Philosophical Speculations

Simon Adams wrote: ↑Sun Jan 24, 2021 11:19 am Yes we act according to our nature, but that’s a moderately strong constraint rather than a determination. Our evolved instinct is for survival, but people still commit suicide for example.

The question is whether it is in our nature to be or become free in any meaningful sense. To "become who we are" as Nietsche put it. Under idealism, it is very likely because the nature of thinking, at its 'highest' level, is unconditioned by external forces. Under pragmatism, it is True because we cannot function long-term as the goal directed social creatures we are without embodying it as a metaphysical axiom. Under all views, most people believe themselves and others to be metaphysicslly free, because that's how they conduct their lives.

Starbuck wrote: ↑Sat Jan 23, 2021 5:03 pm With the belief in doership, we always have a nagging sense that life could have been different than it was or is. All human suffering arises when that could becomes a 'should'. Wants or desires are not the problem - it the false idea that life 'should' go 'our' way.

It is quite correct to say that people can suffer as a result of their false ideas but it doesn't make sense to claim that if ones feels himself as a doer, this automatically leads to increase in suffering.
I can have a notion of doer and yet, perfectly avoid the unnecessary suffering of "should have gone that way" by making the simple observation that the past I cannot change. I live with the consequences of my actions. Neither doer, nor nondoer can change the past.

But I most certainly can try to avoid the same future mistakes. In this sense the "nagging sense that life could have been different" is the most helpful thing that I can have. Not in order to grieve for how things may have gone but to learn from my experiences and guide my actions differently in the future. I'll never even know that I've made a mistake if I can't compare the outcomes of my actions with how things could have gone if I have acted differently. This is simple common sense.

The fact that I feel myself causally related to the unfoldment of experiences in no way forces me to direct them towards domains of suffering. This simply doesn't make sense. If I apply my thoughts and actions in erroneous ways - yes, I'll suffer - but so will the nondoer, even if he doesn't believe to have anything to do with these thoughts and actions.



The fact that I feel causally related to my thoughts is a fact of direct experience. This no one in his right mind will deny. The argue is whether this direct experience is just a movie playback.

Now when I reach the conclusion that the causality within thinking is an illusion, how exactly I do that? Through thinking! I have thought that out. No matter if I've read that somewhere or I came to it myself, I've reached a specific idea within my cognizing activity. The content of that idea is "You have nothing to do with this very process, the end result of which you are now experiencing".

Let's imagine the thinking process as a living tree from which fruits grow - the fruits are the end results of judgments. We find the above thought as one such fruit. Now we fully merge with this fruit and say "I have nothing to do with the thinking tree, I'm just experiencing its fruit".

OK. So far so good. It's a fact of experience that I'm able to think the above fruit-though without paying attention to the thinking itself and as a result it feels as it simply pops into existence as predetermined by the Cosmos.

The problem arises when I try to prove in some way that this fruit that I'm now experiencing is somehow a fundamental, certain truth. But this I cannot do. I can only experience the indifference to the thought process as long as I myself support that indifference. My idea in no way explains how and why the feeling of causality within thinking exists. I simply repel that feeling and that's how the problem is "solved". In this way, the most that the nondoer can prove is that "causality within thinking ceases to exist when I choose not to perceive it". The further part "... and thus causality within thinking is an illusion" is simply a logical fallacy.

This is the first thing - that determinists/nondoers consider that it is somehow self-evident fact that the feeling of causality in thinking is an illusion. I have nothing against if the determinists/nondoers say the they believe that it is an illusion but to show that this is a certain fact of the given, they'll have to do more than that.
* Exactly Dana's point from her last post

The second thing is about the the foggy link between nondoer/determinism and suffering or more generally - moral life.

I've already covered this in the response to Brad. There's simply no point of contact between determinism/nondoer and morality. The idea that suffering should be reduced, is something completely unrelated. Suffering can be reduced by both doers and nondoers. To claim that determinism (as a philosophical principle) leads to reduction of suffering simply doesn't make sense. I can be a barbarian and it can be predetermined at the Big Bang that I'll slay a whole village of women and children. The simple idea of nondoer can never lead in itself to ideas like Karma and compassion.

