Plants and insects communicate in ways we can not quite imagine. We may comprehend or attempt to explain how they murmur signals to one another but that is their world.
That our future ancestors may wonder how we failed to see how planets, suns and comets communicate... well, so too they shall fall to a similar prejudiced focalism of their time.
Yet none shall be so wise as they who die - seeing that there are not two. just this Dao.
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
Perhaps, rather than planning your escape, or dreaming of the release - instead describe and clearly map your prison.
When, by such inspection, it is seen that there is no prison - the natural, preexisting freedom, will become apparent.
What we seek in seeking is arrived at by one means and one means only. Not seeking.
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
1) (Normal person, getting on with life. Walking through a park, care free, whistling. Bird flying out from near by tree).
2) (Person continues walking) (Appearing in shot - A 'Guru' sitting) "You know there is a way called the enlightened way" says the Guru.
"What does that mean?" asks the person.
3) (person, now standing near the sitting Guru). Guru says "It means that you are asleep, you are in bondage - I am enlightened"
4) (person now sitting, book in hand) Thinks - "It seems I must now look hard and work to become enlightened too. Now I know I'm a separate, unawakened being - I have to get there."
5) (time has passed, person now has beard)
6) (Normal person, getting on with life. Walking through a park (with beard), care free, whistling. Bird flying out from near by tree). "Finally I'm free from this quest for enlightenment - I'm awakened!"
7) (Person continues walking) (Appearing in shot - A 'Guru' sitting) "You know there is a way called the enlightened way" says the Guru.
"Yes, thanks" (continues walking)
8) (and walking...)
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
How many people in the world are looking to align with Tao? Not so many but enough for an industry. How many people seek an awakening or spiritual enlightenment? Quite a large number, enough for a multi million dollar industry. How many people are looking to be right with God? Millions. Enough for a billion dollar industry.
To align with Tao. To become enlightened. To be right in God's eyes are different enough but the same in a way. A mind made transformation in a time other than now.
One can not be wrong with God, unenlightened or out of line with Tao. Perhaps the works of man in the name of God are most demanding when they say "all is God's way but man chooses to do right or wrong" but if, to save lengthy debate, we say that this also is God's way then we can move forward to the marrow.
The three cases I've raised are a human journey of the mind.
For the sake of my typing, your reading and the blog I'm speaking on I'll now speak of Tao and perhaps enlightenment (as Zen is so commonly spoken of alongside Tao). When I say though that one can not be out of line with Tao, unenlightened or so on, I will be equally and as correctly referring to God, Allah, spirit, nature, the ocean of being, or any other name for the absolute.
The absolute, the all, the everything, in most people's eyes includes them. In truth though there is no 'it and them' but 'it' only. You're it. One can only convince themselves that they are apart or separate by the use of the mischievous mind.
The mind, on hearing of enlightenment or Tao, creates a split. It then sets about trying to resolve the split. Alike to the quest for selflessness which is an entirely selfish act so too the quest for aligning or becoming exist also. As with all tricks on the mind from anxiety to stress, from fear to remorse, they exist in a time other than now. That is, they don't exist, except in the mind.
What is aimed for in the future that can already be nothing but the case already. Our example being: aiming for awakening tomorrow when it can only be the case now - these are insoluble mind tricks. These are the tricks that the million and billion dollar industries play off, are fueled by.
It was already the case before your birth that nature, the universe, Tao was one. At birth, also one. In times of mind made turmoil, also one. Death and after, also one. The mere concept of there being something to get right with produces the seed of separation.
We can not be blamed though. (Why we should be blamed at all is a joke to me but seems it must be addressed.) - long before humans were here, nature had come to have self and other. Even by close example our ape cousins or beloved pets have self and other in their nature. We though, we named and labeled. We took names, labels and concepts to have concrete reality. Years later in our history this ingrained trait is want for abuse as it runs wild unchecked.
The nature of how we can be fooled into taking labels for forms and also labels for nebulous concepts and imbuing them substance is covered in other posts.
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
This way ...is best only as a way to realizing and being, wishing for no other way to be the way, than it is looking for what you would otherwise desire to become.
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Perhaps..
There is 'where you are' and 'where you wish to be'. If these are different then you're unhappy.
Happiness is when 'where you are' and 'where you wish to be' are the same.
It is not though to change where you are or what you think, but realize that wishing to be anywhere else causes unhappiness.
Where you are, right now, is unchangeable, so accept where you are and you'll be happy.
