There was an interesting survey of philosophy faculty and PhD’s a while back where it was asked: " Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?" 233 of 1803 respondents (12.9%) answered “Accept or lean toward: no free will.” Most respondents (1004 / 1803 (55.7%)) answered “Accept or lean toward: compatibilism.” I think that’s helpful to show what the general feeling is on this topic among the subset of experts in the field.
Obvious disclaimer: philosophical questions are not determined by consensus.
Right! While I agree that “philosophical questions are not determined by consensus” - it does highlight the concept that all of these philosophical frameworks exist in a Marketplace of Ideas - and that when we adopt one of the available options we are - in a sense - consuming those ideas because something about them appeals to us.
I hope you’ll forgive that I’m enjoying the discussion anyway.
Please help me understand what you mean by accidents. Incidents that happen outside of causality…?
And vice versa
I’m expounding the conceptual framework that I’m introducing in this thread. Someone took issue with “destiny” being a “divine” concept of sorts, so I explained that in this context, destiny simply means that each moment is the necessary causal result of the preceding moment. Someone else took issue with the notion that spiritual teachings (or at least this one) aim at dissolving all beliefs rather than just false ones, so I tried to explain why all beliefs are considered to be “false” (or, at least, can never be known to be absolutely true) in the context of this framework. So yeah, at a minimum I think I can say I’m trying not to just reiterate something I’ve already said.
I tried above, and maybe this won’t move around much in this debate either, but Roger Castillo says it’s necessary to distinguish between beliefs and concepts. People hold their beliefs to be absolutely true. The concepts put forward in this framework instead are intended as pointers, meant to offer a different perspective than the one we’ve been conditioned to view Life from since we were children.
Concepts are not absolute truth, nor can they be. Language can only ever point at what reality is like, never describe truth directly. The one thing I will reiterate here is that the only absolute truth you can ever know is the nature of your own experience, with consciousness at the heart of it. For instance: Can you even know (rather than just infer) that anyone else but you is conscious? That is really just a belief you have, and like all beliefs, it cannot be proven or disproved as you worded it.
In short: The framework isn’t intended to be taken as a set of “truths” to believe in, it’s simply trying to offer a change in perspective. Once it “clicks” (unbroken peace of mind), the concepts don’t need to stay in place.
Why not? As I suggested in the first post, the feeling of free will is a gift. Even when “personal doership” is recognized as a false belief, the experience still feels as though we are free to do whatever we choose in each moment. The only advice Roger ever gives is “in each moment, do exactly what you feel or think to do.” Peace of mind doesn’t mean apathy
Not sure what you’re getting at here… my answer would be yes. Why not…?
Yes, whatever I’m doing was destined all along and I’m free to spend my money drinking, doing piles of drugs, quitting my job, leaving all my responsibilities, moving to another city… Still not sure what you’re getting at?
Not sure what you’re getting at with this either, but I’ll happily answer anyway. I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, became an atheist around age 15 or 16 (“why would a loving God condemn and punish my uncle for something he didn’t choose (being homosexual)?”), started getting vague notions of pantheism (“everything is God is everything”) in my early 20s when I started taking psychedelics and finally found non-dual teachings (the ones I’m presenting in this thread) about a year and a half ago. Roger’s version seemed the most direct to me and I’ve been studying his lectures for about a year or so. All in all, yeah, it absolutely feels like destiny: the family I was born into, conditioning at congregation, conditioning when I found out homosexuality wasn’t a choice, conditioning through psychedelics, conditioning through videos I found on YouTube, etc…
Even if all that were the case, so what…? Are you trying to say that I should be more critical of this teaching because it made sense to me given my own nature and the circumstances…? lol
Just as a disclaimer, I’m not trying to be snarky in the least here. I’m honestly trying to understand where you’re coming from, or rather, where you’re trying to go with this
I think you’ve taken the perfectly valid physics concept of causality and stretched it to metaphorically mean things it was not intended to mean. Why do I believe that? Because there are lots of multi-factor systems where small variations in initial conditions create such a broad variety of possibilities so quickly, that they are impossible to predict - or to reproduce the same result twice even if we try to always have the exact same starting conditions (see: chaotic pendulum, the so-called Butterfly Effect, etc). This is why our best science and models still has a hard time predicting where a particular hurricane will make landfall - there are so many factors influencing that sum of all forces in real time, that it’s ALL a series of small accidents.
