In India, a lot of people believe in determinism.  That there is no free will and that we are simply acting out a script written by a supreme director.  The belief is so strong that a business friend once confided in me that he did not feel that it was important for him to attend an important business meeting as he felt the outcome would be independent of his being there!

To my thinking, free will is the essence of being alive.  We are alive and therefore by definition we have free will.  That is what differentiates a robot from a human being.  Free will means that at the very basic level we can chose to have a thought or be thoughtless.  We can have an intent.  Intent to get to some desired outcome.  Intent is directly linked to a desired outcome.  Fire burns down things but has no intent of burning down things.  When a person sets a building on fire, he has the intent to burn it down.  In many eastern traditions, thoughtless state is equated to a higher level of consciousness.  The theory goes (since I have not personally experienced this) that in a state of desireless action, lies salvation.  However, how can YOU have desireless action?  The popular interpretation of Gita saying do action without desiring the result is commonly misunderstood.  You will only do action if you have the intent to do the action.  However, we should not believe that our intent is sufficient to achieve particular results.  Hence we should let the results be and only focus on action.  Secondly, if we expand our desires to enlightened self interest (self defined as broadly as possible and over as long a period of time as possible) then it will also result in perfect alignment in acting in free will and acting in broader good.

A side benefit of my way of thinking is that it is a statement that “can’t be false.”  Because if I believe that I have free will and turns out that I did not, then no harm is done since my belief that I have “free will” was part of destiny’s plan anyway.  Of course it does not hold the other way.  So if in doubt we would do better to continue exerting our free will.