Then the future lives on in this happiness.
When you're not looking to be happy, you can only be happy.
Consequently and apparently - happiness is only sought for by the unhappy. A goal of happiness makes the present location, by definition, unhappiness.
~ ~
Then, there is no chooser, no actor to act, to wish for another way or to accept the current way - there is only the way - no actor, no acted..
Just this unknowable way.
What is. Not what would, could or should be.
~
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
Try this claim for size:
"I allowed myself to break free from the false idea of free will and live now truly free."
No matter the verb following the pronoun "I" at the beginning of the sentence there is conflict. One can not bring about any action if free will is not the case. Then free will exists? Well, no, it does not. What we have is an exposure of how our given language, grammar and vocabularies shape our explanations.
Should I have two children in their first couple of years of life and encourage each to say a different word than one another when they see a dog then they will, in later life, internally voice these sounds when they think of or see a dog. This experiment is proven by two children who grow up in countries where different languages are spoken.
So called consciousness - being conscious of a dog in this case - requires a learned label. No label, no internal voice, we are said to be unconscious of that phenomena. You can prove this true by attempting to hold in your awareness any one thing that you've never seen before and have no label for. Impossible as this is it is great for us that we have nebulous container words and place holders in our language (such as "thing", "stuff" and so on) to allow us to wriggle free of certain death.
Then, if we have a set vocabulary and grammar structure, our descriptive, conscious worlds are fictions and very barren. The world you "consciously think" about is not as colourful as you had once thought, it is far from accurate, and is very unreal. Nothing said in words by a "conscious being" relates at all to what's out there in reality.
A dog watching his owner play chess may well recognize his owner, may even sense the owners mood, but has no consciousness of the progress of the game. A human watching grass grow can tell many stories about the event but is unconscious of the underlying mechanism of growth. When the science explaining the quantum mechanical effects underlying photosynthesis are understood, well enough to be rendered in language, then the person may believe they are now conscious of the system but, as vocabulary and language structure do not fit the quantum world - they're not.
There are many cases in which we can see that the learned world of labels, which is also the world we are apparently conscious of, is not reality. The description or storyline that we attach to the world is subjective, unique and of miniscule resolution. The true reality is an indefinable movement of uncaused being, of which no one can be separate. No one is doing anything, but in that movement of oneness, there can be constructed inner worlds. - Conscious worlds mapped by low resolution bits. Consciousness says the world is bits, primarily "I" and other key players.
Truth sees itself, unformed, shifting. Nebulous.
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
No strings attached. No complex string theory. No branes. No magical forces. No Higgs mechanism. None of the old physics.
The answer is the g word. Capital G.
God? Nooooo. The Grid!
Interested in science? Check out theoryofsomething.com for incredible insights and simplifications in science. All tied up with equations to suit those who need and an elegant wonderful depiction of how the theory of something works.
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
To explain the human story, why we are here and our answer to happiness it is necessary to walk a path through physics, cosmology, neuroscience and philosophy. At the outset a little must be said as to how this, the best we can offer, is limited by language.
Cosmologies, sciences and philosophies of the past have stated a quite natural and seemingly obvious claim that "there was nothing and by some event/magic/intervention/unknown/unknowable there came to be something". Leading physics today though says that there is no such thing as nothing and no true idea of something. That there is a quantum state which is impossible to fit into our language, causal or mechanical frameworks. This can seem limiting but it is also wonderfully magical. Perhaps this start point appears as a knife to the throat of any attempt to describe our world and place in it but this very same sharp edge is what we need to cut right through to the truth of the matter. Nothing is doing anything, acting on anything, causing anything. At root, in the quantum fabric there is the possibility of something and nothing appearing, always as a unity and - here at the introduction - that attempts too much with language.
From the above "something/nothing" quantum state of nothing/something came an appearance of something floating around in nothing. That took time and so something, nothing, spatial and temporal dimensions, apparent forces and so on appeared to come about at once. These terms are attempts to describe facets of this quantum nothing/something and so we must never take one of them as having an objective reality or consider one without all of the rest. One can not consider time without space or matter without space. Also then not consider time without matter or any of the above without the seeming forces at play. The apparent first case of this quantum occurrence, at least the one measurable and so meaningful to us, we know of was The Big Bang. There may have been more bangs, there may not have even been one. We measure the first significant event by tracing back all that we can see and measure now to, not a point in space and time, but the occurrence of space and time. (It is clear how language fails as the very rules for constructing a sentence demand apparent cause, effect and temporality of which "then" there were none).
