Free Will: “You are Not the Doer”

There is only the ONE.

There is only the Oneness pervading All.

There is only one Soul.

You are everyone and everything.

There is no existence outside or beyond the Oneness.

Everything is actually, really, in fact everything.

“Sarvam sarvatmakam = Everything consists of everything else” –Abhinavagupta: Paratrisika-Vivarana

It would not be logically conceivable to attribute anything you do, and by extension, anything anyone in this universe does to a source other than the Oneness.

“In reality, therefore, the individual self is not independent in its action nor does any merit or demerit, consequent upon the so called pious or sinful acts, attach to it; because their piety and sinfulness are imaginary and conventional.” - K.C. Pandey

Our assumption that we are the ‘Doer’ is a part of the Veil the Oneness affects in order to play in this universe – in the same way that an actor pretends to take on a role. The Creator has infinite unlimited Free Will and takes on limitation to play.

Thus we, as individual selves without real justification, claim “authorship” of our performed actions and remain “perfectly oblivious of the fact of being simply a tool of the universal will.” Ibid.

It is this wrong assumption of our own individual will which attaches us to the idea of good and bad results, the fruits of our acts – and entangles us ever more deeply in the temporal illusory hologram we mistake for the Real.

In the Bhagavad Gita (V.8 & 9), Krishna reveals this secret to Arjuna: naiva kincit karomiti – the wise man, who knows the truth, thinks “not anything I do”!

The Oneness takes on the appearance of separation, Veils Itself, and self-deluded in limited differentiation, as this temporal illusion of ‘separateness’, believes that it has individual free will.

While in truth, we are only playing out the dance of the Oneness, the One God Creator that dwells within each and every one of us. The data-collecting-vehicle we currently inhabit is merely one of a myriad of innumerable roles the Oneness has assumed and enjoyed throughout the Cycles of Time. We are not those temporal identities. We are the eternal within and pervade All.

Come Home.

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Abhinavagupta: Paratrisika-Vivarana, The Secret of Tantric Mysticism; English Translation with notes and running exposition by Jaideva Singh; Sanskrit text corrected, notes on technical points and charts dictated by Swami Lakshmanjee (Laskhmanjoo); Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, Delhi, 2000

Abhinavagupta: A Historical & Philosophical Study; K.C. Pandey; Chaukhamba Amarabharati Prakashan, Varanasi, India; 2000

Abhinavagupta’s Commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, Gitartha-Samgraha, Translated from Sanskrit with Introduction and notes by Boris Marjanovic; Indica Books, Varanasi, 2002; Rudra Press, Portland, OR. 2006; (Sanskrit & English)

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