I was raised as an evangelical (literalist) Christian. God was the 1st cause, and we were endowed with free will through the grace of God. Sometime when I was young I began to reflect on what that entails, and asked the questions (mostly to myself) that most young people ask in such a predicament. “If God is the cause of everything and knows everything, than how can I have free will? Either I am written into the book of life or I am not, how could I have any choice in the matter?” I didn’t understand it, but I didn’t obsess over it either. After all, through God ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE, and that took care of that.
At the age of 16 when I finally and officially divorced myself from the notion of God, I then began to inquire about all of those philosophical questions that I had always wanted to ask, but which I was afraid to ask in fear of either divine punishment or punishment from my parents.
I soon wound up replacing God with the Big Bang and within a few years time a number of things started to fall into place. I reasoned that no matter what are intentions were, there was always a selfish drive behind them. If I did something good for someone it was because that act made me fell good. This became axiomatic to my mind and thus I became an Egoist. I also reasoned that if the Big Bang was the 1st cause, and if there was absolutely no intelligence behind or underlying this cause, then everything that happened as a result of the Big Bang was at bottom utterly unintelligent, and completely and utterly caused by it. The fact that “consciousness” had the potential to imagine free will never for a moment felt like a refutation. It simply meant that one “could” (was determined) to hallucinate the notion of free will. After all, correlation does not imply causation. Therefore, the sensation of “free will” that correlates with beings who can reflect on this notion did not imply causation, it merely implied correlation.
Of course, from my hard deterministic stance I also became a moral relativist and pretty much a relativist in every conceivable way. The only self evidence truth was the truth of the 1st cause as the determining factor in all things to come, for all time, past, present, and future. In other words, we, at bottom, are nothing more than unintelligent mechanisms of causation playing themselves out. That’s it. That’s all there is to life. Nothing more. Free will or free anything is utterly impossible.
The events that follow from this I wrote down in a journal a few months back.
"After years of being drunken, angry, delusional, depressed and living out my own inner jihad, I finally came to a point where I decided that I had just about had enough. I decided I was going to seriously consider hanging myself. I found a hook on my ceiling, got some guitar chords and made a noose out of them, got a drum snare to stand on (the fact that the things I was going to kill myself with being music related was something very interesting to me, as music was my other great passion alongside philosophy), stood on the snare, and put the noose around my neck.
I then thought about whether I was going to jump or not. But the entire time I couldn’t help but feel that I had no choice in the matter. It felt like I did, sort of… kind of… but at the same time, I knew that free will was impossible. Furthermore, since I had serious notions that the eternal return was basically scientific, seeing as nothing else made much sense to me, I figured that if I decided/it decided for me to jump, then I would seal my eternal fate/it would seal my and my eternal fate, and I would live this tortured life forever more. The confusion here is comic.
Eventually I picked up my cell phone (or did the bing bang do it? Again, I didn’t know), called my mom who was sleeping at the time, and told her to come into the basement. She saw me standing there on the drum and naturally, she was in shock. She talked me out of it. At the exact moment that this was happening, my childhood friend since kindergarten, who I hand’t talked to in months, called me. It was all so, so, so strange. He came over and along with my mom they drove me to the hospital.
That was about 10 years ago or so. Having survived that, the first leaks in my absolute assuredness that free will was impossible started to enter into me. I still could not see how it was possible for free will to exist, at least not rationally. But it felt like I was the one who made the choice not to end it. I wrestled with this question for years after, and eventually gave up on the question altogether, seeing it as useless. I gave up many other positions too, such as egoism, the eternal return, and the idea of superior and inferior individuals.
Philosophy, to me, at this point in my life, has served as something of a holy illusion. In that, I had to get lost in theory’s, positions, in other words, in THOUGHT, before I could begin to understand the whole futility of “belief”, “ideology”, ”knowing" something with mere words, or complex combinations of words called “theory’s” and “ideologies”. Through peak experiences that came naturally to me, along with psychedelic substances, and experiences of synchronicity, it became obvious to me that life is vibration, energy, tao, call it what you will. That there is neither free will nor “non free will”, that there is neither “egoism” or “altruism”. There is energy, and there are simply manifold ways of experiencing this energy, reflecting on it, and communicating it. No “truth” worth a damn can be found in words. It is the experience itself that is of value, words are there merely to try and communicate the experience. It is in silence, in stillness, in the absence of “thought” that what is is seen as it is, felt as it is, and understood as it is."
Only in silence, in stillness, in absence of conditioning. Only in that state in which all fear is vanquished, all anger is vanquished, in which one comes to the ground of ones own being. Only there does one feel oneself as absolutely free. As that which is the causal in itself. In the East this state is called “Nirvana” or “Satori”. But I am not speaking of anything mystical here. The universe is clearly one thing (or process, or thing-process). It is not absolutely dual. If one comes to the ground of ones own being, then one comes to the ground of being, period. One comes to a state in which time is no more. And in that state, one is free of causality, karma, the whole mechanism of time. And in that state one then becomes a vehicle for which the causal, for which time, for which form, can flow out of oneself freely. I am rarely in such a state, have only been in such a state for brief moments in my life. But there is no doubt, when that state is experienced, one is totally free. One becomes “the big bang” or “god” or “the causal”. But it’s not something that happened a long time ago. I deny any 1st cause. I recognize only a causal place of being, that one can either get more or less in contact with, which I recognize as the purest form of the self.
