The Football Does Not Score Goals. Neither Do You

Questioner: Namaste Acharya Ji. My name is Tanish Gupta, and I'm a second-year MBBS student. I have been listening to you for a couple of months, and I always had this question about free will and fate. Now, you have explained this topic a lot in your videos, but I always had this itch in my mind, and it's this question: What exactly is the extent of free will, and where does fate take over in our life?

Acharya Prashant: See, we exercise anyway, don't we? Let's start from where we are. We exercise choice. We assert our will, don't we? We all do that, right? You chose to ask this question. But there is a choice. If there is choice, irrespective of whether it absolutely exists or not, let the choice be free.

One part of the question is whether free will exists absolutely or not. Keep that aside. For you, everything is with respect to you. And as far as you are concerned, you are choosing all the time, no? And if you're choosing, won't you want your choices to be rather free, free of influence, free of fear, free of ignorance?

Do you want to make a choice under fear? Do you enjoy that somebody puts a gun to your head and says, "Choose"? Now, is there a choice at all? That's called Hobson's choice.

So, to the extent we think we exist, we are creatures of choice. The very nature of human consciousness is to choose. And since you are choosing, you better choose with freedom and discretion. You better not allow all kinds of influences to intimidate your choice, right?

For us, yes, free will is important. Yes, because we see choices. The more confused you are, the more numerous choices you see. Everything looks like a possible option. A patient simply experiences something upset here, right? Every single item in the pharmacy, to this person, exists as an option because he knows nothing. Ignorance breeds options. Now, everything can look like a possible cure because he does not know where the pain is coming from.

Something related to the liver, maybe this will work. Something related to the stomach, maybe. Something related to the intestines, maybe. Anything. Pancreas, maybe. Heart, maybe. Lung, maybe. Muscles, maybe. Everything becomes an option when you do not know.

Not only that, the person at the counter too can become a specialist to this ignorant patient and can start recommending stuff. "Oh, you simply have some gas. Nothing else, nothing else." And it's possible that the fellow has just had a cardiac event, and the pharmacy chap is telling him, "No, no, it's just gas." And that will look like a feasible option to this person because he is ignorant.

As your ignorance clears away, as you start seeing more clearly, the number of options reduces. As you start seeing clearly, the number of options reduces. First of all, you see that it's not coming from the lungs, or the stomach, or the muscles, or the pancreas, right? This much light is there now. So you discount a lot of options. You say, "These options are no more needed." The number of options has reduced. So now you focus on only one section there. "Okay, okay, the medicines of the heart are over there, and even before that, I need to meet the cardiac specialist."

You see what has happened? The number of options has reduced. So, you could say the number of choices has reduced.

The more illuminated you are within, the more you find your choices are reducing.

And ultimately, you come to a point where there are no more choices. There is only one choice left. And when there are no options, when there is only one thing to choose, then that is called choicelessness.

But before you come to choicelessness, you must exercise choice with great care. In fact, it is only by choosing wisely that you can come to choicelessness. And in choicelessness, there is no free will because free will requires options to choose from. When there are no more options, where is the question of choice? And then free will is gone. But before free will is gone, free will must be fully exercised. Before you bid goodbye to free will, you must staunchly exercise free will. That is the way.

Ultimately, you may discover that free will is a myth. Ultimately. But right now, free will must not be a myth for you because you do see options. And when there are options, you choose one, you discard many, right? That's the role of options.

So, presently, as you are, you do see a lot of options, and you must choose wisely among those options. And that will narrow down the choices. And ultimately, one comes to a point when one even stops seeing a lot of options. So there is no confusion, and that is the joy of being choiceless. I don't have to decide anymore. I'm not confused. For me, life is very simple.

Those who see five options have to remain in an inner conflict. How to choose? What to do? Do I go this way or that way? Have I made a wrong decision? Should I consult this one or that one?

When you come to the point when you stop seeing so many options, there is a great unburdening. Now there is no inner conflict. Life is simple and straight. But that, we repeat, is the final thing. Before you come to that final thing, as long as you are seeing options, evaluate them properly. Exercise your free will with gusto. Defend your right to choose, your right to choose wisely.

