Q: If there is no such thing as free will, then why do we make choices? (Posted in a Facebook group 06.25.23)

A: I’ve always found it amusing that people need to categorically discard whichever side of the free will-determinism debate they are certain is wrong, then wrestle with conceptualizations of a reality that clearly includes both.

At the heart of each individual “I am” is a will that freely chose to be unfree for a time, for the sake of experience. Life is, essentially, a willful constriction of the divine will into a narrow enough channel to have specific thoughts, feelings, and conditioned responses.

In Christian theology, this intentional narrowing is called “kenosis,” derived from the Greek root word kenos, meaning “empty.” In Philippians 2:7, Christ is said to have “made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.” The original Greek used here is heauton ekenōse, literally “emptied himself,” from which we have derived the familiar notions of absolute humility and self-effacement associated with the divine becoming human.

Christians will tell you kenosis happened exactly once in all of natural history, but also that each of us is created in the image/likeness of God. I say they have given us the perfect analogy for how anything incarnates (takes a limited subjective form) but forbidden us from using it outside of this one special arrangement.

Using the insights cultivated during the writing of I and I: A Perennialist Theory of Reincarnation and Cyclical Time, I postulate instead that kenosis perfectly describes the “one special arrangement” between the I AM and each individual spirit (pneuma), or fractal of itself, that enters the world.

In the book, pneuma is presented as the divine will for something to exist, reified as the most basic component of subjectivity, hence “the central element of the self,” the life force that powers the energetic pattern of each soul. Pneuma is free, as the theory goes, because it is divine in nature and voluntarily enters space-time through kenosis. It would stand to reason then that we only have true freedom between lives, when we can remain whole as the I AM or choose to re-fractalize into another limited appearance for another ride through space-time.

Imagine a kid at “Kenosisland,” an amusement park with a kajillion different rides, all accessible via portals located in the same “place.” Standing on this platform outside of time, the kid can choose to embark on one of any number of rides, but once she has chosen and entered the portal, she is taking that ride; her free will is no longer free, but constricted to the range of experiences this ride will give her. What she knows when she embarks (and promptly forgets as the ride accelerates) is that the ride will bring her back to the same platform, so the kid can choose freely without fear of the limited set of consequences that each possible choice is bound to generate.

Our will is free, therefore, in as much as we acknowledge its self-same identity with the source-destination of its cyclical path, and the temporary ride through space-time that we chose does not define us. It follows that we are in deterministic bondage only to the extent that we equate the will with the ego, with our sense of self as opposed to the actual self. The ego is strapped inside a vehicle that is on a dead-end linear collision course with its own demise; the pneuma survives and may freely choose to live again.

While on the ride, the kid — the actual self, an embodiment of divine will — may completely abandon all notion of her true self for the sake of the experience. But she also may struggle and labor toward remembrance of who or what she really is, and use the opportunity provided by this particular journey to piece together a context for holistic understanding of this unique “I am” experience, this particular jewel within Indra’s Net.

That, I believe, is the one set of choices we always have at every moment on the journey — to lose the true self in this experience, or seek to find it. Every tradition has its own version of what happens to the immature kid who blows his wad running blindly through life and wastes the learning opportunity that life provided. But those notions, even among the Eastern faiths and philosophies, tend to suffer from the stunted metaphysical structure of linear time. If you consider that you have a perpetual choice to use the human experience to court delusion or seek self-knowledge, and the cumulative results of these choices will likely affect the range of options you have for your next ride, that ought to be motivation enough to choose wisely.

However, if you understand the implications of cyclical time, you will see that no failure is final. Kenosis creates an individual loop of time marking one soul-ride, but that loop itself is a segment of a greater one that marks a pneumatic lineage, the divine will’s venture out into successive learning experiences and its ultimate return home to supreme unity.

Read more about “I and I: A Perennialist Theory of Reincarnation and Cyclical Time” at Not One, Not Two