During our endless struggle for outer freedom - the freedom of expression and freedom to pursue our choices – we take our inner freedom to be ever-present. This is the inner freedom to make choices regarding what to pursue. We also hope to enrich that inner freedom through many spiritual endeavours.

As we shall see soon, that strong notion of freedom disappears like a mirage when we search beneath the surface of our mundane experiences. We become aware of so many undercurrents beneath our seemingly monolithic identity. We witness ourselves being pushed into the choices through those undercurrents.

Does that mean we just have a mere illusion of making a choice? Can we accept that we work like a machine, driven by a chain of causes and effects (either physical or mental), completely predictable prior hand with the precision of a mathematical formula? Can it be true that our destiny is cast in stone? Are we just puppets in a play of determinism? Where does moral responsibility fit in if this were true?

Can it be that a pinch of pure randomness within these undercurrents breaks the predetermined nature? We cannot find solace there. It cannot be that we are being arbitrarily thrown around by pure randomness. How could we maintain any hope in the face of such randomness?

How does true freedom arise within us? The Buddhist position on freedom provides a middle ground free of these contradictions. Moreover, it strikingly opens up a new dimension. It reveals the severity of our state of affairs. The freedom of choice no more remains just an enigma, but the prime concern every individual has to address.

Are we as free as we believe?
Before we examine the Buddhist position, it is imperative to look at the extremes closer. We might miss the fine ground otherwise. Are our choices as free as they appear to be on the surface? We often worry in our lives. We know worrying is not the same as being mindful of a problem. Worrying just worsens our problems. Yet we worry. Do we make a conscious choice to worry? How does the worry come up? Even at times when we sincerely wish not to worry, tell ourselves not to, we still do occasionally continue worrying. Surely, this does not occur through our free choice.

As another example, we might decide not to be angry anymore. Within hours, we might have an angry outburst again. Are we making free choices not to be angry anymore and then to be angry again? We might also make a third choice later to repent having gotten angry again. How could there be so many conflicts in our choices if there is a free and monolithic decision maker within us making these choices? How could our choices be so incoherent?

Are our choices incoherent just because these were in response to differing situations? No, it is not. In the first place, our choice not to be angry would have arisen in a peaceful state of mind. During that state, our insight would have been strong regarding the negativity, delusion and mental unrest that anger can cause. Under this influence, we chose not to be angry anymore. The truth behind this insight has not changed by the time we became angry again. Otherwise, we would not have repented later. In the irritated state of mind, the habitual urges dominated over the prevailing wisdom while making the choice. These urges developed from having similarly responded to irritations countless times in the past with hatred and anger. We habitually obtained the notion that anger is the best response to irritation. One influence instead of another, is this the freedom of choice? We see our choices over time destructing each other as every choice arise from the interplay of differing habitual urges, emotional states and circumstantial conditions. We see the absence of a free, coherent and monolithic decision-maker within us.

Entangled by Karma
In the Buddhist context, the doctrine of karma is a clear exposition on this process. It shows how we sow the seeds of habits in our mind-stream and how various conditions in and around us lead to the nourishment and ripening of these seeds into fully developed actions. Our mind itself is a continually changing stream. Just as a river being affected by rain and the terrain, and just as the river in turn altering the terrain and its own path by turbulently carving out sand from the banks, our mind too is undergoing continuous modification. In the case of the mind, the delusions and clinging add to this turbulence. The doctrine of karma elucidates how the mind modifies over time, how our past moulds our present and future.

Buddhist doctrine identifies a much stronger role for karma than some other doctrines. Many schools of thought approach karma with a dichotomy. The dichotomy is in that the karma throws us into situations whereas the mind freely chooses how to respond, creating new karma through the response. On one side, the situations are determined through karma. On the other side, responses to situations are free choices made by the mind. Such doctrines are in contradiction with observations as we have seen above with the example of anger. We saw earlier that even our responses are under the influence of karma ripening in the form of habitual urges. The right view of karma is that it plays a role not only in throwing us into certain situations but also in leading us all the way to act with one choice or another. There is a total entanglement where karma influences both our situations and responses.