"I have options, and I won't want to give them up. Yes, these many options are open. Yes, these many roads are open. First of all, don't try to block them for me. That's my sovereignty. Eight options? Yes, I'll say I have the right to walk any of those eight roads. Don't try to prevent me." And having asserted your sovereignty, now evaluate those eight options wisely. And what does wisely mean? Without letting fear, or ignorance, or conditioning come in between. Defend your right and use it wisely. And as you continue using your right to choose wisely, we are saying one day you may find yourself choiceless. It's not sudden happening. It's a gradual reduction in the diversity that you see. You getting it?

And then, as it reduces, the freer you feel, the lighter you feel. "I don't even think of certain things. Wow. Wow."

Think of two persons. One who is constantly wondering that this thing may fall on your head, and he is resisting this thought with some other thought. There is this person. And then there is another person who does not even think of certain things because he has thought of those things so deeply that there is no more any need to think.

Who is the free one? Who does not have certain thoughts anymore. Those choices are gone. Those options are gone. And then one lives spontaneously. It is all very spontaneous.

If you ask me something, I don't have to think and choose. The choice just happens. Just happens. I don't have to remain inwardly divided. It just happens. Ask me something, and it just happens. Yes? But tempting or beautiful as it may sound, it still is something distant for most of us. So, where we stand, what do we do? Broaden the range of your options. Broaden the range of your options and choose with freedom. Let there be free will. Let there be great free will before one day you surrender it. Okay?

Questioner: Acharya Ji, back to my question. When I asked, “What is the extent of free will, and where does fate take over?”Now, there is also this idea that fate can also be just a series of choices that we have made right from birth. And now, let's say that I am here by choice. And this choice is also, one can argue, influenced by some past decisions or some past choices that I made. And then those choices are also made by some other choices. And then that whole chain goes till birth and again till the beginning of life, let's say. So, is that fate? Now, is this free will, or is this fate?

Acharya Prashant: This is cause and effect. This is not a choice at all. This is cause (rumal ko haath me lete hain) and effect (Dropping a handkerchief). This is not a choice. This didn’t choose to fall, or did this? Didn’t choose to fall, this is the cause. The cause is that it was lifted up, right? A certain additional potential energy was added to it. It was picked up, and then it was left to fall. This is cause and effect. What most people call life is just dead cause and effect.

See, this (handkerchief) has moved, has it not? This has moved from a higher altitude to a lower one. This has moved. But does this movement require life? Does this movement require consciousness? No. That's the way most of us go through this entire journey called life. There is movement, but no consciousness. Like football.

Think of a football match. How much does the ball move the entire hour or so? A lot. Kilometers. Several kilometers. If you count the distance traveled by the ball, it's a lot. The ball has done a lot. And the ball will say, "You know, then I went to Ronaldo, and I said, 'You know, can you kiss me with your feet?'" That would be the narrative coming from the ball's side. But we know the reality. The ball has done nothing. All it experienced was getting kicked around all its life. And that movement it called life.

That's the fate of most individuals. They'll say, "No, no, no. He didn't pass me to the teammate. I decided to break up with him, and therefore I went to the other one." That's the narrative from our side, as if we made a choice. Does football make a choice? But it keeps moving to all corners of the field, sometimes even into the stands. It keeps moving between all twenty-two players. It sometimes enters the nets as well, right? It does all kinds of things possible right, left, and gains a certain height also.

Most players don't want to touch it with their hands. But then there are two who pick it up and hold it to their chests. And the football will say, "You know, there are only two lovers, really, and they stand at the two ends of the field. They are the ones who give me some respect. They pick me up and hold me close to their hearts. And they are different even in their uniforms."

That would be the story from the football's side. But has the football really done anything? That's who we are, the football. We don't really do anything. There is just cause and effect. Cause and effect. There is no free choice at all. But we narrate it as if we are the doer. We narrate it as if we are deciding things.

