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A few days ago I picked up Who Cares?!, a book by Ramesh S. Balsekar, an Indian sage known for his blunt, cutting, almost nasty approach to the quest for enlightenment. Ramesh's perspective is that the individual self is an illusion and "doing" is an illusion - we find ourselves in a reality-movie where God is playing all the parts. The actions of our individual "body-mind organism" are determined by the Source, the universal consciousness that creates and occasionally dissolves our egos in order to continue lila, the divine play. For Ramesh, enlightenment is the extinction of personality, the annihilation of the illusion of self and doer-ship.

When I first read Ramesh, I was shocked by a philosophy that left no place for individual choice, meaning, or agency. We in the West are obsessed with free will - with individuality - but Ramesh negates this entirely. Over time, I stopped being depressed by this, and began to find his Vedantic view oddly liberating. While free will on an individual egoic level is not possible (because all of our thoughts and actions are based on past conditioning), there is absolute freedom on the level of the singular consciousness - the "one without a second" - that exists within and beyond all relative manifestation. When we identify with the unlimited Source, rather than our individual story or ego-game, we participate in that absolute and unconditional freedom.