And that’s just for non-conscious systems. When you deal with the interactions of many humans, making snap decisions based on incomplete information, and all of their communication and actions are constantly affecting one another, then that creates even more unpredictable factors which influence the sum of all forces. So yes, from where I stand, strict causality has its limits, and the more multi-factor elements, brownian noise, and individual understanding/volition you introduce into a given sum-of-all-forces, the more the chance for unpredictable effects increases.
I guess this might be a particular sore point for me personally for a few reasons. For one - historically - many bad people have used this same line of reasoning to rationalize and abdicate personal responsibility for some really terrible, horrendous behavior. They were simply the instrument of divine will! They had no choice but to follow their destiny. I have no reason to believe that you are anything but benevolent and good - but as a student of history, I guess I’ve encountered it enough times that it rings alarm bells for me when I hear it.
The other reason is - I come from a mental health background. I no longer work in the field, but I have a Master’s in Counseling Psychology, and I’ve worked with individuals, families, couples, and done a lot of crisis intervention work. As part of that process- i.e. helping people who are stuck and feeling helpless find their way towards self-directed change - a huge part is going from External Locus of Control to Internal Locus of Control.
So let’s say you’re working with a couple who want to stay together but they’re always in conflict about the same things. When you talk to them, all of their stories are about how everything is always the other partner’s fault, and if only the other person would change X, Y, and Z then everything would be better. In fact they often refused to make the effort to change until they see that change from their partner - ensuring that they will continue to be stuck.
Regardless of the content of X, Y, or Z, the important thing about this dynamic is both are stuck in the same place because they’re refusing to acknowledge their input into the dynamic, or take responsibility for it. It’s a great excuse for not doing anything different - i.e. “Well, I’ll only do A if you do B first!”
In order to help that couple move forward, it’s important to help them understand their own contribution to the whole - to see their actions from another’s point of view, and take responsibility for their input from a place of genuine concern. Only once they’ve done that can they they come up with a different way to take action. Yes you can acknowledge that factors X, Y, and Z have these effects on you, but you still have the agency and responsibility to choose how you react to those, and once you begin to own your own part in a larger dynamic, you can change that dynamic.
What I was getting at is trying to highlight that you had a role to play in all of that. Yes, your environment and conditioning played a role. But YOU also played a role. If you picture the entire Marketplace of Ideas as a vast candy store with many bins, then you are the individual moving among those bins, trying different things, and putting them in your basket or not depending on if they are delicious or yucky to you - the subjective perceiver.
And those reactions are not stable over time - they also grow and evolve in ways that are far from predictable. Things that were delicious to you at one stage in your development (i.e. atheism) eventually became yucky, and you went in search of new things that fed new desires. And it’s not a static process - it will keep on going - what you find subjective appealing will continue to change throughout your life, and I wanted to highlight that there is some unpredictable agent in there who is affected by conditioning to some sense, but also has their own desires and urges and curiosities which contribute to the sum of all forces, and that conditioning is not enough to account for it.
I absolutely agree with all of that. However, Life being infinitely complex, chaotic and unpredictable doesn’t negate causality in my opinion. As you said, sometimes we won’t get the same result twice even though we try to have the exact same starting conditions, but of course the starting conditions are never actually the same. And so while the results may be impossible to predict, they’re still a causal necessity given the exact starting conditions.
Terrible, horrendous behaviour doesn’t have to be condoned, but it can nevertheless be seen to be the inevitable result of the preceding and surrounding circumstances. Life is a story of interconnected opposites, and as such is often extremely painful. However, our psychological attitude towards the pain (guilt, blame, pride, worries & anxiety, expectations & attachment to outcomes) can fall away when we understand that the pain was inevitable (albeit sometimes unpredictable).
