What if free will is just an illusion, and the life we live is a game within a game? Across centuries, sacred texts and mystics promise enlightenment, yet the contradictions of existence remain. This essay confronts those tensions, questioning the narratives we inherit and what it truly means to be free.
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“In his Divine Comedy, Dante ascends to the Heavens to meet God, and to do what God cannot do. He must imagine the Truth, and tell the world this Truth. He would spend twenty years wrestling with the blinding illumination that is God, and from this struggle he would imagine the nature of God and the universe, and our place and role in it.
“The contradiction within the universe is that God is perfect and omniscient but God seeks newness and to know. To resolve this conundrum, we were created with corporeal bodies – to suffer and to blunder so that we could experience and imagine new possibilities. God granted us the greatest gift – free will – so that our imaginations may roam freely.”
I haven’t read The Divine Comedy, but this interpretation — and the rest of the short article by Professor Jiang — gets the critical thinking wheels turning. It offers some rather intriguing and perplexing philosophical contradictions and contrasts.
Consider first the construct, the reality, or realm we live within. It has supposed boundaries, physical limits, chemical and energetic constituents. It also has expressions of aether, plasma, electricity, and magnetism. What about alchemy? Within that reality-shaping matrix, we live the story of a lifetime, in our avatars — each of us either housing a divine spark, an original essence, an immortal within, or contained within the original essence itself — the plasma, the energy construct reduced concentrically, or folded toroidally, into the individualized human expression we relate to as “I am.” Both might be true, or neither — yet seek, and you’ll find evidence to support your ideations, imagination, assertions, and analyses, regardless of your preference or bias. That alone says a lot about the nature of this reality.
The trouble with a soul’s sojourn within an existential inversion is that it’s difficult to know for certain which inversion is which — and so we speculate, posit, theorize, and hypothesize — then we preach, proselytize, and indoctrinate. But you can’t very easily test this one. If the story holds, we cannot know (or perhaps better stated, remember) anything for certain until we “die” and move on — away, inward, or back out of this reality construct.
Many have claimed to have had “near-death” and “life-between-lives” experiences. Yet when so many report back the same kinds of stories, framed within the same hand-me-down belief systems inculcated into virtually all of humanity for centuries, I call foul. You’ll find and experience what you expect to. The earthly identity you retain and cling to when venturing out of body is just that — an identity and personhood derived from, and endemic to, the seemingly unique elements available within this construct. It’s not real. It’s a story. And it should rightly fade the longer — or perhaps the further — one drifts from this grand illusion. Then, sure, report back, but why would you care to? The human story is subject to the laws, rules, and functions of this realm — the lowly, material existence we’re all “suffering and blundering” within. If you tried to explain it, no honest human could comprehend it — and rightly so — if there is any veracity to the idea of your expansive, liberated soul, the divine spark freed or unraveled from the mechanisms of this realm, returned or reacquired into its greater, higher self.
All of that to say: to suggest that we have “free will” in this place is bordering on the absurd. Certainly, within the game of life, we may feel there are elements of choice-making, agency, and a utility for discernment. But beyond the everyday and practical — did we choose this life, our parents, this fragile mind and body, and all the potentialities that could befall us while we’re here? Right or wrong, shadow or light, good or evil? Did we choose to forget everything about the last time — if there was a last time? Did we willingly sign up again to learn everything incorrectly, only to have to relearn, unlearn, and blindly seek saviors while clambering for enlightenment? That’s insane.
For Dante to ascend to the Heavens to meet God doesn’t compute. Dante is God; God is Dante. The rest is speculative anthropomorphizing of the eternal everythingness — limited to the extreme because its truth is lost in translation. Why else would it take twenty years to come to the same conclusion everyone else has reached on the topic? We don’t have the language of light here, but we like to pretend. Many a charlatan takes advantage of this desperate seeking, searching, praying, powerlessness, and confusion. The idea that one may be differentiated as a “divine spark” of God — the perfect, omniscient, and seemingly bored all-that-is, which must have created this place to “split off” pieces of itself in order to “seek newness and to know” — is, frankly, ridiculous. How can there be newness to an always-and-forever, always-was, always-will-be? Time isn’t a factor if God is what we wish or suppose God to really be. Similarly, there can be nothing else to know. From where would novelty, originality, and fresh knowingness emerge if God is God, as described and presumed in all these timeless, greatest writings of human history?