Moral life is something that man pursues on completely different grounds. There's nothing in being a doer that forces me to degrade morally, neither there's anything in being nondoer that guarantees that I'll elevate. It's about moral ideals. At every step I conduct my life by allowing my highest ideals flow in me as moral imagination and turn into deeds. Both doers and nondoers experience this in the same way. As a matter of fact, we can think of ourselves as doers or nondoers only after the deed, when we look in retrospect towards it and ask if it has anything to do with us, who now experience the memory of it. In this sense, all quarrels about doers/nondoers waste our human energies. We do not become a moral being when we believe that we are or are not the author of actions but by envisioning a high ideal, stimulating moral imagination, leading to free deeds out of Love.

Cleric K wrote: ↑Sun Jan 24, 2021 1:29 pm

It is quite correct to say that people can suffer as a result of their false ideas but it doesn't make sense to claim that if ones feels himself as a doer, this automatically leads to increase in suffering.
I can have a notion of doer and yet, perfectly avoid the unnecessary suffering of "should have gone that way" by making the simple observation that the past I cannot change. I live with the consequences of my actions. Neither doer, nor nondoer can change the past.

You are correct, the 'feeling' of being the doer is not the problem. If we look at our experience, that feeling comes and goes. When we are in a flow state, there is no sense of 'I' controlling it. Often when we focus in on something, that sense comes back in strongly.

Non dual spiritual traditions would argue that after enlightenment, that coming and going still continues. What has disappeared is the clinging to any experience as belonging to a separate entity that is independent of the totality. So there is not a being that can choose to cling or not cling. Suffering is the byproduct of an imaginary self that seeks resolution out of outcomes and the tenacious quest for self preservation. Through spiritual training (conditioning) the false identity ruthlessly metacognises its experience, dispassionately noting evidence (or lock thereof) for anything resembling permanence, autonomous independent selfhood, or the conceit that any outcome can bring lasting fulfillment or happiness.

'It' thinks it is liberating itself. However it is more accurate to say that conditions have transpired to allow for self enquiry. Then preferences and choices remain, but the 'clinging of should' has gone, and along with it suffering and ignorance.

Cleric, I strongly disagree with your last post...

Cleric K wrote: ↑Sun Jan 24, 2021 1:29 pm * Exactly Dana's point from her last post

...you 'misgendered' Dana! I may have to report your comment to Dana for that one

Other than that, well said!

Eugene I wrote: ↑Sun Jan 24, 2021 1:19 pm In other words, ultimate freedom is an unachievable ideal, in reality there's only a degree of freedom, but what we can realistically do is to realize our ability to have unconditioned choices and learn to increase the degree of our internal freedom and the ability to make such unconditioned choices.

Eugene ... I basically concur, in that most often it's a case of 'both/and' to some degree or another. For example, if there's an option on offer of either alfredo or tomato sauce, with declining both being an option as well, and there's no actual preference for either, how is there no freedom whatsoever in going with one or the other, even as there may always be some degree of conditioning involved ~ i.e. one being reared in a house where alfredo was never on offer, which could conceivably have some subconscious influence? Still, it seems there can be no definitive, unequivocal, irrefutable case made denying freedom in such cases.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Jan 24, 2021 3:19 pm ...you 'misgendered' Dana! I may have to report your comment to Dana for that one

Duly noted ... Good thing I'm well-wedded to the anima.

Starbuck wrote: ↑Sun Jan 24, 2021 2:13 pm 'It' thinks it is liberating itself. However it is more accurate to say that conditions have transpired to allow for self enquiry.

I'm sure that while you're typing on the keyboard you can completely dissociate and look at the letters appearing on the screen and say "there - that's the state of the Universe unfolding. The movie of life. No doer whatsoever". My whole point was that when one expresses it in this way he focuses on something specific within his soul contents and then declares it fundamental. In a similar sense I can say "The color of red is the fundamental reality. Yeah, I agree that other colors also come and go but this one is the primary".