By chance, I literally just listened to Roger talk about this very topic. If you’ve got four minutes to spare and find out who I’m getting all these crazy concepts from, check out the passage from 49:04 to 53:12 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzcEI1CwcAc
Now I see what you’re trying to say here, and while I agree with the gist of it, I do think that conditioning & genetic make-up (while variable over time and unpredictable) are absolutely sufficient to account for the “agent”'s behaviour. What are my own desires and urges and curiosities, other than an expression of my genes?
In practice, we’re never going to go rewind in time and go back to the same cause. In this manifestation, the cause only has one effect. It may be impossible to find out why the effect was this specific one rather than a different possible one, but we do know that this is how Life turned out and that the effect logically succeeded that cause. Even under quantum considerations, the number of possible effects for one cause is finite, correct? The relationship between cause and effect will never be random. At best, which of the possible effects occurs may be “random” (or rather, impossible to predict).
For anyone still reading this thread, let’s set “destiny” aside for a moment.
What spiritual seeking is really about is the end of suffering. Seeking happens when we intuitively feel that our true nature is peace of mind, but something gets in the way. That something is suffering, so if we’re interested in peace of mind, it helps to be specific about what suffering is.
Suffering is not the same as pain. Circumstantial pain can be intense, but it happens vertically in time. Pain cannot be avoided. The flow of Life is always either pleasure or pain.
Suffering is something that is added on top of the pain (or pleasure). Suffering is our psychological attitude towards the pleasure and pain in our experience. It’s an uncomfortableness with oneself and with the other. Suffering is a false (but absolutely convincing!) story about who we are. It stretches horizontally in time long after the circumstance is past and gone. Suffering constantly tells us lies. “This isn’t right, this shouldn’t be happening, this is an attack on who I am.”
It’s a lie because circumstantial pain cannot touch what we are at our core. Our true nature is peace of mind. Suffering tells us otherwise.
Hey you, reading this, yeah you! Intuitively, in your heart, in your gut, do you feel that there is a difference between pain and suffering? Let me know, let’s break some bread and talk about it. ~
Beautiful quote The conceptual framework I’ve presented in this thread is an integrated version of advaita vedanta, which was originally a Hindu school of thought. Advaita translates to non-duality (vedanta means the end of knowledge, there are two or three other variants besides advaita), and there are some non-dual schools of thought in Buddhism as well (although I’m not as familiar with them). Advaita vedanta as Roger Castillo presents (and I relay) it is “integrated” in the sense that there are no such references to “God” as Hindu versions might include.
I am somewhat familiar with those ideas and elements of Buddhism. Perhaps I should further clarify myself to avoid confusions that could arise from my extremely under-detailed post. I am actually a fairly religious Christian (although I have a lot to improve on along those lines). I posted this just in case people would mistaken me to be a non-religious person. Honestly there is quite a bit with this thread that I believe heads in a correct direction but there is also a bit that I don’t agree with (and it is nothing personal, nobody is perfect). As a Christian though, I would highly encourage other non-Christians to seek out some alternative viewpoints to their current ways of thinking. As Christ said: “Go and make disciples of all nations.”
I hope you don’t take the following as an attack on your faith, I’m simply bouncing off of your statement to continue with my presentation of these non-dual concepts (which, as I’ve laid out before, are not intended as “truths”, anyway, merely as pointers).
Non-dual frameworks posit that there is nothing (or “no one”) to improve. You’re already exactly where you’re meant to be. Life doesn’t make mistakes and God doesn’t judge its Creation. (The term non-duality originally meant to suggest that there is no difference between God and Creation in the first place; in this integrated framework, it suggests that there is no difference between “you” and anything included in your experience, since all the objects in the experience (including “your” body) exist inside of your field of consciousness (rather than “outside” of you).) Believing that you need “improving” would suggest that you’re not complete yet.
