Ray: If the dharma for all human beings is doing good and being good, it still manifests itself differently for different people. Are the differences in our dharmas based on choices we make—on free will—or is our specific dharma something with which we’re born?
Wayne: We’re all individualized expressions of God, of oneness. We do have personality differences. Everyone who has had more than one child knows that they come in with personalities. The moment they come in—some come in screaming, some sleep through that first night and stay peaceful the rest of their lives—you see the differences. It gives me pause to think about past lives and those kinds of things.
Free will is something that people struggle with so much, but it’s very simple to me. Carl Jung said at the same moment you’re a protagonist in your own life making choices, you also are the spear carrier, or the extra, in a much larger drama. You’ve got to live with these two opposite ideas at the same time.
Basically we’re living with opposite ideas all the time. We’re sitting here in this room, and we see each other’s bodies. We know that we are physical manifestations—physical beings. We also know that each of us in this room is a nonphysical being.
We have minds. We have thoughts that are happening right now. You can’t see them. You can’t touch them. There’s no substance to them. They have no boundaries. You can’t get a hold of them.
So there’s a part of you that you can get a hold of, and there’s a part of you that you can never get a hold of, and those are opposite things. Who are you? Which one are you? You are combinations of opposites.
The Bhagavad Gita speaks about combining the opposites—about fusing, or melting if you will, into the oneness. I think we have a free will, and at the same moment we don’t. We have to live with that.
It doesn’t make sense intellectually, but that’s because our intellect is always trying to come up with a logical, rational explanation for things. To do that, it puts labels on things. But once you label something, you’ve got twoness. You’ve got the label, and you’ve got what you’re labeling. And there is only oneness in the universe, even though we artificially believe in twoness.
*Read a selection of interviews, including key excerpts from the full interview with Wayne, on my website, www.hemachandra.com, and read an earlier interview with Dr. Dyer on his site, www.drwaynedyer.com.
Ray Hemachandra at Golden Moon Circles 