The Myth of 'Free Will': Prove me Wrong!

Someone recently asked me if I believed we had 'free will' or free choice. Here is my provisional response.

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I don't think we have as much free will as we usually think we do. An embryo developing in the womb has no free will. The new born for the first year or so has very little if any free will. I know some in the New Age movement say we choose to come to this earth. That may be, but I and many other people see no solid evidence for that assumption.

With time the growing infant seems to have the ability to make some minor choices, and good parents allow them these choices in order to launch them into the soul-making endeavor. As our individual soul wakes up and grows, we gradually get more choices.

But studies and research demonstrate that most of our responses during the day are reactions rather than choices (see Malcolm Gladwell’s, BLINK). We say the same words and phrases, have the same beliefs, choose the same relationships, eat the same food, watch the same TV shows, read the same kinds of books, like the same politicians, seek out the same friends, wear the same clothes, make love or war the same ways, go to the same church, don’t go to church at all, have the same morning and evening rituals, etc., etc. Over time, usually due to some stressful or painful event, some of these things change. But very, very few people actually ‘choose’ do something out of the ordinary.

True free will is doing things that you do not naturally 'want' to do or normally desire to do. This is what the European mystic Gurdjieff called 'voluntary suffering.' One uses his/her will to voluntarily become uncomfortable. He realized that the soul only stretches when it breaks out of the rut. Doing and thinking the same things everyday is not free will. VERY few of us actually choose – we react. ‘Re-act’ literally means ‘to act again.’ Repeat after me, “I am not a robot. I am not a robot. I am not a robot.” Now try saying the opposite, “I am a robot.” Find ten ways your life is robotic. Ironically, if you do this, you may have just stopped being a robot for a few moments!

That is why I like to pick a book from another point of view and read it. I just read Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, the socialist Community Organizer who has so influenced Obama. I am reading Glenn Beck's book, Common Sense. I read books on pro-gay marriage and anti-gay marriage. Recently I have begun going to plays, shows or concerts that I think I would hate, though I must say, ‘chick flicks’ are still very painful.

Try eating a meal today consisting of food you have never eaten before. If you are a Democrat, watch Bill O'Reilly for the whole hour, or listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio without judgment. Read one of Ann Coulter’s books. In fact, ‘choose’ to find ten points where you agree with them. THAT is free will and that is what makes soul. If you are a Republican, listen to Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow or Stephen Colbert. Find ten points of agreement. Read one of Obama’s books – Audacity of Hope or Dreams from My Father. If you are a theist, read a book by an avowed atheist like Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. If you are an atheist, read C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity or The Problem of Pain.

Then try the opposite. If you are a Democrat, find five areas where you disagree with your party. If you are a Republican, find five areas of divergence from your party. If you are an atheist, critique atheism. If you are a theist, critique theism. If you are a New Ager, find five valuable insights from the Christian tradition. If you are a Christian, find five valuable insights from the New Age religion.

Most people will find these tasks virtually impossible to initiate, much less complete, proving that free will is largely non-existent. Some may try one of these exercises, but will grouse, groan, moan and cringe their way through it, usually ceasing before the full hour is up or book read. Or they may watch or read, but will not be capable of choosing to find areas of agreement. Our will is most often frozen in a particular ideological mode and can find only what supports our current prison of supposed ‘free choices’. Will is not free unless it chooses beyond our current areas of security and certainty.

Give it a try, then post a response on this blog about your experience.

Yes, I Am Separated from God

I have become a lover of paradox and believer that seeming contradictions are due to the limitations of our minds. So for me, we are actually separated and not separated from 'God' - both are just as true and necessary for making soul.

Otherwise, when I am feeling fear, separation, anxiety, depression and such emotions - there is a little guilt voice that niggles at me saying, "Hey, you aren't really separated. You just 'think' you are." I can't play that crazy-making game any longer. My times of separation are as much 'God' as my times of connection. It is like my breathing - in and out, in and out, in and out. The breath is connected and separated at the same time. Both are necessary - just as my times of grief, depression and fear are exhalations of spirit through me, and feelings of joy, peace and love are spirits inhalations through me. Both make soul.

That is the core image of Christianity. Jesus was simultaneously wholly God in the flesh, and completely separated from God on the cross. "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" This is not to be understood anymore than we can understanding what holds the spinning electrons from flying out of an atom.

The Ying/Yang symbol illustrates this by placing a little black dot in the center of the white space, and a white dot in the center of the black space. There is unity in separation as well as disintegration within integration. Our logical minds can hold only one or the other; but our poetic minds can experience both taking place simultaneously as our souls meander through life.