Be it through entirely reductional means or by more holistic means where new "emergent" qualities arise from increasingly complex arrangements of networking "parts" then the quantum dance wiggled and became increasingly huge and complex. In truth this is beyond huge as it is infinite and beyond complex as such as it is the entirety of everything bar none. This quantum dance, which as said has no meaningful language to describe it, from our perspective and in our language, interacted with itself. [from now onwards I will just use English words without quotations or explanation and let you remind yourself of their inadequacy for describing that outside of our sensory world. These words are all we have after all so lets progress without the inertia of caveats]. Certain parts took on certain qualities providing them the abilities to interact and this appeared to happen along a causal and temporal, linear dimension. Invisible to us but known to our minds as time.
Within this story ever more complex wiggles appeared to 14 billion year old scientists (as that is how old we are in this story) as various constituent parts. This is after all how our mind has evolved to describe our macro world, we insist that wholes are made of parts. These parts however are not parts but aspects of this self interacting dance of one, infinite, nothing. For a time these parts were atoms, for a time they were protons and electrons (protons and electrons we found made up atoms), for a time they were electrons and quarks (3 quarks we found made up a proton), for a time they were known as strings (strings were theorized to be the fundamental wiggles which made up anything known before them), for a time strings became more complex "branes" and for a time all of these ideas were embraced, cast aside, loved and even dismissed. We met limits in our abilities to test theories but what we had come to know in a brief magical time in science was so great and so accurate in describing our world that in the wake of the revolution came GPS, Wi-Fi, CPU's, Lasers and a whole host of magical and powerful things depending on the, as yet unseen, quantum universe behind all of reality.
As these wiggles took on complex forms, be they described as strings, quarks, atoms or anything else then the force we all know as gravity acted also. This stuff coalesced and, as it did, even more complex forms came to be. In time gravity and the other forces present in these (truly) nuclear furnaces in space could balance no more and huge explosions ripped thorough space scattering what we know as chemical elements into space. Carbon, lithium, helium and anything up to the weight of iron spilled out into the universe and they all too felt gravity. New, second generation stars, of which our Sun is one, took form and matter, which was not grabbed by the gravity of these stars and sucked into them, floated around in volatile elliptical orbits sustaining collisions. In time the larger bits pulled in the smaller and planets of very complex mixtures of chemicals took shape.
The indescribable quantum wiggle grew more in complexity and in our story became chemical compounds and, not forgetting the possibilities on offer in infinity, some, you can imagine it happening, animated.
At first two complex compounds would both do well to react with another compound. When one did it went static but when the other did it became larger and was left fit to continue. Within liquids certain reactions went well and those compounds which generated bubbles grew to protect or isolate themselves. An interplay went ahead where many possibilities were tried and by no method whatsoever besides having all the time they wanted and any means available to them, reactions went on in whatever way they did. As growing compounds took on mass they split apart and these parts continued. In time these subdividing parts came together and, not forgetting the time scales involved, billions of years, and how long you have to read this story, much less, some mixtures were successful and others not. Successful compounds grew more complex and at some time, still billions of years ago, there were chemical compounds so adept to duplication that they were carrying with them instruction manuals, protection, and things we may now recognise as cells were living. The quantum universe, from our perspective, was alive. Although it would be simple to state and accept that aliveness is the natural state of the universe I'm only now looking at the animated life which contrasts, in our macro world, with the inanimate dead.
The most complex collection of cells we know of are the ones collectively known as human beings and the most complex part of them is their brains. Until very recently brains were thought to be made of neurons and useless goo. It turned out with time that there are many hundreds of kinds of neuron, the eye has over a hundred kinds of its own, the heart has neurons, your stomach (gut feelings) has neurons and your brain has billions. The largest collection of neurons is in the brain and each neuron has thousands of linkages which may reconfigure at any moment. Your brain is said to be plastic as it can, and it does, reconfigure moment by moment. It is said that there are more connections in the brain than stars in the known universe. The complexity here is, as you know by being there right now and considering all of this, quite incredible.