It could only exist or emerge from one who has been deliberately dissociated from their truth, obscured from their origin. Divine Comedy, indeed.
In my view, it is not free will to live and experience what we call “life” in what essentially amounts to an immersive, wonderfully artful artificial construct — conceived, designed, and derived by the same source — contained, by definition, within an aspect or fractal expression of God, or the All, to amuse and entertain itself.
This is the very illusion of free will. All the exposition about making promises and learning to forgive that Jiang delves into are extrapolations that, to me, present an incomplete and wildly ineffective solution, a would-be cheat code, to what is essentially a game within a game within a game. Jiang further refers to The Iliad, noting how, when Priam forgives Achilles for brutally mutilating his beloved son, Achilles experiences what could be described as a “come to Jesus” moment — and through that simple yet profound act of forgiveness, all is well again with the universe. Good grief.
Another interesting quote:
“I recently had tea with a Vedic monk who told me all of humanity’s greatest souls are clamoring to reincarnate into our time. It is in this age of darkness that we can best achieve enlightenment.”
That we must perpetually, lifetime after lifetime, struggle or seek our way to spiritual enlightenment — and that all of humanity’s “greatest souls” are clamoring to reincarnate into this “age of darkness” — is, to me, spiritual escapism at its finest.
Can any of us call up that number, or join the Humanity’s Greatest Souls group chat to verify this claim? No. It seems a way for this Vedic monk — and countless others who devote their lives to extreme rituals, routines, and practices, such as living in perpetual meditation high in the mountains for their entire earthly existence — to both make peace with the futility of trying to understand the nature of this place, and to seek a way out of it.
In the hope of reconciling the endless suffering of our realm, we project this specious notion onto discarnate souls, thereby elevating our human existence into something to be envied by those who wish to return to this world amid its madness, chaos, and living paradox.
I don’t buy it. It reeks of distortion and deceit — an emotional vector with which to entrap ignorant seekers, empower spiritual advisors, and embolden social media influencers. If these “greatest souls” are divine sparks, they could, and should, be able to get back into this earthbound game at will, freely, at any time, regardless of how enticing this age of darkness might seem to them. It seems highly unlikely that these greatest of human souls would exist anywhere but in close proximity to our Earth game, this living simulacrum, if at all possible, in order to maintain any semblance of the identity that could have only ever existed here, extant amid a perceptual layer of the grand illusion as we are.
To be sure, many variations of this deceptive and incomplete story exist and persist throughout recorded history, encoded into every major religion and its derivations. None should truly satisfy the intrepid natural philosopher seeking what is authentic, real, and true.
If, however, you’re content to follow interpretations presented by interpreters — who themselves interpreted interpretations from others who were speculating, conjecturing, and cleverly wording their guesses, desperate for solace or justification for an eventual escape from this place — or, with malice and forethought, to confuse humans for generations, even millennia — then carry on.
You’ll need your religion, faith, rituals, and sacrifices. Today it’s morphed into and encompassed mainstream “science,” but the effect is the same: a subscription to cult-like behaviors and belief systems that subsume the dazed and confused, subjected to their adopted cause, transient identity, and shaky earthbound story.
Or, you could choose to stop all of it. Drop all the layers of condition, story, fabrication, illusion, delusion, and divisive, dissociative spiritual bypassing. Let go of the endless seeking for enlightenment or escapism. Choose to remember, then “live your life fully, with reckless abandon,” as Garret Kramer writes.
All that is artifice and construct is just that — a façade. It is as transient as the next season, the next impulse, the next thought.
But it is not free will. That implies an offer, a contract, terms and conditions, and by definition requires an escape clause — or some other affectation with which to manipulate yourself or the reality you inhabit.
You were always free.
Temet nosce.