What are you deciding? Look at biological things. You decided to be a man or woman? No, you didn't. You decided to be born with black hair? No, you didn't. You decided to be a Hindu or Muslim? No, you didn't. Most of you won't even really decide on your specialization. The doctor here was speaking to me the other day, and he said the society decides it for the doctors. Dermatology, you said, right?

Questioner: Derma medicine.

Acharya Prashant: Derma, this, that. The doctors will say, "You know, I chose derma." You didn't, sir. Society did it for you.

Your hormones decide the kind of partner you would fall for. There has been research. Even before adolescence, psychologists can get into your mind and project a fairly accurate picture of the kind of person you would fall for in your youth. Ten, fifteen years in advance, it can be known. And think of the implications of that in the AI age. If that can be known in advance, that can also be created in advance. Couple that with genetics. Now bring psychology, AI, and genetics together and see what you get, eugenics that is.

There is just cause and effect because there is no choice, really. You say, "I like that girl," or "that man." No, sir. You are not liking. Something that sits within you as programming is doing some biochemical activity. But you are so ignorant, you are calling it your own choice. Just like football, it's not your choice. Either the body is deciding for you, or the society is deciding for you, or some random accident is deciding for you. These three are all the X, Y, Z coordinates, body, society, and chance, random chance.

Take these three, and you get the entire story of your life. There is no consciousness. There is nobody here to choose freely. There is just somebody sitting here to claim credit. Just like the football. The scoreline at the end was 4–0, and the football is saying, "See, see what I did? Four goals. Four goals."

The football is taking the credit for the four goals. And she'll say, "I have optical proofs available. It's all video-recorded. All four goals were awarded only when I hit the net, only when I crossed the line. So I did it"

No, you are not doing anything, sir. This is cause and effect. Dead cause and effect. Laws of physics. Laws of physics that then become the laws of biology, and then the laws of life. Material deadness. No consciousness there. Getting it?

If you want to talk of destiny, your destiny really is to see all this because if you don't see all this, you will remain restless. Football is lucky in one way. It gets kicked around all the time but never gets depressed. Ever seen a depressed? You can see a deflated football, but never a depressed one. Whereas everybody is kicking it all the time.

Your problem is you do get depressed because you are conscious. However much you suppress your consciousness, you'll still experience suffering. You cannot totally suppress the experience of suffering because it is not your nature to lie unconscious.

So your destiny is liberation. Your destiny is to be fully conscious. And if you don't reach there, you will find you have wasted your life.

Questioner: Does this mean that we really have no choice at all?

Acharya Prashant: No, you have, you don't exercise it. To exercise choice, there must be an awakened chooser, right? You're sleeping. And there is a great menu card by your side, and there is somebody available to serve whatever you order from the menu. But who will choose? The chooser is sleeping. Who will choose?

So the opportunity is there, but there is nobody to make good of the opportunity. We just flow through life asleep. And if we don't look asleep, we look walking. Then we are sleepwalking without knowing anything.

A movement. A lot of movement, a lot of movement. That movement could also mean hugs, embraces, all kinds of activity that you think of as very important, very significant, giving birth to a kid. But all of that is unconscious. A lot of that, in fact, everything there can be replicated using a machine. There's not much in that.

You smile at someone. What do you think? You have smiled? No. There is no "you" in that. It's a machine following its algorithm. In fact, others know how to behave to make you smile. It's not difficult at all. So it's like pressing the buttons on a machine. We are unconscious to that extent.

Again, as doctors, you are in a privileged position. See how automatic the body is, and see that it is possible to be conscious, but we don't exercise that possibility.

Questioner: What does it mean by exercising the possibility to be conscious? What does it mean to be conscious of what we're doing?

Acharya Prashant: It means to see that things are happening on their own in a dead cause-and-effect way. The moment that is seen, the moment you stop claiming that you are the doer, the possibility of real choice opens up. No real doing can happen as long as you take all kinds of movement as consciousness.

