torture machines and are gone instantly and hence, not worth wasting energy upon, except not succumb to torture or are they something more important and complex, something persistent regardless of physical existence, something that needs to be dealt with right away, no matter the cost.
Let’s put it this way.
You don’t want to have sex because you want to have sex. Also, you don’t want to drive a BMW because you want to drive a BMW. In both cases, you want to feel a certain way, and the desired thing is merely a means to an end, perceived through a very thick layer of monkey stuff. Remove the monkey stuff, remove the pain and limitation of physical existence, remove your seat of consciousness into the “astral body”, and suddenly you have a completely different set of parameters, where the pain you wanted to remove by desiring something no longer exists; the limitations you wanted to free yourself from no longer exist. You are in a state of clarity, freedom and joy, where knowledge pours into you as soon as you show interest, and communication with others is no longer performed by making air vibrate and hoping something gets across, but through an equivalent of fiberoptic connection directly into the soul.
Yes, almost every type of desire you can think of goes away with the body. However, there are other desires that are the problem. For instance, some souls want to torture and humiliate others. That works great on Earth, and not at all in heaven. Thus, they will be attracted to this place. Also, those who hate God will find heaven terribly painful because His presence is everywhere, so this place will be preferable. Basically, the criminals and God’s enemies will prefer Earth, for all sorts of reasons.