Pariprasna Q & A with Srimat Swami Tapasyananda (1904 to 1991), Vice-President of the Ramakrishna Order.
May 2019
Approach the wise sages, offer reverential salutations, repeatedly ask proper questions, serve them and thus know the Truth. — Bhagavad Gita
The Vedanta Kesari
34
QUESTION: If we resign ourselves to the will of God, would it not amount to our succumbing to a fatalistic attitude? Would there be a place in such a scheme for moral action, which presupposes freedom? MAHARAJ: According to Sri Ramakrishna and all other great seers, prophets and incarnations, there is only one will behind the universe and that is the will of God. Whether we recognize this or not, this is the ultimate fact. To one who recognizes this in truth and spirit, the question of fatalism does not arise, as there is no place for a second will in his outlook. The sign of such a person is that he ceases to be self-centred or ego-centred in life, is free from the worrying and planning mentality of ordinary men and is always at peace with himself and with the rest of the world. The question of the fatalistic attitude arises only in the case of men who are still ego-centred, and yet recognize a supreme Divine Will. As long as we are ego-centred, we have to accept the idea of a ‘limited free will’. As in many ultimate questions, the mean between two extremes is virtue, as far as men in general are concerned. At the one extreme there is the idea of absolute free will, which is untenable even from a purely mechanistic and biological point of view. At the other extreme there is fatalism, which implies the recognition of the distinctiveness of individuality without any freedom. Now we have to assume a middle position which is consistent with the supremacy of Divine Will. We shall call this the idea of ‘limited freedom’. Sri Ramakrishna illustrates this idea with an analogy. The owner of a calf ties it to a tree with a rope. Is the calf free or not? It is both free as far as the rope would allow it to move and also not free beyond that. Though the length of the rope also is ultimately determined by the owner, he has in practice given the calf feedom to move about within a certain area. If the calf exhausts the grass in the given area, the owner may extend the length of the rope. If we accept this idea of ‘limited freedom’, we can practise resignation without its conflicting with self-effort. At our level of experience a sense of freedom of will is a fact. Until this is replaced by a sense of mergence of the individual will in the Divine Will, the individual will is a fact of experience, and the idea of its ‘limited freedom’, which means freedom within a limit sanctioned by the Divine, has to be accepted and acted upon.
