Now is the moment to take stock of this question. Where does Mahamudra lead?
It leads to a state in which the person is no longer controlled by the mind. All animals experience conditioning and the higher the animal in terms of the capacity to calculate, categorize and remember, the less conditioning is necessary. The great problem with the human creature is that there are two forces at work, the natural Life Force and the Identity. Each attempts to impose its own form of conditioning.
The Life Force conditioning is designed to permit potential growth in the system while the interests of Identity satiation are the prime conditioning force when Identity is present. In a human being with Identity present, his abilities to sense the world, memorize and categorize are superior to other animals. The only difference then becomes the complexity and range of conditioning which occurs. The normal human creature with Identity is like any other animal, almost completely conditioned. Thus the answer to the question of "Conditioning (determination) or free will", is that there is NO FREE WILL. The human creature with identity is 100 percent a victim of conditioning in its accepted sense.
The question is what is the state of the human system when the Identity is not present and the human creature is liberated from Identity and a Dual Mind.
The sytem automatically conditions for efficiency all that is frequent and conditions stimulus response chains in a complex array than works for the benefit of the organism. That means when equanimity is appropriate there is equanimity. When affect is correct then there is conditioned affect and when dis-affect is appropriate there will be conditioned dis-affect and appropriate action.
The question then is what happens when the organism meets infrequent stimuli without a clear prior set of information with regard to benefit to the system. It is a temptation to reply “free will” but that is not the case.
What occurs is that there is a random response, that is, a correct response not marked by reason. It is true that memory of beneficial and non-beneficial will delimit potential responses, but in the final analysis the system will respond randomly.
Actually this is just a word, for nothing is really random. What random really is is a combination of complex components of conditioning in such a way that a cause cannot be discerned. A purist may say that that indeed is conditioning, but in the classical sense it is not.
Normally we can point to classical conditioning naming a stimulus nd a response, but we know in Buddha Dharma that there is not a single cause that has a single response as a consequence. For every response there are innumerable causes from which we may indeed detect one as the principal.
It is the work of psychoanalysis to look for significant past causes, but this invariably fails to do anything but generate another comportment with unknown root causes.
But the random conditioning which we speak of here would require an enormous computer with incredible programs working at unknown velocity to match the Bio-computer that runs our Random Conditioning. The beauty of this random state is that it opens the door to a vast range of experiences and generates an outlet for the two great human traits of Curiosity and Creativity, which are the hallmark of a Bodhisattva and a realized person.
It is not easy to let go of Identity conditioning and allow the random state to hold sway, but that is what happens when Identity falls away and Mahamudra is encountered as the Primordial State, which then destroys the dual mind.
Mind-blowing for some… Mind-illuminating for others.