Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
Maharshi, and I think that underlying my question maybe a
stylelist difference. But I find when I'm sharing with others on
these topics, and for example when I posit that there ultimately is
no free will, I'm not sure that this really matters, but I'm
challenged by my friends and, for example, my girlfriend
sometimes, she'll call me basically a fundamentalist in that I don't
really feel that in the absolute sense there's really any room for
difference of opinion about the fact that there is no free will in the
absolute sense, at the bottom line there's no free will. Does this
make me a fundamentalist, or are there certain things that you too
feel are just absolutely true, and you don't really see the wiggle
room around those things? And if you do how do you deal with
folks who feel that everything is relative, and there's lots of room
for discussion on topics like ultimately free will, like how do you
know you're right, it'll say to you?
NICK GANCITANO: Yes. The Neo-Advaitic movement gives a lot
of room, a lot of wiggle room, for the mind to try to misinterpret
these things. And so in order to be as clear as possible, depending
on where we get our information and the state that we're in, we
receive that information is of the utmost importance, more so than
the actual information itself. If I'm in an extremely receptive state,
and that information falls or lands on my ears, then I will
contemplate that and recognize that it's not so much whether or
not there is a state of free will, it's more because there really isn't
free will or predestination, that neither one of them really exists in
the absolute, because they both exist in the level of mind.
WIZARD: Yes.
NICK GANCITANO: And so as long as there is a sense of doer, or
that I am doing it, then the notion of free will can't really be
tolerated. You see, the idea that I have free will supposes that
there's an individual there that has free will, and this is when that
question is generally asked, and when it's answered in a way that
you probably perceived it on the clip you saw, that was more than
likely the case for the person who is asking it. And as far as there
being any of those things, the thought really never occurs from the
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