Einstein on Free Will

Does our world run entirely according to the Lord’s will, as the mystics assert? If so, doesn’t that mean we have no free will? If everything is predetermined, why bother to be proactive or initiate anything? In our day-to-day decision-making, such questions can be a source of great confusion. Exploring Albert Einstein’s approach to free will vis-à-vis the Lord’s will may be helpful because, surprisingly, it totally corresponded to what the mystics say. Einstein clearly did not believe in the existence of free will. He said:

I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer’s words: ‘Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,’ accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me.¹

As Einstein explains by quoting Schopenhauer, our sense of free will is an illusion – the result of our mistakenly taking for granted that we are free to think whatever we wish. In reality, our mind is pre-conditioned to think and act according to a program already stored in it, and hence ‘we cannot will what we will’. Einstein was certain that we are all dancing to God’s will, or “tune”:

Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.²

And yet, despite the above conviction, Einstein exercised his free will on umpteen occasions. He was very proactive, for example in his decision to give up his German citizenship when the Nazis were in ascendancy, or to boycott a conference of physicists in Italy when Mussolini’s Blackshirts snatched power. He saw no contradiction between his firm belief in an “invisible piper” and his exercise of free will. The paradoxical nature of the underlying philosophy was explained hilariously by the writer and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer:

We must assume free will. We have no choice.³

In other words, God’s will includes in it a command to us human beings to exercise what seems to us to be free will. As saints have explained, at this stage (i.e., when we are spiritually immature), we are not privy to his will. To grow spiritually and attune ourselves to his will, we need to act as though we do have free will – but also ensure that our decisions never violate what our conscience and discrimination dictate. As we go through life with this approach – of making choices and acting according to what we think is right, doing our best and then accepting the result cheerfully – we will gradually be able to access our ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ (i.e., consciousness in its pure form), which has the power to reprogram our mind. It is only when we reprogram our mind that it can voluntarily give itself up to a higher power – we could call it God, spirit or soul – and that we develop real free will, which is synonymous with His will.

As Guru Nanak has explained, God’s will actually stands for sarbatt da bhala (the good of all sentient beings), that is the whole of creation rather than its parts. The creation is designed so that only those who act on behalf of the whole creation are given the gift of real free will: Until then, we are too selfish (our perspective is too narrow) to be able to maturely handle the powers that come with it.Before we make spiritual progress, our mind cannot see the whole picture and hence raises all kinds of questions about how God is running this creation. But as the spirit awakens, our perspective expands to include more and more of the whole, and so our actions become more and more in tune with the ideal of sarbatt da bhala. Therefore, people like Einstein recommend that we should use our free will to do what is good for all, rather than just a few. His statements on this topic have been paraphrased as follows:

Men should continue to fight, but they should fight for things worthwhile, not for imaginary geographical lines, racial prejudices, and private greed draped in the colors of patriotism. Their arms should be weapons of the spirit, not shrapnel and tanks….

Nothing that I can do will change the structure of the universe. But maybe, by raising my voice, I can help the greatest of all causes – goodwill among men and peace on earth.⁴

The phrase “weapons of the spirit” refers to the power of the spirit as opposed to the power of the body/mind. At the level of body/mind, we are caught in duality, but at the level of spirit, we attune ourselves to the whole of the creation. Einstein left behind a beautiful definition of a human being to emphasize that the purpose of life is to graduate from seeing ourselves as a part to becoming whole:

A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in space and time. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.⁵

This definition portrays a human being in the same way mystics do – as spiritual beings going through a human experience. Einstein arrived at this conclusion through his dedicated pursuit of science as a search for truth. Through this process, he became convinced “that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe – a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”⁶ Such humility in turn led him to “a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naïve.”⁷ Based on that, he could recognize the limitations of the human mind:

The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God.⁸

Thus, like our mystics, Einstein could make a clear distinction between the mind and spirit (or consciousness) and realize the superiority of the spiritual over the mental. He could also see that true free will exists only in the realm of the spirit, never in the realm of the mind. This led him to recognize the profound relationship between mysticism and the pursuit of science:

The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is at the root of all true science.⁹

Einstein’s pursuit of science and his attraction to the spiritual were deeply connected. This connection arose from his recognition that the the world of three-dimensional space and linear time that we experience in our everyday life is an “optical delusion” of our consciousness. He realized that the best way to overcome this delusion is to experience the “sensation of the mystical.” His ideas on free will flowed from such a profound insight.