We are not the doer; we only participate in things getting done !!!

We generally say, I did this, we did that. It happened only because of me. I should get all the credit. Are we really the doer ? or do we have any free-will ? To understand this, just lift your right hand. How?did?you raise your hand?

Here we not interested in the story of how the brain send signals that make the muscles contract. That’s a useful scientific theory to explain?what?is happening, but it doesn’t address the question?how?you do it.

Rather, what we are looking here is, just try explaining how you actually did it, to a child who didn’t know how to raise his or her hand with a set of clear instructions.

What you will inevitably find is that you cannot even?begin?to explain it. You cannot explain it because in reality you don’t have any clue how you do it. Neither does anyone else.

We can all make our hands do all kinds of things with ease, but the truth is, we don’t have any idea how we actually make any of it happen. No one knows.

If we examine our direct experience, we will inevitably discover that we don’t know how we do?anything?that we do – how we read this book, how we talk, how we talk, how we learn, or even how we think. It’s all just happening. We are only participating in this happening and things getting done by eco-system of nature through a series of stimulus and response. In simple, doing and happenings happens though us; as a member of natural eco-system. Hence, Buddha said,

“Events happen, deeds are done, but there is no individual doer thereof.”????????

Free will is the power of choosing and acting without the constraint of anything beyond “self”. Though our robotic shadow-self perceives that we have free will, a deeper scientific study reveals that the Human consciousness and biological brain makes decisions much before it even knows it. Dr. Stephen Hawking states,

"It is hard to imagine how free will operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion."

? John-Dylan Haynes, a British-German brain researcher, led the study “On the button,” where he and his colleagues imaged the brains of fourteen volunteers while they performed a decision-making task. When the participants needed to decide, they were instructed to press one of the two buttons when they needed to decide. Each button was controlled by a separate hand. Simultaneously, a stream of letters was displayed on a screen at half-second intervals. The volunteers had to remember which letter was displayed when they hit their button. When the researchers reviewed the data, they discovered that the earliest signal the team could detect began seven seconds before the volunteers recalled making their decision. Because there is a few seconds delay in the imaging, brain activity could have started up to 10 seconds before the conscious decision. The signal came from the frontopolar cortex, which is found near the brain, right behind the forehead. As a concluding remark, John-Dylan Haynes says, "We think our decisions are conscious, but these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg." This study challenges our 'conscious decisions" and may even challenge ideas about how 'free' we are to choose at a particular time.

It seems there was a long conversation between Einstein and Ramana Maharshi to reconcile the idea of free will from the perspective of consciousness. Also, Einstein mentioned,

"Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills."

Why we do not realize that, we are not the real doer and our response to a stimulus is beyond our free will ? What’s your view?

PS : You may subscribe to the weekly newsletter?Smart Sage