Not only are the connections in the brain vast but they do not operate as switches, on or off, and in circuits, nothing so simple as that! They operate in networks with many kinds of signalling media available to them. The specific skills of our brain, and the reason we did not evolve a language suited to the quantum world, were honed by our need for survival in a world that seems to us to be made of big and small things operating in a causal manner. Lion runs at human, human will be eaten, human attempts evasive action. The resulting complexity of our brains though is a very powerful tool and, as said, plastic and highly adaptable. While certain parts of the brain do seem to be commonly wired one way for most of us, say the part for vision is almost certainly at the back of your head, other parts of the brain can be involved in many tasks and parts can alter purpose and many features will be unique to individuals.
During the evolution of the brain the increasing complexities of, what are ultimately quantum wiggles, dressed as chemicals, being successful or not in replication, took on increasingly more complex roles. Brains for some animals are only a means to navigate relatively simple landscapes, finding food, partners and so on. Brains for other animals developed apparent skills like the ones you are using now and along side the near visible features such as these the invisible world of genes operated unseen.
Seeing as we did that successful chemical interactions multiplied then so too successful genes will lead to duplication of certain traits. If two sisters are born and they move to different sides of the same river and one caries a gene that makes her snore at night then given the same nocturnal predators the snoring sister may have more chance of scaring away nocturnal animals from her babies as, even unaware of the threat, she slept at night. This outcome is deemed successful and, as unimpressed as you are at snoring, nature deemed it a successful adaptation. Variations of this speculative example can be from two tree seedlings dropped by a tree. They happen to be indigestible by birds but eaten all the same. Both seeds drop in the birds droppings onto different fields. One field is prone to flooding and the other not. Both seeds carry a gene that allows them to cope well with excess water but as the trees have offspring in their respective fields the gene degenerates in both families. In the flooded field only those offspring carrying the gene survive, the others don't but in the dry field all saplings survive with or without the gene. Within not too many generations the gene is strengthened in one strain and diluted or lost forever in the other. These related trees, given enough time and variation become different species with different appearances and qualities which can no longer interbreed.
The brain then underwent internal evolution in ways so far and beyond the complexities of the above examples that they would take pages to even theorise over but we do not need to attempt to rewrite what Charles Darwin and all who have followed him have already stated and proven so well. Certain qualities, even seen as quite horrible, such as feeling pain or being depressed flourished for their ability to lead to successful duplication and nothing else. Two people cut their hands, one feels pain and is drawn to act the other does not feel pain, great for them!, but they do not react, become infected and die with no offspring, not so great for them. The qualities we have have been successful to date so you do not have a single relative in your direct family tree who has failed to duplicate itself since the beginning of time. We are one big family.
We are one big family though where it has been good for our genes as a collective whole for some of us to be subservient and others dominant, for some to be creative and others dogmatic, for some to be so fond of their recent heritage that they will kill in its name and for some to be so taken by our interrelatedness that they are drawn to question all apparent division. We have evolved with dangerous and complex contradictory drives inside one brain. We have genes that know success is from having one steady life partner and via complexities in community have attempted to legislate that this must be the way for all. We have genes that know success by having many partners and have successfully duplicated these genes by doing just that. We have dominant brain organizations which infer parts out there in the world and we have dominant brain organisations that see wholeness. With such wildly separate examples and so much else in our mix it can be no surprise that in the 9 billion versions of the human alive today that we are so different to one another even given our striking similarities. There may well be 9 billion completely correct views on some subjects, or exactly what shade of green is the real green.
Along with the complexities in our brains we have the external world where interactions between us are just as important and just as complex as the interactions of neurons and transmitters in our heads. As our genes move to duplicate and for duplicated genes to reattempt their successes, our complex brains have gone to shape the world in which we live. Now our world is only this way for us. A bird will fly from one area of land to another but we will display a passport to cross the very same land mass. We have labelled and split our world in the way our brain has evolved to label and split what we sense around us. When a child is born then the universe for them is completely at one. Just as soon as we can though we have them label parts. We have them say dog when they see a dog and we repeat it until they repeat it and then we congratulate them for saying it on their own and then we ask them to please stop saying things out loud and to internalize the labelling. This learned labelling, while very useful and and purposeful, is then taken to new levels as we have children apply labels to things which are not even things. We have them label good and bad, consciousness, east, west, China, India, space, life and death. We have them treat concepts as things as real to them as doggy and Mum and Dad.
From this labelling tool that was deemed so useful and successful to organisms that successfully replicate, a method by which we could pick the right food, give directions and avoid danger, we have moved to increased complexity where we label areas of land, animals and misty concepts such as consciousness with the same language. We have killed one another over these labels. I say this is called X, he says it is Y, I say that X has the qualities of goodness and love and he says that X is unreal and those qualities must be applied to Y instead. We fight to the death.
