No Chooser, No Choice

Devotee: If everything is predestined, what about the freedom to choose right action in the moment?

Papaji: You have no freedom to choose at all. Why not? Because you are already free, and in that freedom there are no choices.You think you are not free, so you also think that you have choices: the choice to be free or not to be free, or the choice to follow one course of action instead of another. But this feeling of choice that you have is illusory.

The acts which you are performing today and all the acts that you are going to perform in the future have already been determined. You have to do them. You have no choice. All your apparent choices were fixed even before you were born. Who will choose? And what is the choice? The idea of a chooser and a choice belongs to the mind. In reality, there is no chooser and no choice.

Before the creation of this universe all the choices of all the beings that would ever appear were already fixed. You don’t know who it is who creates all these beings. It is he who lives and indwells in the Hearts of all beings. It is he who existed even before the creation of the universe. During creation it is he, the indweller, who directs the activities of all beings in the universe. He allocates the karma: this karma is yours, this act you have to do. This indweller is even in the Hearts of all those beings who are yet to be born.

It is difficult to understand how the actions of all these beings can be determined in this way. To solve this problem I advise you to see who is the one who has created this universe. All this creation is in his thought only. When you realize and understand this, you will understand that all these beings are just a concept in your mind. You will finally understand that there is nothing that you can do and that you have never done anything.

All these doings are like the activities in a dream. You dream you are climbing a mountain, that you are fatigued and that you sit under a tree to take rest. When you wake up you immediately know that there never was a mountain and that you never got tired and never had to rest. When you wake up from this waking-state dream you will similarly know that all your responsibilities, your actions, and all the problems you dealt with in that state were just an illusory dream that came and went. This illusion, this mirage you see around yourself, is not real.

You may dream that you are thirsty, that you are moving towards a river that you never find. It begins to rain and you are happy because you think that water will soon be available. Then it thunders and you wake up.

You never reach the water in a mirage because no matter how quickly you run towards it, it is always receding into the distance. In this waking-state dream you are all running after peace of mind, but never finding it because it is always receding into the distance. But when you wake up, you instantly know that all your running around after peace was a waste of time because it all took place in an unreal world that only existed in your imagination. 

After you wake up, you understand that the peace was always with you, and that you merely imagined an unreal dream world in which you had to run around looking for it.