Before you start reading, make sure you have already read The Roadmap to Overman, as it will help you better understand the purpose of this article.

In this article you will learn the following:

• • what is consciousness
  • what is the ego
  • problem of free will
  • What you are and what you are not.

 I advise you to forget all the previous knowledge you have about consciousness, self, and the ego. The way I intend to use these terms will be firstly defined because there are many ways you could interpret them otherwise. I also wish to highlight the fact that a lot of the following text will be paraphrased from the books and app “Waking Up”, and “Free Will” written and created by Sam Harris, and I do not wish to take any credit for the following text as it was greatly influenced by him and others.

For a better understanding of everything to come, check out my summary of the book “Waking Up“.

What is consciousness?

Consciousness is the feeling of being you. The feeling of being like you are. Is a bat conscious? It depends on what it would feel like to be a bat. If it would feel like anything, then it would be conscious. If it wouldn’t feel like anything or in other words be the same as not existing, then it wouldn’t be conscious.

Consciousness is the prior condition of every experience; it is simply the light by which the contours of mind and body are known. Everything must first appear in consciousness to be noticed, it is the condition in which everything appears, it has no center, it has no edge.

Suppose you were to be stripped of body, thoughts, feelings, everything. You would be left with only consciousness. The only thing that exists.

What is the ego/self?

 The experience of full capture by the contents of consciousness is the ego. Let me say this differently. Ego, “I’ or the self is the feeling of being in your head, the feeling of being a thinker of thoughts, the feeling of being centered somewhere inside your body looking outside. This is an illusory appearance within consciousness. There is no place inside of you where “you” could be found. The perception of being inside your head is the thing that you must detach from. We almost feel like passengers in our bodies, as the center that is appropriating the experience. But this feeling of “I” is a product of thought. It is no more than a thought, we are just so immersed in the illusion that we feel as if the words in our head are us.

Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking. It’s the feeling of being identified with thought. Once you notice thoughts as thoughts and stop holding on to them, you will break the spell of the “self”.

The problem of free will

We have now come to the crucial point of this whole post. There are two perspectives that I will present to you, and afterward, I will merge them into a system that I believe to be the best.

Determinism

(Disclaimer: Much of the text below is either copied or paraphrased from Sam Harris’s book “Free Will” and from the following website.)

The popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions: that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present. Determinists argue that there are only two possible ways that our “will” comes to be. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them. 

Some very beneficial things come to fruition from this kind of mindset. Losing the sense of free will can only improve your feeling of compassion, forgiveness, and unconditional love since you realize that you have no basis to blame or hate anyone. It will also eliminate your feeling of entitlement because you didn’t choose your genes, life, parents… It was all given to you by a pure chain of causation that you had no part in making. So it is important to realize that by breaking the illusion, you lose the inclination for hate, boasting, and many other destructive emotions.

Compatibilism

Now compatibilism paints a little bit of a different picture. At some level, our thoughts and actions are certainly restrained by the causal nature of the universe. But that doesn’t mean that there is no free will of any sort. What determinists call randomness, I call free will. 

In their minds, anything that doesn’t have a prior cause is random. But there is a big difference between not having a prior cause and not being able to determine the prior cause. Our free will is that prior cause which is also by definition undeterminable. So to conclude, all events have a cause, but the ones caused by free will cannot be determined, not because they are random, but because free will is literally unpredictable in its definition.

We have mixed up free will with randomness because they look the same on the outside. For a better understanding of my point of view, check out Jordan Peterson’s video on this topic.