Free Will

[lmfao]

Yup, no free will. 

In the relative sense there's "choice" when your consciousness is sufficiently free of bondage and neurosis to pick a path freely. 

Keep your awareness focused approximately one inch below your navel as a meditative technique, during your life sometimes. And see if you notice an effect. 

Edited September 25, 2020 by lmfao

[Forestluv]

Just one perspective on this: neuroscientists are getting to the point that they can determine someone's decision before the person thinks they are making the decision. If every decision you make was made seconds before you think you made the decision, do you have free will? If your subconscious brain activity is making decisions, is that free will? It would be the same as asking if you have free will over your dreams. Let's say you wake up and remember a dream. Did you have free will over that dream?

For me, this stuff was freaky and uncomfortable to think about at first - yet now I kinda like it. 

[yetineti]

@Forestluv Do we have any free will over our subconscious? It makes sense to me that our subconscious is essentially causing determinism for us - but do we have any say in what it’s going to determine. 
 

I like the idea that I have choice. I also like the idea that I’m personally just ‘watching a movie of myself.’ But I haven’t experienced the truth of the question yet. 
 

Of course I wonder: If we were able to have choice in our subconscious wouldn’t that choice also just be determined by our subconscious ?? 
 

Sounds like we don’t have free will. Still I’ll wonder the point of anything then.

Fuck. Just to experience. Maybe I’m answering my own questions. Here I am wondering, ‘why do anything?’ but all the while maybe ‘anything’ has been doing me. 
 

Questions still tick though. Would it be my choice to embrace that I have no control or is that determined to?

[Breakingthewall]

3 hours ago, Moksha said:

"I" is an illusion, since Source is unified

It's an illusion but it's real during it exist. It's like a thought, if you observe you could see that there is nothing, and suddenly a thought appears, with a shape, a character. That "thing" that you create of the nothingness is something during a while, before it dissolves. True, it couldn't exist without the thinker, same that the illusion or reality couldn't exist without the self, but during it exist , is real, there is a duality. The source creates a duality, and in this duality you , illusion or not, exist, and have free will. It's only a game? Could be, or maybe there is a need, an objective. 

[Consept]

4 hours ago, Moksha said:

 

The only "choices" that feel completely independent  are those that arise out of Source. If I am Source, in a sense they are a choice. But "I" is an illusion, since Source is unified. So I can't say that I have free will at all.

But what about the double-split experiment? It almost seems like the individual photon makes a "choice" on which slit to travel through.

'seems like' is important, if you take an individual photon away from the main source and it acts in a certain way it would seem like its acting of its own accord, but for one why would their be an individual separate conscious entity behind that photon making decisions? 

I think it's the same for us we are, at least from our perspective, separated from source (although you could argue we're not really) we believe we have agency but really we can't do anything without there being some other cause for it 

[VeganAwake]

It doesn't matter...

And that's the freedom here...

 

[RedLine]

I would say yes and no at the same time.

It is a very weird paradox.

Basically what it means is that question doesn't make sense at all.

 

Edited September 25, 2020 by RedLine

[Moksha]

Truth is riddled with paradox. The human mind likes to discriminate between this and that, but maybe we have free will and we don't have free will in the same moment. The question of free will (or any other question really) is ultimately meaningless given that Source is nonconceptual.

It seems to me that the conditioned mind is inherently imprisoned. As long as we are identified with our conditioning, we cannot have free will. Everything we do, think, feel, or say is the result of our biological and behavioral programming.

What about the guru that has surrendered the conditioned mind and is one with Source? Even then, is it not Source working through the guru, rather than the guru himself doing the doing?