"If you want to become whole, let yourself be partial." Tao Te Ching 22

BE AN INFORMED DOGMATIST: IDEAS, IDEALISM, IDEOLOGY

IDEA

An idea is neutral. There are good ideas and bad ideas, peaceful ideas and warring ideas, republican ideas and democratic ideas. The human mind is filled with many ideas. It is what the mind does. The human mind does not come up with most of these ideas, they just arrive. Sometimes they come from other people, sometimes they seem to [1]float in from the ethers. Nietzsche wrote, “A thought comes when ‘it’ wants to and not when ‘I’ want; thus it is a falsification to say: the subject ‘I’ is the condition for the predicate ‘think.’ 'It' thinks: but there is…no immediate certainty that this ‘it’ is just the famous old ‘I’.” (Beyond Good and Evil)

Freud recognized this and made it a central piece of his psychology, “Besides the ‘I’ (ego) we recognize also another region of the soul, more extensive, grander, and more obscure than the ‘I’ (ego), and this we call the ‘it’.” (The Question of Lay Analysis) In English translations, this ‘it’ is called the 'Id'. The Id (it) is the vast Unconscious Realm which contains ideas that are 'more extensive, grander and more obscure' than the little repository of ideas in my ego-mind. This experience of myriad ideas intruding is most obvious in dreams, but actually occurs all day long.

IDEAL

An ideal is a sought after standard, a high and perfect goal. There is the ideal man, ideal woman, ideal football player, ideal flower arrangement, etc. These are typical definitions from any English dictionary:

1.	a conception of something in its perfection.

2.	a person or thing conceived as embodying such a conception or conforming to such a standard, and taken as a model for imitation: Thomas Jefferson was his ideal.

IDEOLOGY

An ideology is the systematic organization of an ideal. It has an authoritative source, a set of beliefs, a community of supporters, standard expressions or ways of operating and a clear aim or goal. Here are some standard definitions:

1.	the body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group.

2.	such a body of doctrine, myth, etc., with reference to some political and social plan, as that of fascism, along with the devices for putting it into operation.

It is sometimes religious, sometimes political, frequently though not always a combination of religion and politics. It is usually consciously or unconsciously seen to be somewhat Utopian, or held as the perfect solution. There are many ideologies ranging from one extreme to the other.

What’s the point?

The point is that there are many ideas in the universe, and some are better than others. Every ideologue thinks his/her ideas are right, or at minimum, the best. His/her ideas have become ideals which morph into an ideology. There is the Christian ideology, the Marxist ideology, the Socialist ideology, Muslim ideology, Progressive and Conservative ideologies, etc. And those I quoted in the singular actually have varied ideological permutations, though it is fair to say that each has basic common ideas and ideals.

If Nietzsche and Freud are correct that thoughts and ideas are independent of the self (‘I’), then it behooves us to seriously explore alternative ideas thoroughly before permanently taking up our ‘ideal’ and subscribing to a fixed ideology. I don’t mean exploring with a view to proving another set of ideas, or an opposing ideology false, but with a view to really letting the ideas from the ‘it’ take up residence and become familiar before we dismiss them.

A great negative example is in the biblical story of Nicodemus, the elite Jewish religious scholar and teacher. He covertly met with Jesus in the dark of night because he was fascinated with some of Jesus’ ideas. Nicodemus didn’t want to be seen with the Nazarene peasant who was challenging certain Judaic ideas and ideals. Jesus said, “Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil,” thereby calling Nicodemus' secret summit an evil deed. This must have come as a shock because Nicodemus was most certainly a very moral man. When Jesus referred to evil, he was speaking of Nicodemus' cowardice. The religious elitist didn't want to be seen in public questioning the correct ideology. The evil was not in the traditional moral sense, but in making a living off of an ideology that was suddenly suspect. The evil occurred when this prominent man placed his social prestige, financial gain and political power ahead of vetting the truth.The evil was in allowing an ideology to trump better ideas.

This applies to our current culture very pointedly. Christians and non-Christians, Republicans and Democrats, and all of us who take sides are famous for bashing the ‘bad guys’ before really understanding the actual ideas and ideals of these so called opponents. How many of us have confidently and ignorantly attacked others with hearsay or fabricated ‘historical facts,’ 'scientific studies,' 'statistics' and other convenient ‘evidences’? Shame on us! Face it. We are [2] bigots.

Jesus calls this uninformed, exclusivistic ideological chauvinism the 'unpardonable sin’. Jesus' judgment comes out of a story in the Gospel of Matthew where the unorthodox Jesus was casting out demons with the wrong ideology. The orthodox Hebrew idealists then accused Jesus of being possessed by Satan and of committing wicked deeds. Jesus shocked them by saying that the attribution of evil to someone doing good cannot be forgiven. In other words, that sort of ideological infection systematically rots the soul from the inside out, destroying the very essence of the man or women in their self-righteous idealism.