How objective can the choice be?
Are we free in our choices if we objectively think through all the options using the interval between stimulus and response? Many hold such a view in modern circles. While this is better than jumping into action at the sprout of anger, even such choices are not free from the influence of karma. Among the available options, we pick one that we perceive as capable of bringing us greater happiness and lesser suffering. This perception is subjective. For example, let us take an example of being at crossroads with an option to make professional advancement at the cost of hurting someone. How do we choose? We think through the options along with their potential outcomes – the satisfaction from professional growth, the longer-term impact of missing that growth, the feeling of disturbance resulting from hurting someone, the possible weakening of our moral standing, the possible after-effects in relationships, etc. How do we weigh one over the others? Most of these are not comparable on a quantitative scale to make a choice with mathematical precision. After the analysis, we still need to compare the perceived qualitative feeling of happiness and suffering that can result from each option. That qualitative feeling, and thus the choice, clearly depends on our habitual disposition. Our experiences with similar situations in the past remain as seeds for habitual urges that ripen based on many conditions, leading us to prefer one to the other. Karma again!

Moreover, keeping emotions altogether at bay does not lead to better choices. Emotions like love (not attachment) and compassion (not grief) improve the quality of our choices. We become sensitive to the needs of others through these emotions. The best choices arise from a state of mind full of such emotions. An ever-conditioned mind-stream with constructive or destructive emotions and habitual urges make choices within us. Thus, our karma drives our choices.

Riding on a wave
Coming out of the extreme of believing in a truly free, coherent and monolithic decision-maker, we discover a terrible state of being chained down by our karma, by our past. What we believe as our freedom of expression is most often nothing other than the freedom to vent out our habitual urges – our karma – as and when they ripen based on many conditions. We remain slaves to our karma, not knowing where we are headed to or even what our interest would be in an hour from now. In effect, we ride a wave of happiness and suffering based on how the karma and external surroundings interplay.

Is our existence all about being able to let the urges flow out as and when they arise – being able to decide not to be angry, being able to be angry again, and being able to repent about the whole thing later, all under the spell of karma? Where do we find genuine freedom within?

The other end of the spectrum
Here, we need to be careful not to fall to the other extreme of causal determinism that is morally nihilistic. Many doctrines of karma and scientific materialism end up falling to that extreme. The Buddha cautions us against such a fallacy when he comments on a deterministic view of karma that prevailed during his time, “If someone would speak thus, monks: 'exactly as this man performs deeds, thus does he experience its fruit', if this were so, monks, one could not live the saintly life, no opportunity would appear to put a proper end to sorrow.” [Anguttara Nikaya]. If our choices were fully determined by past karma, our destiny would have been predetermined too. Similarly, if our minds were just an outcome of underlying physics and chemistry of our body – as some scientific materialists hold – it does not leave us any space to control our destiny through our choices. It would make no difference whether we put effort to make the right decision or not. Our direct experience tells us this cannot be true. We do not get to success by ignoring the problems at hand. We can also assess the quality of our decisions by observing whether we end up having to repent our decisions later. From correlations, it becomes evident that well thought-about decisions are the ones that we end up repenting the least. This is a clear indication that we can make some difference through our choice instead of being pushed forward by karma like clockwork. 

The truth of the middle ground
We do not find a free and coherent decision-maker within us, yet we have the freedom of choice! How does that work? Here, we get to the middle ground. What brings the Buddhist doctrine of karma to the middle ground of freedom that is beyond the reach of the strict determinism of scientific materialism? Functioning of mind cannot be fully comprehended with the functional principles of inanimate matter. We find only two types of principles in the material world – one where causes determine the effect with the precision of a mathematical formula, and the other, pure randomness like a quantum phenomenon. As we have seen at the beginning, neither causal determinism nor randomness can explain moral responsibility. The mental phenomenon of freedom of choice is irreducible in terms of strict determinism and randomness of material phenomenon. Spontaneity of mind is not randomness; karmic causality of mind is not determinism. Freedom is in the very nature of awareness even when being steered and constrained by karma. Let us see how the karmic causality and freedom of the mind work together.

