Three things I find very interesting about freewill (or not):
1. Freewill is an appearance in "what is" just like my nose is, my most private thought is, and the clouds are. There is no way to distinguish one thing from another in a fundamental way.
2. I always found the question of freewill moot because how would I tell the appearance of freewill (I can click submit on this or not, freely) from the "actuality" of freewill? There's no difference that I can see.
3. Most importantly, we SEEM to have freewill, so we must act like we do. If we don't, we are not honoring (taking fully into account) our actual lived experience. We are denying or ignoring an unavoidable and incontrovertible aspect of what it means to be experiencing this aliveness.
Yes. Thank you VG. I will comment on all three points:
1. "There is no way to distinguish one thing from another in a fundamental way." This, in my view, is a clear statement of non-duality, and has the advantage over most non-dual dogma of easy verification through observation and understanding. Quoting Louise March:
We Are Blessed
Take a fish from water,
It is not a fish anymore.
Fish is part of water,
He can only be alive in his element.
Take air from a man,
He is not a man any longer.
Air is his element,
He is part of it.
We all take it in,
We all breathe it out.
It changes us,
We change it.
Where is mine or thine?
Where is greed or glory?
We search so far—it is so near.
When we meet it,
We shiver and bless it.
And we are blessed
We are blessed to discover,
Something so good, so real,
Could be found in this life.
2. Yes. Many non-duality buffs use the word "appearance" to mean something like "not completely real." Since everything we humans think, feel, or otherwise perceive is an appearance, they conclude that our lives are not "completely real," or that we are "just dreaming" this world. Really? And you know that how exactly?
3. I did not ask to be here. I don’t know why I am here. I know nothing about any
purpose to living, nor about “God,” karma, afterlife, the meaning of dreams—
none of it. Absolutely nothing.
I simply flow along naturally, doing what seems necessary as best I can. For me, there are no mistakes, or “bad choices.” What is, simply is, and must be the way it is, including what I think I have chosen.
Nevertheless, if you think you have a choice, choose wisely, I say.
An old post but I've only just read your chapter on free-will and had some thoughts.
'Choose' as a verb seems absurd given my understanding of what you said in the chapter.
It occurs to me that a good example of how much 'choosing' we do or do not do is demonstrated viscerally in who we find physically attractive or not.
Given a choice of a number of people that I'd never seen before to take out on date, for example (I'm married, happily, so this is purely hypothetical), I'd 'choose' the one I found most attractive, no thought required. Over and over again I'd make the same 'choice' because that's the wiring I had at that point in time. Rinse, repeat, same result and infinitum.
So rather than 'choices' they are simply possibilities? There is a choice of X number of possibilities but I don't 'choose' one. In fact they are only possibilities to everyone else observing the process. For me they wouldn't even be that.
To a certain extent yes, but not entirely. What you see, feel, and think IS you. There is not truly a "myself" that looks at a group of people and finds one attractive. That is just a manner of speaking, but most of us take it to be a fact. It isn't.
The feeling of being oneself, the ability to see things, the things seen, and the feelings that arise from that seeing are just aspects of one, undivisible experience--an ongoing experience that we call "me." But that "me" has no firm, free-standing existence. It is made up of multiple factors, all of which are changeable and momentary. Those factors have no lasting power, and so "myself" doesn't either. The myself of this moment will be gone in the next, and can never come back again.
Hi Robert, I truly appreciate the possibility to ask questions and have responses. Wonderful!
I'm now half way through your book, in which I see the repetition of what you had to remind me of here in your second paragraph. You must get a little tired of that for which I apologise. I thought I was grasping that idea when I posed my question. That of what 'I' am. Only ever that of which is a tangle of present experience right now.
I've reread my question and your subsequent response a couple of times over to try and clarify a little where I tripped up. I suppose I should have concluded by saying that I would have found myself at a restaurant table with a certain person because of what I was feeling in that moment?
There is a delicious subtly here that I can almost grasp. 'I' think. Thanks once again. 🙏
You seem to get it just fine. You would have "found yourself at the table"--not because you actually chose to be there but because that is what occurred. It's that simple. Things are as they are, including what we see, think, and feel. No one is making perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. They just occur. They are what they are, and we are that.
Thank you Robert for your availability and willingness to help others. 💚 I'm encouraged to keep learning so as to nudge future happenings into possibly better outcomes.
But for now, if you mean free ourselves entirely, I'd say no. But this is a matter of degree. At one end of the spectrum are the great masses of humans who never even see how deeply their minds are programmed, and have no idea that there is anything to be free from. At the other end are those of us who are acutely aware that most of what we feel are my thoughts, my ideas, my feelings, were imposed upon us before the age of reason by our caregivers who were transmitting to us their own programming, usually uncritically.
Even if one is aware and deeply self-observant and self-critical, no one can be free entirely of cultural baggage. Some of it is unconscious entirely and cannot be made conscious, and some of it is necessary for us to function in the world without falling into despair for if we fully understood that all of our imagined accomplishments and interests serve primarily as a strategy of denial, we would not be able to act at all.
Denial that everything that is born will die.
Denial that nothing that I think I have, nothing that I think I am, has any permanence whatsoever. It never did, and it never will.
Three things I find very interesting about freewill (or not):
1. Freewill is an appearance in "what is" just like my nose is, my most private thought is, and the clouds are. There is no way to distinguish one thing from another in a fundamental way.