You see, you go from here to there, and you say, "You know, I could walk because I was awake." Then it's all over for you because you have already declared that you are awake. You have taken movement as proof of awakening. Whereas we are saying movement can happen very easily when you are totally drunk, or unconscious, or even comatose. Does the heart not beat for somebody in a coma? So movement can happen even when you are comatose.

You confuse movement for consciousness. You say, "I am breathing, so I am alive." No, breathing doesn't make you alive. Though technically, in your medical understanding, yes, if the brain has movement and the heart and the lungs have movement, you will say the fellow is still alive. But that's not the way of life. You could be fully functional as a physical being, and yet you could be totally dead within. In fact, not "could be." That's how most people are, fully functional in the physical sense, yet totally dead in the internal sense, because there is no consciousness. There is just movement.

Irrespective of what you are doing, eating, walking, sleeping, smiling, hugging, embracing, mating, it doesn't matter. Even corpses can make love. It's possible. You have to see that this that I'm calling life is not alive at all because I'm just a small incident in the large cause-and-effect chain. There is nothing called the individual. There is nothing called the free one. The moment you see that, the possibility of freedom opens up.

Questioner: I didn't get this. How does the possibility of freedom open up once we see it?

Acharya Prashant: No, no, no. See it, and then you will see that it opens up. Sitting here, when you are not seeing it, you cannot imagine what freedom means.

Freedom is not something to be imagined. You have to see bondages as bondages, slavery as slavery.

And while sleeping, if you say, "I want to imagine what awakening looks like," it would be, at most, a dream. To the asleep one, what is awakening? At most, a dream. So there is no point asking this question. The point lies in asking yourself more practical questions. Like: Had I not been told what to do, would I have done any of what I have done?

You must be, what, twenty-two, twenty-five? How old are you?

Questioner: Eighteen.

Acharya Prashant: Eighteen is a large number. And you have done a lot of things that you claim you have done. Now tell me: Had you not been told what to do, would you have still done what you have done? Now that is cause and effect. You have not done anything. There is a cause behind you. Somebody told you to do this, so it happened. Which means you are absent. Which means, probably, in that sense, we are not even born. There is just cause and effect.

Somebody tells you medicine is great, you get into it. Somebody gives you birth. Some random incident will take away this life that you have. Somebody gave you your genetic material, and so you keep behaving in certain ways and inviting certain diseases. Somebody gave you the language you speak. Somebody told you it's important to get married by a particular age. Somebody told you this thing called money is very important.

Now, were there nobody to tell you all this, would you have still lived the way you do? That's the question to ask. And when you ask that question, that's when you encounter your dead state.

It depends on you, the kind of severity you can tolerate. "Dead" is extremely severe. If you want to be a little lenient to yourself, then you could call yourself just drunk, or unconscious, or asleep. Depends on you.

Questioner: Sir, what do I need to do exactly to awaken this consciousness?

Acharya Prashant: Don't claim ownership over what is not yours. Don't say, "This is my choice," when it is not really yours. Be humble. That's the door. Don't say, "This is what I am thinking," because you're not thinking. That social influence or a physical mandate.

Were you thinking about having a partner when you were eight? No. But now that you are eighteen, you say you are thinking. You're not thinking, it's the body and the biology in motion in the most ancient way. But you'll say, "You know, I am thinking about her." No, you're not thinking, sir. It's cause and effect. You are eighteen, so such thoughts are arising on their own. You're not thinking. Why are you claiming ownership? Why are you being the doer when you are not? Why are you behaving like the football?

You don't have to ask what freedom is. Ask what slavery is. That's the point to begin from because that's where we stand, slavery. Freedom, to us, can merely be an imagination. And because that imagination comes from a point of bondage, the imagination will be very distorted.

What does a creature of the night know about sunlight? You ask this one to imagine sunlight, and what kind of imagination will he have? So don't imagine. Just see how thick the night is for you. That's where you begin from. And that requires some courage. Most of us don't have it, or don't want to summon it. Why should I say you don't have it? Everybody has it. It's a choice to summon that courage and bear the consequences.

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