We have seen earlier how our perceptions on potential outcomes lead to our choice. [1] Within the whole scheme of interdependent arising, the spontaneous aspect of mind called volition (cetana) arises constantly moving the mind to act towards the preferred outcome. The mind is free and morally responsible in the sense that the actions of mind arise with an intention to reach preferred outcome. (This is unlike the inanimate that lacks volition and cannot move without being pushed) For example, when we are frightened about an object, we choose a path away from that. We try not to continue moving towards the object with increasing fears. This is the spontaneous freedom of our mind. The mind is causal in the sense that the situations it gets to, the perceptions it forms, the preferences it makes, etc are driven by karma.[2] For example, certain objects might be frightening just because of our karmic disposition. The path we choose to steer away from fear itself might be in error since they are driven by habitual urges.

The spontaneous freedom of volition is limited in scope since we lack omniscience and since our perceptions are distorted through karmic dispositions. We fuel the tentacles of karmic bondage further by creating seeds for habitual urges through our volition. Yes, we have volition, but our preferences and targets change as we ride on a wave of karmic results causing the volition to be incoherent. It is like moving through a maze without a map or with a wrong map. We have the freedom to move, but we do not see the right path. Getting started northwardly, we end up in south. We remain confused and chase after mistaken goals, only to realize and change track often. We spend our energy in confused struggle for a little happiness, not realizing the huge suffering we create on the way.

The locus of freedom
We have freedom. Nevertheless, we remain slaves to our karma without knowing how to make a free choice. We use our freedom to deepen our bondage, like a man wriggling to escape from a swamp. The more he wriggles the deeper he gets immersed in the swamp. When asked about how he crossed over the flood of bondage, the Buddha replied, “When I pushed forward, I was whirled about. When I stayed in place, I sank. And so, I crossed over the flood without pushing forward, without staying in place” [Ogha-tarana Sutta, Samyutta Nikaya]. The key is in identifying the subtle middle path where certain locus of freedom is left. 

Relative freedom
We have seen how incoherent and limited our freedom is. How could we tap that freedom in a useful way? How could we avoid being driven crazy by the freedom of conflicting moments of our mind-stream? As a first step, we can get to a relative level of freedom while being still under the clutches of karma. This is a condition where we have lesser instances of having to repent about choices. We can attain this by developing mindfulness so that we improve the coherence of our mind. We can plant the antidotes in our mind to weaken the deluded minds from arising. For example, we can plant the antidote of patience and cultivate it through making it a habit. The ground will not be fertile in our mind-stream for anger to arise, if patience is strengthened. We cultivate the habit of mindfulness so that a sane moment of mind can spot the sprout of anger and overcome it before anger strengthens in our mind-stream deluding our discrimination. Thus, we use some moments of mind to cultivate the ground for desired characteristics and sterilize the ground for undesired characteristics. We move to overall happiness through such steps. Moments of our mind-stream with wisdom are capable of watching for the upshots of afflictions, thus having the power to eliminate delusions towards greater freedom and happiness. This is like making a map of the slippery terrain and limiting ourselves to safe pathways.

Ultimate freedom
The ultimate freedom is in going beyond the clutches of karma altogether, to a freedom that is spacious and unconditioned. That is Nirvana. This corresponds to us either getting away from the slippery terrain or equipping ourselves to move around in and out of the terrain freely. The former corresponds to a mere liberation. The latter corresponds to the complete awakening of a Buddha, being able to re-enter Samsara without falling to bondage. The way to true freedom is in disciplined movement under bondage!

A new dimension to the problem of freedom of choice is evident in the Buddhist analysis. We become conscious of the terrible state of current affairs. By knowing its causes, we also become conscious of the path to genuine freedom. We have the seeds of spontaneous freedom within us. Yet we are terribly chained down by karma, making our attempts at freedom a mere confused journey through cycles of happiness and suffering. We add on tremendous suffering on the way. We have the option, the path, to release ourselves from this bondage and taste the unconditioned happiness, the spontaneous freedom of our awareness.

The journey to freedom begins when we realize the true nature of our bondage.