2. I always found the question of freewill moot because how would I tell the appearance of freewill (I can click submit on this or not, freely) from the "actuality" of freewill? There's no difference that I can see.
3. Most importantly, we SEEM to have freewill, so we must act like we do. If we don't, we are not honoring (taking fully into account) our actual lived experience. We are denying or ignoring an unavoidable and incontrovertible aspect of what it means to be experiencing this aliveness.
Yes. Thank you VG. I will comment on all three points:
1. "There is no way to distinguish one thing from another in a fundamental way." This, in my view, is a clear statement of non-duality, and has the advantage over most non-dual dogma of easy verification through observation and understanding. Quoting Louise March:
We Are Blessed
Take a fish from water,
It is not a fish anymore.
Fish is part of water,
He can only be alive in his element.
Take air from a man,
He is not a man any longer.
Air is his element,
He is part of it.
We all take it in,
We all breathe it out.
It changes us,
We change it.
Where is mine or thine?
Where is greed or glory?
We search so far—it is so near.
When we meet it,
We shiver and bless it.
And we are blessed
We are blessed to discover,
Something so good, so real,
Could be found in this life.
2. Yes. Many non-duality buffs use the word "appearance" to mean something like "not completely real." Since everything we humans think, feel, or otherwise perceive is an appearance, they conclude that our lives are not "completely real," or that we are "just dreaming" this world. Really? And you know that how exactly?
3. I did not ask to be here. I don’t know why I am here. I know nothing about any
purpose to living, nor about “God,” karma, afterlife, the meaning of dreams—
none of it. Absolutely nothing.
I simply flow along naturally, doing what seems necessary as best I can. For me, there are no mistakes, or “bad choices.” What is, simply is, and must be the way it is, including what I think I have chosen.
Nevertheless, if you think you have a choice, choose wisely, I say.
An old post but I've only just read your chapter on free-will and had some thoughts.
'Choose' as a verb seems absurd given my understanding of what you said in the chapter.
It occurs to me that a good example of how much 'choosing' we do or do not do is demonstrated viscerally in who we find physically attractive or not.
Given a choice of a number of people that I'd never seen before to take out on date, for example (I'm married, happily, so this is purely hypothetical), I'd 'choose' the one I found most attractive, no thought required. Over and over again I'd make the same 'choice' because that's the wiring I had at that point in time. Rinse, repeat, same result and infinitum.
So rather than 'choices' they are simply possibilities? There is a choice of X number of possibilities but I don't 'choose' one. In fact they are only possibilities to everyone else observing the process. For me they wouldn't even be that.
Am I grasping this concept as intended?
To a certain extent yes, but not entirely. What you see, feel, and think IS you. There is not truly a "myself" that looks at a group of people and finds one attractive. That is just a manner of speaking, but most of us take it to be a fact. It isn't.
The feeling of being oneself, the ability to see things, the things seen, and the feelings that arise from that seeing are just aspects of one, undivisible experience--an ongoing experience that we call "me." But that "me" has no firm, free-standing existence. It is made up of multiple factors, all of which are changeable and momentary. Those factors have no lasting power, and so "myself" doesn't either. The myself of this moment will be gone in the next, and can never come back again.
Hi Robert, I truly appreciate the possibility to ask questions and have responses. Wonderful!
I'm now half way through your book, in which I see the repetition of what you had to remind me of here in your second paragraph. You must get a little tired of that for which I apologise. I thought I was grasping that idea when I posed my question. That of what 'I' am. Only ever that of which is a tangle of present experience right now.
I've reread my question and your subsequent response a couple of times over to try and clarify a little where I tripped up. I suppose I should have concluded by saying that I would have found myself at a restaurant table with a certain person because of what I was feeling in that moment?
There is a delicious subtly here that I can almost grasp. 'I' think. Thanks once again. 🙏
You seem to get it just fine. You would have "found yourself at the table"--not because you actually chose to be there but because that is what occurred. It's that simple. Things are as they are, including what we see, think, and feel. No one is making perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. They just occur. They are what they are, and we are that.
Thank you Robert for your availability and willingness to help others. 💚 I'm encouraged to keep learning so as to nudge future happenings into possibly better outcomes.
Hi Robert, I'm not sure this is the right place to ask questions but I don't know any other site where I could address some queries.
My question is:
Do you think it is possible to free ourselves from this cultural and social imprint in us or we are doomed to be just that?
If you have Facebook, here is where I reply to questions most fully:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/3633907716835096
But for now, if you mean free ourselves entirely, I'd say no. But this is a matter of degree. At one end of the spectrum are the great masses of humans who never even see how deeply their minds are programmed, and have no idea that there is anything to be free from. At the other end are those of us who are acutely aware that most of what we feel are my thoughts, my ideas, my feelings, were imposed upon us before the age of reason by our caregivers who were transmitting to us their own programming, usually uncritically.
Even if one is aware and deeply self-observant and self-critical, no one can be free entirely of cultural baggage. Some of it is unconscious entirely and cannot be made conscious, and some of it is necessary for us to function in the world without falling into despair for if we fully understood that all of our imagined accomplishments and interests serve primarily as a strategy of denial, we would not be able to act at all.
Denial that everything that is born will die.
Denial that nothing that I think I have, nothing that I think I am, has any permanence whatsoever. It never did, and it never will.
Be well.
Thank You.