Perceiving Reality: Free Will

Free will, determinism, and predetermination are encountered by Perceiving Reality. The structure of our ״I״ is explained as embedded within four factors that determine our characteristics and behavior from within our genes and from our environment.

Transcript

Perceiving Reality: Free Will

We don’t know which of our actions are actually free and which we just have an illusion of freedom. Because we’re blind to the laws and forces that manage us we assume that there is no management at all - and this gap in our perception is what we feel as free will.

But we have no freedom of will at all except in one thing, other than that everything we do is dictated to us by inner and outer nature and defined by four factors.

In order to discover where our freedom really lies we need to look at a level of life below ours to catch these four factors at work.

Let’s look at a seed of wheat

1. The First Factor: the Bed, the First Matter

You can take that seed and bury it in the ground, it will decompose and the body of the seed disappears but the information about the qualities that are going to develop doesn’t die with the old form, it gets transferred into a new one – and that information is the primary cause of everything that follows.

Likewise a drop of semen contains the abstract force from our ancestors. And we come into the world with their accumulated knowledge, physical and mental qualities that we feel as our own subconscious tendencies. But they aren’t ours, they’re installed in us and we can’t choose or change them in any way.

2. The Second Factor: the Cause and Effect that Stem from Itself

So now the information in the seed receives a new form, but the form doesn’t change the information. It will never become an apple tree or a squash. It only develops the qualities it carries from the seed. The only change that happens is in quality or quantity but it can only grow as a stalk of wheat.

Geneticists tell us that there is a gene for everything, even what we consider our deepest personal wishes. They’ve identified which genes predispose a person to good or criminal behavior, to addiction, to sexual response, The inner system we think of as our I is a fixed set of qualities controlled by a program that switches them either to the positive or negative. We have no direct influence on that program.

3. The Third Factor: the Inner Cause and Effect

How well the stalk of wheat grows depends on specific external factors that work directly on its essence and programming for better or worse; the amount of sunlight, rain and minerals in the soil. A different set of minerals won’t provide the right nourishment to make good quality wheat. All these forces must be there and no others.

Our inherited program of desires thoughts and attitudes develop positively or negatively depending on our family, which we don’t choose, and the way they bring us up and on how and where we’re educated. We’re helpless as children so all this is done for us by them, which compels us to be influenced by a constant chain of interactions with their characters, ideas and values. So what ever we are will be the result of agreeing with or reacting against these forces but we can’t change the laws that transform our essence or how they do that, and there’s no free will here either.

4. Cause and Effect through Alien Forces

These are environmental forces that unlike rain and minerals don’t have any direct relationship to the wheat. Forces like hail, wind and other plants influence all of the other er 3 factors as a whole.

Obviously a plant can’t get up and move but for us regardless of the fact that we don’t determine any of the first three factors in our development, we can influence all of them only by the choosing our surroundings. It is our single point of freedom in the physical world, and it’s from this point that we can harness these laws, to sling us in the direction of our goal. A person can have negative or weak first and second factors, and just by placing those factors and the system of development in the proper environment, the quality of development can be enhanced and its speed accelerated enormously. The worth of our life is judged only by this, because once having chosen the environment all of these laws again kick in and that environment then shapes all our future conditions. 

As spirits, human beings have not yet really taken possession of their physical body

"As spirits, human beings have not yet really taken possession of their physical body. They drag it around, they are weighed down by it, crushed by it, sometimes even stifled by it, but it cannot be said they have settled into it, for it is not a dwelling that is worthy of them. So, in the meantime, the spirit (or rather, what is considered the spirit) walks around with the body, like a right pair, stumbling around, arm in arm... You'll say, 'What a sight!' Well, yes, human beings are indeed quite a sight all the while they are unaware of what their spirit and their body represent and of the work they both have to do together. 

But since you know what this work is, do your best to free the divine principle within you, so that it can rise as high as possible and, on its way back down, purify and illuminate its dwelling-place. Your physical body, along with your astral and mental bodies, is the dwelling through which your spirit must one day be able to manifest."

Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov

Pour les humains, la difficulté est que bien souvent chacun vit dans son monde

Pour les humains, la difficulté est que bien souvent chacun vit dans son monde, avec son point de vue, sa conviction, son opinion, sa vérité. Chacun pense posséder l'attitude et la réponse justes pour tout le monde et pour tous les mondes. En fait, chaque point de vue devient vrai dans le monde dans lequel il est appliqué. Les hommes s'isolent ainsi les uns des autres et ne se comprennent plus. Chacun a raison et part de son côté, gardant avec lui la ferme conviction qu'il est dans le vrai et le juste. Chacun vit dans des régions différentes avec une vision et une compréhension spécifiques, mais ce n'est pas forcément la vision de l'intelligence supérieure. 

O. Manitara

Where Is My Soul?

In the material world, everyone has a body with its fulfillments.We are separated from each other by biological bodies, and psychologically, each of us perceives themselves as an individual personality.

In spirituality, everything is constantly changing by going from one state to another; the Light and the vessel are always different. We “clothe” in a certain state and name ourselves in accordance with it as actors who change cosumes for new roles. It is as if we are in a science fiction movie where we play a variety of characters.

There is no such notion as a “private, permanent soul” that exists autonomously, climbs the ladder, and preserves its individuality. It’s hard for us to understand how our “self” disappears. For example, it is said in the article “600,000 Souls” that each person who corrects his soul will uncover Malchut to the world and will be named King David.

Micheal Laitman PHD

http://www.laitman.com/

What knowledge, what understanding of life can we acquire if weare not free, inwardly free?

"What knowledge, what understanding of life can we acquire if we

are not free, inwardly free? It is the absence of inner freedom

that prevents humans from discovering the essential truths they

need in order to orient themselves in life.

So many men and women consider freedom to be the most precious

possession, and they will fight to achieve it! Yes, but what they seek is not the freedom that can give them the living knowledge

able to sustain them and save them. On the contrary, they are

engaged in activities that enslave them and blind them. It is as

if they were walking through a magnificent landscape or garden

but were so weighed down with worries and grief they were unable

to see any of it. All the wonders of heaven and earth are there,

all around them and within them, but to see them and understand

them they would have to be free, inwardly free."

Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov

Bouncing Up

Why does Man destroy? Why does he wreak havoc in the world?

This world was designed so that there is no progress forward without first a step backward. Night comes before day, pain before pleasure, confusion before wisdom.

But then God made man, who strives beyond the design of things,who yearns to leap past nature, to embrace the infinite.

Man, too, must first fall so that he can leap upward. But since his leap is beyond nature, he must first fall beneath it.

That is sin—a fall beneath nature.

And that is the power of return—to leap beyond nature.

T. Freeman