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Lan of Karma
master who is in us. We have the freedom of surrendering ourselves to the feet of God.
It depends on how one defines free will. If it is a will free of all laws, man has no such will. Plenty of it will turn the cosmos into chaos. We all know about the presence of consciousness within us but even though ignorant of us act such as they do not know. Such is the case with regard to the freedom of will.
Gandhiji's belief in the Law of Karma does not imply that he considers man's life and activities to be completely determined. Freedom of will is considered by Gandhiji as a necessary postulate of morality. The real question is not whether behaviour is free or not for it is obvious that every behaviour being a response to some given stimulus, must be in some sense determined. The question is how it is determined; whether it is determined from within or from without the self? When we say that behaviour is "free", what we really mean is, not that it is undetermined, but that the self acts as a whole, making the action of its own, taking full responsibility.
Such self-determined action is to be contrasted with the action at the instinctive level, where action is determined in a quasireflex manner. In the first type of action, we recognise personal volition; in the other, we see a creature of impulse. Mere mechanical action, performed under the influence of blind impulse or custom, cannot, therefore, be moral. According to Gandhiji, “No action which is not voluntary can be called moral. So long as we act like machines, there is no question of morality. If we want to call an action moral, it should have been done consciously and as a matter of duty."38
Closely connected with the problem of free will, is the problem of evil. Gandhiji says that the presence of evil cannot be accounted for by any rational method. It is real only from the limited human standpoint. For God, there is nothing good, nothing evil. But one point must here be understood that the relativity of good and evil is not acceptable to him, for its introduction to problems of actual life would lead us morally astray. In his words, “Good and evil are for human purposes, from each other distinct and incompatible, being symbolic of light and darkness, ...'33
