is the ego or consciousness the doer?
Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering
The idea of not having free will is scary and unsettling to people, but for a very strange reason: it threatens the very foundation of the egoic self that lives life as though it is in control. The self has placed itself at the center of all that occurs, as a belief that it is free to do what it wants and get what it should have. But this isn’t really the way it works.
The self has no free will. This is clear. Can you see this as reality instead of something you’ve learned? This can be known by way of observation, but if it is just information that someone says — and you accept it because it sounds right or appeals to your sense of security or belief system — then it is still unknown.
Who is it that believes you have free will? Who is this “I” who says, “I have free will”? It may surprise you to find out that this “I” doesn’t really exist except as an idea, a belief, a mirage.
The self, which is the egoic mind or the person you take yourself to be, is the source of all suffering, and this was the main lesson learned and taught by the Buddha. The self is an illusion that is created out of the ideas and teachings of authority figures that psychological condition your mind. As such, the self does not really exist, because it is an image made out of a belief system of attachments and identifications that are created out of the conditioning. An image cannot have free will. Or, we can say that an actor in a movie is not a real person, no matter how real he may seem when you are lost in the story.
The problem is when consciousness attends to the self as if it is real, because it mistakenly believes that the self is the doer. When you can fully observe the self as it is then you eventually discover that it is just a belief system; and when this happens you know it is not the doer. So what happens next? You realize that consciousness is the doer and that you are consciousness and not the self. So, are you the doer or not? Yes, you are the doer, but not the you of the self. When the self is completely dropped, you still exist as consciousness, unalloyed to the belief system and attachments of the self. Therefore, as consciousness you are the doer, but you cannot see this yet, because you are so deeply lost in the belief system of the self.
Consciousness creates, destroys, and perpetuates life. It is a whole, continuous movement out of which the belief of the self arises due to attachment to certain thoughts. The self, on the other hand, is a fragmented idea, split off from consciousness to create me-versus-you, me-against-the-world, If you were to realize that you are consciousness, instead of identifying with a self that is attached to the body then you would also realize that the self is not the doer and has no free will.
Consciousness is ever-present as the real you. You don’t have to get to it, learn about it, practice being it, or pray to it. You just have to wake up to this fact and then it is obvious how all actions take place as the result of the movement and complexity of consciousness.
Since the self has been so established, it is very difficult to see life in any other way except through the self’s lens of beliefs and images. And therefore, it is very hard, confusing, anger-provoking, and disconcerting to understand how there is no free will. It’s a matter of perspective.
If you identify with the ideas, memories, attachments, and identities of the self then you are stupefied at the prospect of having no free will, especially because this causes a great amount of fear to arise, as the self is resistant to being uncovered as a falsehood. But if you awaken to the fact that you are really consciousness then it is all quite obvious.