Not only do we fight to the death over concepts but we fight intellectually over labels. The very contents of this writing up to now and likely to the end will upset people who don't like the use of certain labels. I said early on how we don't have the language to describe the quantum world and later how our language evolved in the large scale world - yet people will fill debates with hours of airy talk over just what labels should be used for such things. To avoid expanding this writing by pages I'll lump religion into one basket as a form of philosophy, a way of carrying ideas suited to some genes surviving certain times and places down through generations. Philosophy has been about as long as humans I'd confidently guess and due to this it is apparent that the philosophies of past generations can only survive if they follow the examples of the genes that carry them and adapt, casting the weak aside and moving forward with those that suit the current climate. A revolution which took flight from the shoulders of philosophy was that of science.
Science has a unique quality that religion did not display and only the better philosophies did, it is willing and even flourishes by throwing off all that is proven wrong. Science refuses the unprovable and only maintains the proven if it remains testably true. As new tools come about or new measurements, findings or so on science, and what it deems to be truth, adapts. As great a mind as Isaac Newton had, formidable in fact, we only moved with his ideas for so long. We did not think we must keep them going for eternity because they are old and we did not think that we should keep them once more accurate methods came about. Our ideas of what goes on in the brain are only as good as our tools and current investigations allow for, we do not deem them fact but part of an ongoing discovery.
Science is the complex universe, the indescribable quantum wiggle, attempting to explain itself - which leads to a discussion on happiness.
Happiness.
Due to the successful duplications over the past billions of years since the universe seems to have gone from the potential to the seemingly actual, and following our story version which is restricted by language and the way our brains formed, we have exactly this to go on. By this I mean that sense you have there of being someone who can sit back and think of being someone and think about being someone thinking about being someone - self aware and conscious. That is what we have and that is our tool and we are the universe looking back on itself and attempting explanation, even given the faults that came with it, this is it.
We have minds that insist on there being parts that operate by cause and effect (as false as this is from what we do know about the quantum thread our life’s tapestry is woven from then cause and effect are illusions true only for our brains and not the universe writ large). We have qualities such as brains which have us writhe in agony when something goes wrong like toothache or a poke in the eye. We have imbalances which have us kill, hurt one another, hurt the ones we love. We have finite lives and we die, we suffer the deaths of others and we are guaranteed nothing more certainly from the moment we are born that we will die one unknown day.
Along with these weaknesses that evolution has provided us we have daily fluctuations in our brains too. We have been provided by evolution a sense of self, feelings of happiness and sadness and a sense of agency in the world. It just happens that these qualities, good or bad, weak or strong were the ones that can trace a family tree back as far as we have yet managed to see. Perhaps we had ancestors who were only ever happy, but they did not replicate. We can be happy or sad. [Note that philosophically it would be impossible to be only happy as happiness is only know by contrasting it with sadness so to know happiness one must know sadness.]
So here we are, we have this set-up and we have our complex drives, we have this sense of agency in the world and we have this desire to explain or be explained, to find purpose in this universe. This universe is what we are though, we are the universe, we are the magical, inexplicable quantum dance. One thing that can not be proven false and is ever there to be in awe of and take great fulfilment from is that we are the universe. Confused as we are by our make-up into thinking we are an individual -in- the universe, we are in fact, the universe.
This individual self, that we are confused into thinking we are, and have learned to believe that we are, seems by the readings of any culture yet to leave its mark in writing to have one true desire - happiness.
We want to be happy and we want our offspring to be happier than we were. This has been found by every researcher who has enquired to date, humans want to be happy. As I have pointed out though, happiness is only known because of its opposite, but let's not be put off by that. We can always redefine, after all, language is only labelling gone mad. It's not real.
Many fine and informative pieces of research have been made available by people researching this quest and happiness comes about from some things and is taken away by others.
Happiness is taken away by; the unknown, excessive money, a lack of money, spending money on only yourself and not others, loneliness, being too far in the past or projecting too much into the future, being too lost in thought, being sick, having a wandering mind, ...
Happiness comes when; we share experiences, share food, money, forget the past, are unconcerned by the future, have health, love, ... and many more things.
As seen, happiness can come and go, it can be brought about and taken away. Love can be lost, money, health, things which provide security and meaning such as a house and family, can be themselves great potential sources of sorrow. Happiness is, unfortunately, as said, a relative state but one method for happiness that has been passed down through many generations of successful dividing humans is the appreciation of the moment.
