One of the most compelling questions that philosophers, theologians, psychologists and even neuroscientists have struggled with is, “What is the nature of human freedom?” This is a profound and difficult question. I won’t pretend that I have the answer to it, but I would like to share some thoughts with you that might prove helpful or at least stimulate your own thinking on the matter.

To begin with it is hard to establish a consensus even on what human freedom means.

Naively you might say that freedom is the ability to do whatever you want to do. But it doesn’t take much thought to conclude that is deluded.

Two decades or so ago I was on the Council of the University of Central Queensland. It was a time of change at the university and their PR department had come up with a new slogan viz “Be what you want to be”. I expressed my opinion that I thought such a sentiment was deluded. “How so?” I was asked. I replied there were natural limits to our capacities that we needed to heed. As an example I said, “Suppose I wanted to be an Olympic basketballer. You would have to concede that I am forty years too old and probably 30cm too short.”

It is obvious in a material sense that our freedom is circumscribed by such things as our own physical and mental capacities, and the laws of physics. It is obviously futile to think that you might fly, for example.

(As an aside there are many other areas where we need to acknowledge this limitation. For example men who might like to think that they could be women need to consider this physical limitation!)

So in practical terms we are forced to curtail our ambitions for freedom to acknowledge the real constraints that nature has imposed on us.

Some concepts of freedom rely on how we might remove the constraints that the world imposes and that, consequently, prevent us from doing what we want. This is sometimes called “negative freedom” This notion suggests that you would be free if only you could remove these impediments. The obvious correlate to this notion is that people of wealth have more freedom than poor people.

It is hard to deny that wealth offers more opportunities but whilst it allows more indulgence it is not evident that this provides any greater sense of liberation.

It is useful to ponder on the words of Diogenes of Sinope who was reputed to have said to Alexander the Great, “I am a greater man than you my lord, because I have eschewed more than you have conquered!”

As I have written in a recent essay, desire and attachment are antithetical to freedom. They compel us to seek things that are not necessary to our happiness and therefore a constraint on our freedom.

The Stoics long ago had seen through this notion of negative freedom when they asserted a slave could be freer than a master who had internal conflicts.

Philosopher, John Gray, who believes human volition is an illusion, observes that disciples of monotheistic faiths believe, paradoxically, that freedom comes from obeying God’s will. But this freedom is not a freedom to choose, but a freedom from having to choose!

He explains:

It is easy to dismiss those who yearn for this freedom as wanting to be ruled by a tyrant. After all, that is what many human beings have wanted in the past and continue to want today. Wanting freedom to choose may be a universal impulse, but it is far from being the strongest.

He goes on to explain:

…..those who seek inner freedom do not care what kind of government they live under as long as it does not prevent them from turning within themselves. This may seem a selfish attitude; but it makes sense at in a time of endemic instability when political systems cannot be expected to last.

Now I believe that Gray is right to believe that human freedom has more to do with an internal reconciliation of belief than just about anything else. When such a state is achieved a person can live at ease in the world whatever their circumstances.

But I also suspect that many who adhere to a faith in God do so (knowingly or unknowingly) because it provides an accessible template for appropriate human thought and behaviour, which then, as Gray alludes, absolves us from doing our own hard work as to how we should react with the world. In essence, if I can convince myself that I am a believer, I am then absolved from having to make my own decisions about morality and conscience. I just need to adhere to the particular dogma of my religion.

The allegorical parable in Genesis about Adam and Eve eating the apple provides a useful insight into human freedom. The serpent inveigles the two mortals to eat of the tree of the “fruit of knowledge” against God’s explicit command not to do so. Having disobeyed God, Adam and Eve were deemed to have “sinned” and therefore cast out of heaven and doomed to lives of suffering.

So what was this fabled “knowledge” that God wished to deprive humans of? It was self-awareness. I have written many times about the nature of self-awareness. It is the feature that seems most to distinguish human beings from other animals. No doubt other animals are conscious and capable of decision making. Self-consciousness however, embodies humans with a “theatre of mind”. We are able to observe our thoughts and decision making processes. It is not clear that other animals have the same capacity to do so.

As a consequence of this, humans have to deal with two different worlds – an external physical world and an internal psychological world. Those who have come to understand the true nature of human freedom will attest that it is how we manage our internal world that makes the greatest difference to our sense of freedom.

But if we go back to the Genesis parable of Adam and Eve there was always another way to interpret it and the Gnostics threw a lot of light on this conundrum.

In the early centuries of Christianity there were quite a few different groups of believers. They can, however, be divided into two principal schools – the Literalists and the Gnostics.

The Literalists have been so defined because they take the Jesus story (and indeed ost of theBible) literally. They believe the gospels of the New Testament are a literal account of historical events. It was this school of Christianity that was adopted by the Roman Empire in the fourth century AD becoming Roman Catholicism and all its subsequent offshoots.

But there was another movement prominent in the development of early Christianity that did not take the Jesus story as being literally true but saw it as a parable pointing to many great truths. This group of Christians was later persecuted out of existence by the Roman Church. Because of this there are few records of what the Gnostics actually believed.

