Thoughts on Contingency

[Dimmesdale]

I will be blunt. I do not, at least at first glance, like the word "contingent."

In one sense, how could anything in the world be contingent? How could anything be subject to chance? Isn't "chance" simply a function of our ignorance of causation?

If you believe in free will or karma, then you can say that what one suffers or enjoys is contingent on a prior choice one made in the past. Fair enough. But, even then, that karma, the effects of free will, are necessary for whoever bears its brunt. We are all connected in a broad nexus of causes. For this reason, I prefer the term dependent rather than contingent. It takes the superstition out, so to speak.

I now believe that we could have chosen a different destiny, prior to time. I do not think this variation is true of God. God cannot but be as He is. He is what is. There is no shade of variance with him. But, for finite beings, since we sit at the margins between the Infinite and the paltry finite, we have that bent, that trajectory, that tendency to cheat....

But once our will is cast into the Bronze of fixed Actuality, then, we are at the mercy of so many causes that affect us and influence the future trajectory of our will. Those causes and their effects are not contingent. They are wedded into the very social sphere of the actual world.

[Dimmesdale]

But then, are we free here and now?

We are free only insofar as we turn our heads and choose what is obvious. When we surrender to the truth.

It is in that sense a choiceless choice.

It is a choice, since it is active and unobstructed.

It is choiceless in the sense that it is unconditional and absolutely natural. Not relative to fear, compulsion, guilt, neurosis, etc.

We do not need to work ourselves up into an emotional frenzy. We must but be natural to who and what we are and seek out the truth with the best light we have. And that involves entering our own soul. And the soul of our soul.

If something by its very nature seems repellant to that highest of realities, we cannot but shirk it, avoid it. The self cannot endure the nonsensical, the absurd. To be true to freedom is to be true to the purest source of our being.