Sit comfortably, relax your shoulders, let the strain drop from your brow, and your jaw, and your back and your legs, let your body rest. Breath in slowly and deeply and pull yourself up straight. Focus on that vacant clarity that emerged just then in your head or heart. That's nice, happy peace. That is the appreciation of the moment - a moment with no labels attached to it, no story, no explanations, just a universe being its wonderful self.
A unique thing about that happiness is, while transient, for many of you it is probably gone already as your mind is wandering, it can be re-achieved very simply. You can do it again right now and any time you choose. That happiness is unconditional happiness as it is just happy with the simple, unlabelled emptiness.
Happiness due to something, money, house, love, friendship, can go and be replaced by unhappiness. Happiness due to simple emptiness and recognizing the universe with no labels or storyline - that is an unconditional happiness. Literally requiring no conditions.
A quantum dance is taking place. We know it is because the great scientist who worked hard and diligently to discover and measure it, who only accepted a scientific approach, have proven it. The fact you have a device with GPS, Wi-Fi, a CPU, Lasers and so on prove that there is a quantum world hidden from the large world senses we evolved to sense the natural world. That quantum world, which for now is indescribable - but even a description of it will not change the truth of this only uphold it more - is the dancing universe. And that is what you are.
Sitting empty of storyline and labels you are the universe in the highest evolved state to date - a human feeling unconditional happiness.
When thoughts wander back in, as they will, you are whatever story you believe.
Wandering thoughts.
The above findings of a true and content simple happiness that can be experienced by anyone, from a child to a person on their deathbed is the most important conclusion of this writing and to any human to ever live. Relative paths to happiness can not fulfil us or sustain like the simple resting can and so nothing more need be said. There are though two big outstanding questions that wandering minds like to wrestle with. Beyond unconditional happiness they are Consciousness and Free Will.
Consciousness and Free Will.
The fact of the matter is that you only -think- you are you and in truth you are the universe, the quantum dance, no more, no less. In this way any ideas of consciousness and free will can be simply discounted as stories within the language unfit for the threads which make up the tapestry. The universe as a whole is not consciousness as it can not meaningfully be said to be conscious or unconscious. We don't benefit at all by applying relative terms to the absolute. Things within the story, the story that appears on the tapestry of life can be said to be conscious or unconscious as they are useful terms in our life and language but an important boundary exists. As we enter the world described by language and the story we apply to reality then we must not infer the reality of the things we label. They are just useful labels. No more.
Equally, as we label things within the story then there is no actual entity outside of the story to have free will. There are no agents, no actors to act and no things to be acted upon. In the story, yes, sure, useful. In reality, not at all. The universe is, by convention of language, changing and living out some kind of temporal, causal story. Within that story there are apparent people seeming to make choices but also within that story there is, as mentioned before, the scientific method.
The scientific method as touched upon earlier does not just make claims and hold onto them, it measures, tests, retests, checks and when better tools come about, we recheck afresh. When it comes to ideas of free will and the vivid sensation that we are choosing our actions then the tools and investigations at the disposal of science right now are very powerful, very deep and very accurate. We have learned things that we could never have gotten to by any other method, we have watched the brain at work and the body and we have done this with people just like you and me who have been aware, present, convinced they are free agents, perfectly sane people in test after test have sat with researches and the results are consistent. In test after test and under all degrees of scrutiny researchers had watched the brains of volunteers and have known the forthcoming action the person will make even before the person thinks they have consciously willed the action.
That is: A person will say they have willed an action at a certain point in time but in test after test the researchers watching the brain at work have already known, seconds before, what the person will do. The workings of the brain take place. The "choice" is made. The researches see this occur in the images they are seeing of the brain and can clearly see what is about to happen. A few seconds later the person thinks they have made a choice and then almost straight away they make their move. Supposed free will is an illusion which comes after the event. Naturally evolution would favour people who think they have free will as, take this example. Two people punch you in the face. One cares less and walks away. The other appears to be apologetic and appears to feel responsibility for their actions. Given that neither had free will in either case, even for their reaction after the event, the one who appeared sorry would survive apparent society better.
At the very best all we are doing is justifying whatever took place and as the best outcome we are fooled into thinking we were the agent. In truth no agent even exists.
Sad? Not at all! You are the universe! Relax, breath, sit in the moment, drop the storyline. Happiness is.
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
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