As I was walking recently with the monk who teaches me Buddhism, he characterized his undergraduate training in psychology as being Skinnerian psychology.

As I reflected on this later, it occurred to me that Skinner’s psychology of behaviorism was the ultimate extension of the principle of conditioning that the Buddha spoke about.

A few days later, I listened to Ajahn Brahm recount a story about his encounter with hypnotism at Cambridge. The hypnotist placed a subject into a trance, and made a post hypnotic suggestion to the effect that the subject would stand and sing the national anthem loudly when the hypnotist tugged at his ear. The subject recovered from the trance, and returned to his seat unaware of his hypnotic conditioning. At the appropriate moment, the hypnotist tugged his ear, and the participant rose from his seat and loudly sung the national anthem to the raucous laughter of an amused audience. The subject of the hypnotic experience was undisturbed by the laughter. After he finished, he was asked why he had just done such a thing. His response was an articulate rational explanation of the “causes” and “reasons” behind his actions. There was no shred of doubt in his mind about his power of choice, or the freedom of his will. At least in Ajahn Brahm’s mind, the assertion of “free will” in a heavily conditioned mind is highly dubious.

In The Self-Aware Universe. physicist Amit Goswamni makes a very plausible scientific case for consciousness as the primal creative source that collapses quantum probability waves and thus creates the universe as we know it. But he very carefully distinguishes between the conditioned consciousness people experience after the brain has processed the impulse, and the primal consciousness that sets things in motion. Physiologically and psychologically the two can be distinguished. Quantum collapsing consciousness cannot be normal conditioned consciousness.

In the Udana, the Buddha articulates:

There is, O monks, an unborn, an unbecome, an unmade, an unconditioned; if, O monks, there were not here this unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, there would not here be an escape from the born, the become, the made, the conditioned. But because there is an unborn,…therefore there is an escape from the born….

I think that is the crux of the arguments about “free will.” In conditioned experience, a good case can be made that “free will” is an illusion of the mind. It’s not so much that there is complete determinism, because there is inherent randomness and chaos in the universe that destroy the predictability that determinism implies. It’s more that the heavy cloak of conditioning makes it impossible to distinguish “free will” from conditioned actions. Given the inability to distinguish between the two, the mind is left to mere opinion and sparse scientific evidence. (Philosophy is pretty much useless here, except as interesting speculation.) The confusion is compounded by an assumption that there is either “free will” or “just conditioning” when in reality both can coexist, manifesting seamlessly.

The source of free will, spontaneity, creativity has to be the unconditioned. Because this unconditioned is an inherent part of our existence, we have inherent opportunity for free choice. In this possibility of unconditioned choice lies the only real freedom. From the unconditioned, free primal conscious choices collapse probability waves to form the actual universe. We have capability as humans to tap the unconditioned because we are part of it. Some among us, like great artists, thinkers, and scientists have found themselves in occasional direct contact with the unconditioned without comprehending how they arrived there. Buddhism offers a systematic path for the rest of us who don’t often stumble there on our own. And it resolves at least in my own mind the eternal debate about whether or not “free will” exists. At the mundane conditioned level of life, it is an illusion. But at the core of existence, free creative choice is all that is. The quest to live at the unconditioned level of liberation is worth a lifetime of effort.