Of course, advaita still knows the concept of spiritual seeking and progress, and on one level that could be labeled “improving” as well, with the caveat that anything is only ever good or bad relative to a certain benchmark; in the case of spiritual seeking, that benchmark would be happiness (unbroken peace of mind). Spiritually “improving” then would mean the loss of that which covers up peace of mind - suffering (our psychological attitude towards the flow of Life). Of course, even suffering is put in place by Life and not a mistake in and of itself, only in relation to the benchmark of unbroken peace of mind.
I’m sorry for being so wordy. I’d love for you to lay out where you disagree with this framework - I love debate.
No worries, an important part of learning the truth is questioning it, as I do the exact same thing and do not intend to be attacking. I would really love it if you would elaborate on what you mean by “pointers”, because I personally seek the absolute truth regardless of whether or not I can find it. It seems that you are making these “pointers” seem to be something other than the truth which, to me, seems strange because I would look at “pointers” as ideas that seek the truth. Perhaps I am misunderstanding you here.
I believe that there are two possible beliefs that lead to this general idea. One, is the idea of atheism while the other is the idea that God simply threw the universe out there and does not do anything to guide it. I personally believe that the idea of atheism is absolutely absurd for a number of reasons, many of which I won’t list right now and only if additional curiosity is sprung up. Aside from the fact that I believe it is also a contradiction (something doesn’t come from nothing), a universe without God suggests a meaningless world. Morality would be just an idea, and there would be nothing wrong with a barbaric world, as there is no concrete “right” and “wrong.” Even if atheism was correct, and everyone believed in it, society would be atrocious and, quite possible, non existent. Thus, God plays a crucial role in maintaining society, which starts to prove the error of the second idea, that is, that God threw the universe out there and doesn’t maintain it. “Improving” one’s character then and seeking perfection (despite the fact that it will never come), is essential. To be concise about the second idea, I will start to answer it with a question. Why would God create a world that he didn’t care about? Ponder on that. Destiny as you define it doesn’t exist for a similar reason. As people we are given free will, and life is all about choices. Living a life of belief in destiny suggests that, again, there is no “right” and “wrong” in universe. For example, that would assume that criminals were destined to be criminals and that they had nothing to determine that for them. Again, life would seem meaningless. There is so much that is wrong with these two ideas, but particularly with atheism.
This paragraph suggests that you do have some understanding and belief of spiritual progress and “improvement.” I believe that the general idea here is correct, if I am understanding it correctly. To expand, Spiritual “improvement” goes far beyond what that context says. It puts others before myself and, most importantly, God first. Drawing a conclusion about “improvement” and leaving off where that context does could project a viewpoint of “selfishness”, which, as we saw earlier, leads to corruption in society. Improving does bring happiness, but the important part of it is not about “me”, rather it is about others. Hopefully I answered my beliefs on most of this subject and that I am understandable here. Again, please understand that I am not going against you as a person, but rather against these ideas.
On a final note, it is most reasonable to believe in God. Let us assume for a minute that we do not believe in anything and are trying to find what to believe. If we believe that there is no God and there isn’t a God then we have lost nothing. If we don’t believe in God and there is a God than we have lost everything (as there is punishment). If we believe in God and there is no God then, again, we have lost nothing. Finally, if we believe in God and there is a God we have won everything. Therefore belief in God is most reasonable.
I tried to go into this a little in post 43 of this thread. According to this framework, language can never describe truth absolutely. It can only be “pointed” at with relative accuracy, if there even is such a thing is absolute truth. Descriptions aside, one concept suggests that the only unchanging truth that can ever be known is the nature of your experience: It happens inside (your field of) consciousness. Life is an experience, you are aware of the experience, and you have an impersonal sense of “I am”. Anything that goes beyond this is a belief (cannot be known absolutely). Can you even know (rather than just infer) that anyone else but you is conscious?
This particular framework doesn’t concern itself much with God. The cosmic laws are considered unknowable. One classical advaita concept is that there is no meaningful distinction between God and Creation: God “has become” Creation. God is not separate from the world. That’s why I like to spell Life with a capital L.