At every point of our conscious experience we are in an act of becoming. We constantly cast our current state of being as a memory and become our next. It can be said that we can experience this in a twofold manner.

First, we can look towards the past and have our "back" on the future. We are preoccupied with perceiving our past states as they are cast away from us and go further and further into memory. This is to look towards the pole of perceptions. Our own thought perceptions are also in the past in relation to our current being which perceives them.

Second, we can look towards the future and have our "back" at the past. This is the pole of will. Imagine that you try to remember something. You don't have it on the screen of your consciousness - if you did, you would just perceive it from there. Instead you are looking for it. You are looking to become something, to become the state of being where you experience the thing you are looking for. Now you are actively pushing your way towards the future. You are not interested in landing in just any state. You are pushing, groping towards the dark unknown of the future but you have very specific vision of what future you want to realize. Then if you succeed to become the state that you are looking for, you immediately "turn your back around" towards the perception and it is already into the past.

Now these are perfectly valid introspective observations that anyone can make. It is just that in your psyche you have formed a preference to always stay with your back on the pole of the will and focus entirely on the perceptions flowing towards the past as rigid, immutable facts. Of course in everyday life you constantly work with the pole of will, when solving problems, etc. You constantly feel that you are pushing towards a certain direction of becoming. But as far as you philosophical seat, it's bolted to look always towards the past.

These are experiences as valid, as red and blue. In themselves they don't say anything whether from some outside-of-the-universe perspective they are truly determined or not but as long as our experiences go, we can most certainly feel, when actively engaged in thinking, remembering, etc., the causative becoming into our next state of being.

Now since I suppose you don't have access to this outside-of-the-universe perspective, which could be the only sure confirmation of the facts, you would have to explain how do you know, as a self-evident fact, that bolting your philosophical seat only towards the past states is the only valid perspective and respectively, why the experiences which we can have when the seat is turned into the other direction are illusionary.

Now if you say "Because I feel more comfortably when looking only towards the past and avoiding the trouble of becoming" I'll shake you hand and the discussion ends. Everyone is free to take any position they want. It's not my desire to cause discomfort to anybody.

But if you insist that your perspective is somehow the only one leading to truthful picture of reality, you'll have to convince everyone else, whose seats are not yet bolted in any direction, why they should do so. Or in other words - why only red and not both red and blue.

Similar to freedom having nothing to do with determinism, it also has nothing to do with doership and reality of self. It's a misconception that for there to be freedom, there must be a "doer" or "self" who exercises such freedom. If freedom is understood as an ability of consciousness to act and make choices free of conditioning, it has nothing to do with the existence of a "doer" or "choice maker" in consciousness. But for some reason many people think that those things are related and freedom of action or choice implies and requires the existence of the "doer" or "choice maker".

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Jan 24, 2021 3:19 pm ...you 'misgendered' Dana! I may have to report your comment to Dana for that one

Ooops... my sincere apologies, Dana

Blame it on the boogie... and the English language. In my native language you would have been been exposed through grammatical gender

Cleric K wrote: ↑Sun Jan 24, 2021 4:15 pm

But if you insist that your perspective is somehow the only one leading to truthful picture of reality, you'll have to convince everyone else, whose seats are not yet bolted in any direction, why they should do so. Or in other words - why only red and not both red and blue.

I think ultimately we are all looking for peace, so that should be the final arbiter, no what another thinks or wants us to believe. As a previous poster said, these age old paradoxes get transcended by enquiry, as Ramana also said:

D.: Has man any Free-Will or is everything in his life predestined and preordained?
M.: Free-Will holds the field in association with individuality. As long as individuality lasts so long there is Free-Will. All the teachings are based on this fact and they advise directing the Free-Will in the right channel. Find out to whom Free-Will or Destiny matters. Abide in it. Then these two are transcended. That is the only purpose of discussing these questions. To whom do these questions arise? Find out and be at peace.