This was remedied in 1945 when two Arab camel-drivers stumbled on a whole library of Gnostic gospels hidden in an earthen-ware vessel in a cave near Nag Hammadi in Egypt. When they smashed the vessel open they found 12 codices (one of which had another pamphlet bound into it so that the books are now numbered as being 13 in total). The codices are written in Coptic which is the final form of the ancient Egyptian language. Translation of the codices was made easier because by this time Coptic script had adopted the letters of the Greek alphabet (as opposed to its original form which utilized hieroglyphs).

Scholars who studied the texts were intrigued by the belief of the Gnostics that the Jesus story was not a biography at all but a carefully crafted allegory created by Jewish Gnostics which encompassed many essential truths for those who were perceptive enough to see beyond the literalist interpretation.

But it was not only the life of Jesus that the Gnostics understood as a parable and not the literal truth it was also the Genesis story. The Gnostics believed that the God portrayed in the Old Testament was not the Supreme Being but a demiurge. (In Gnosticism and other theological systems a demiurge is a heavenly being, subordinate to the Supreme Being, that is considered to be the controller of the material world and antagonistic to all that is purely spiritual.)

The Gnostics argued that the God of the Old Testament displayed too many human characteristics (like anger and jealousy) to be the Supreme Being and therefore concluded he was a demiurge. Consequently eating the fruit of Tree of Knowledge was not indeed a sin but a necessary step to complete Humanity.

But whatever the theological explanation the outcome has been that humans have acquired consciousness and this has proved to be a game changer. Being self-aware and cognisant of our own thoughts we came to believe that we were imbued with a capacity to autonomously guide our own lives.

In more recent times psychologists and philosophers have come to doubt that humans have any freedom at all. They have argued convincingly that all human behaviour is determined –it is in fact mandated by our biological history and our socialisation.

The American psychologist, B F Skinner was a dominant figure in this movement. Skinner himself referred to his philosophy as “radical behaviorism.” He suggested that the concept of free will was simply an illusion and, instead, believed that all human action was the direct result of conditioning.

Yet for humanistic psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, freedom is not only possible but also necessary if we are to become fully functional human beings. Both saw self-actualization as a unique human need and form of motivation setting us apart from all other species.

This dilemma has not been successfully resolved. In more recent times it has been the topic of debate between such luminary thinkers as Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris.

My friend and mentor, Dr Phil Harker has long argued that our behaviours are largely determined by our biological history, our socialisation and our environmental circumstances. But he concludes that our free will is exercised in how we see the world – ie our worldview. (To understand how he came to this conclusion you might want to read his book One Degree of Freedom.)

Now those who think conventionally might think this is not much of a choice. It is hard to argue that we are not able to negate our genetic foundations. We didn’t choose our parents but are doomed to live a life considerably fashioned by this biological inheritance. Similarly much of our behaviour has been learnt by our early socialisation. And it is indisputable that our behaviour is always in response to stimuli that our immediate environment demands.

So what lies behind this choice of worldviews? Phil has always asserted that there are essentially only two worldviews – viz a worldview based on fear or a worldview based on love.

But to properly understand this choice we have to probe a little deeper.

What is this worldview of fear? Is it driven by existential angst – the fear of death and self-extinction? Certainly for most of us this is a huge concern, but an even greater basis of fear is related to the defence of the ego.

If the principal fear felt by human animals was the fear of physical death then nobody would ever commit suicide. The act of suicide demonstrates that there is something more important to many human beings than merely physical survival.

As I have often written the main cause of human dysfunction is ego defence. We try to defend a self-concept that is built on fabrications and misconceptions.

The good Dr Phil’s hypothesis, as I related above, is that there are only two worldviews – one based on fear and one based on love.

Even Albert Einstein said:

Everyone has two choices. We are either full of love – or full of fear.

It is natural for someone trying to prop up a confected self-image to exist in fear – fear that the artifices the ego constructs to defend such a self-image might be exposed or destroyed..

But then what about love? My definition of love has always been that it is “the dissolution of separateness”. The Greeks had words for the many manifestations of love. This included words for collegial love, fraternal love, erotic love and so on. But authentic love is about having empathy for your fellow human beings. This comes from a basic understanding that in essence we are all as one. That is we understand that we all share this human condition and that our differences that emerge on top of that are insignificant compared to the commonality we share as human beings.

For many it will seem a disappointment that our much vaunted notion of human freedom comes down to such a stark choice. However there are two consoling factors.

Firstly in our day to day lives we proceed largely unaware of this constraint. That is we feel free, even as we are unaware of the determinants of our behaviour.

But secondly we mustn’t underplay the momentous impact of our choice.

Real human freedom seems to me to be a matter of knowing who you are and living authentically.

Sri Nisargadatta was a famous Indian sage preaching non-dualism. (He was the author of an influential book titled I Am That.) He wrote:

Your outer life is unimportant. You can become a night watchman and live happily. It is what you are inwardly that matters. Your inner peace and joy you have to learn. It is much more difficult than earning money. No university can teach you to be yourself. The only way to learn is through practice. Right away begin to be yourself. Discard all you are not and go even deeper. Just as a man digging a well discards what is not water until he reaches the water bearing strata, so must you discard what is not your own, till nothing is left which you can disown………

So it seems to me that real human freedom is about asserting our authenticity. Freedom is not having to respond to the unreasonable demands of the ego. Freedom is curtailed by relinquishing our inner sense of well-being by pandering to our desires and attachments. Freedom is living with no fear and an assured belief that you are as one with every other human on the planet.