Another concept is that the label God could be applied to consciousness: The human body/mind as an incredibly complex instrument designed by evolution through which consciousness functions. God is experiencing the world “through” us. Since the world is not separate from us (it exists inside our field of consciousness), God is really experiencing itself (and we are not separate from God). “There are not six billion consciousnesses experiencing one world, there is one consciousness experiencing six billion worlds.”
Yet another concept is that God is infinite unmanifest potential, and the universe is one (out of infinite) manifestations of that potential. It’s certainly fascinating to ponder these deep metaphysical questions, but they also seem somewhat irrelevant if our spiritual goal (as this framework suggests) is peace of mind.
I would describe advaita as being agnostic rather than atheistic, but in my opinion, the assumption that atheism leads to atrocious or non-existent societies is completely baseless (but I’d love for you to elaborate on the idea). The last couple thousand years certainly don’t seem to suggest to me that societies founded on rigid religious beliefs on the nature of God are inherently less atrocious or barbaric than societies founded on individual peace of mind might be.
However, you are right that in this framework, any ideas of “right” and “wrong” are only ever relative. That doesn’t mean that laws are meaningless, though: Humans naturally move towards pleasure and away from pain. Most people would agree that murder is painful and should be prevented.
I agree that “belief” in destiny (as I’ve said, this really just means to acknowledge that Life inevitably unfolds according to cause and effect) suggests that there is nothing “wrong” with Creation, although I do think it means that there is everything “right” with it.
Understanding that people were “destined” (by their genetic make-up and conditioning through Life; in other words, cause and effect) to commit a crime only means that on a psychological level, hating (blaming) them for what they’ve done makes no sense. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t prevent them from committing crimes in the future if we want a society that tries its best to prevent the infliction of pain. If anything, according to this framework, holding blame towards “criminals” will diminish peace of mind in ourselves on an individual basis, so I think it follows that it would also diminish peace of mind on a societal basis.
Why is it important for Life to have a “meaning”? You’re here now, experiencing Life. Seeking for anything outside of yourself will never result in peace of mind (according to this framework).
I’d still like to see arguments that support this assumption.
That is certainly an honorable concept to live by, but I don’t think that it’s mutually exclusive with looking for peace of mind within ourself. Viewing the world you experience (including everyone you meet) as something that exists inside your consciousness means that no one is really “other” than you. Viewing Life as something that unfolds in an inevitable way means you don’t look at anyone as an enemy who’s guilty of wrong-doing and deserving of your hatred (blame). Viewing yourself as an instrument through which consciousness (or Life, or God) functions means there is no sense of your “self” as being a separate, independent entity. With these concepts, there is no real distinction between “selfishness” and “selflessness”: Your “self” includes everything you experience, and there is no independent “doer” at the heart of the experience, just consciousness aware of Life unfolding.
Edited to add, I think there can be an interconnectedness at play here: Peace of mind causing us to treat others well, and treating others well (as if they are not “other”) leading to peace of mind.
So a belief in God must include a belief that God punishes? You said it’s reasonable to believe in God, but why is it reasonable to believe that God punishes its Creation? Is God’s design imperfect? What does God gain from punishing us, especially if that punishment occurs after death and hence has an indirect effect on Life on Earth at best?
I will respond to these refutations in the near future, when I have the time. Please respectfully understand that I do give an apology for steering this thread slightly away from where it intended to go. It is also important to note that I have just skimmed through most of this thread. While I don’t believe a great deal of these ideas (there are some that I believe are spot on), I appreciate your respect for my answers.
The conceptual framework I’ve presented in this thread is an integrated version of advaita vedanta, which was originally a Hindu school of thought. Advaita translates to non-duality (vedanta means the end of knowledge, there are two or three other variants besides advaita), and there are some non-dual schools of thought in Buddhism as well (although I’m not as familiar with them). Advaita vedanta as Roger Castillo presents (and I relay) it is “integrated” in the sense that there are no such references to “God” as Hindu versions might include.