So beware, whomever we are – traditional conservative or progressive liberal, Christian or New Age, male or female, black or white, American or Muslim. This does not mean we ought not evaluate and critique ideas, ideologies and idealisms. It does mean that we ought to do our best to seriously understand another ideology before we criticize it. As I said, some ideas are better than others. Some ideologies are more beneficial than others -- politically, religiously and economically. But before we take a firm position and critique another, which I encourage by the way, let's find out what our ‘opponents’ really think, believe and practice. Then our critiques have power and authority, and the possibility of changing things for the good of all.

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[1] It is interesting that the Sankhya Hindu philosophy posits three ways of knowing:

1. Empirically – through the sense organs.
2. Rationally – through the reasoning process.
3. Auditorially – through hearing.

They recognize the usual western categories of empirics and reason, but add hearing.

[2] The word 'bigot' is etymologically related to the 'by - God' and was used of those who said they had the absolute truth or ideology because it came from their God.

SWINE FLU, CHICKEN LITTLE AND THE END OF MY WORLD!

The latest media driven catastrophe is swine flu. Some are saying it is a pandemic that will wipe out half the world. Others are calling it a conspiracy by politicians and drug companies to make money. I call this all too human, universal propensity to anticipate annihilation, the 'Archetype of the Apocalypse.' By that, I mean that there appears to be a universal element in the human psyche to anticipate and even thrive on the prospect of disaster.

Humans have always catastrophized. It seems to be in our nature. For Western mythology it begins in biblical Eden with Adam and Eve being told that if they ate from one particular tree they "would surely die!" They ate from the tree. They didn't die. Life changed, but no one died. That’s important to remember in these doom and gloom scenarios. Things change, but people rarely die.

Chicken Little continued the apocalyptic tradition by screaming to all who would listen that the entire heavenly canopy was going to crash onto the earth and kill everyone. Many listened. He gained quite a following until it was pointed out that he had only been hit on the head by a rogue apple. He didn’t die. But, like Adam and Eve before him, his life had changed.

From the second coming of Jesus, to Y2K, to global warming (or cooling), to meteors hitting the earth, to nuclear holocausts, to the Mayan 2012 calendar, to Catholic conspiracies, to drug company scams, to greedy politicians, to Free Masonic plots, to Jewish plots, to Islamic world domination -- and the list goes on and on and on. In fact someone has compiled a brief list from various times and cultures around the globe predicting various ends of the world: http://www.bible.ca/pre-date-setters.htm

While such external scenarios are never out of the question, and an actual 'end of the world' could occur due to human error or circumstances of Nature, most never have and never will. Of course, each person's pet apocalypse will be deemed to be "the one that IS true!"And you may be right, but probably not.

It seems to me that this internal predisposition to catastrophize is a wonderful and useful part of the human psyche. That part of us that anticipates and even thrives on judgment, destruction and ‘The End’ needs to be applied at a personal level in order for each of us to become a complete en-humaned being. You see, each of us is a walking apocalypse, a living end of the world. Each breath is the end of the old breath and the introduction of a whole new world of oxygen molecules. Each minute, hour and day is the end of life as we know it. When the head hits the dreaming pillow, the past day has been obliterated, the four horsemen have wiped the slate clean and a brand new world is coming. We cannot count on the fact that anything we possessed yesterday, mentally or physically, will be around when we awaken.

It has been said that the biblical book of Revelation is like a bad dream. That is a very helpful insight. Our night dreams and day anxieties are often filled with bizarre and troubling imagery and disastrous scenarios. A short peaceful car trip to the grocery store can end in thoughts of financial ruin or a life of miserable loneliness. The mind loves to construct end of our world scenarios. Let's face it, Time is a harsh Judge, passing sentence on each tick of the clock. The old is destroyed and buried. Frequently we imagine scenarios which are far worse than they actually become. Like the biblical book of Revelation, we experience days and sometimes sleepless nights filled with moments of tribulation or rapture. We await the Day of Judgment, the Lake of Fire, the Second Coming. There is some relief in knowing that this is the way the Psyche works.This is the way life works. But remember, every good apocalypse concludes with a new thing replacing the old, always.

Our lives are changing, always. What we thought we knew and had yesterday is going to shift, gradually or drastically. That is how life works. That is why babies grow and adults age. Such processes and events are what cause our souls to evolve and our unique characters to develop. Every change, each apocalypse, all fears and worries are purposeful and working toward the next new heaven and new earth. So take a load off – relax your shoulders and calm your thoughts. Shift the focus from 'the end of the world' and 'paranoid conspiracies' to your own life of ongoing change. God is making something new in each moment. Faith in the purposeful process turns catastrophes into what J.R.R. Tolkien called 'eucatastrophes' (ostensibly bad situations suddenly revealed to be fortuitous).

The Hebrew God, through his prophet Isaiah nearly 2,700 years ago said it like this:

"Forget the former things;
do not dwell on the past.

Pay attention! I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; can you not see it?
I am making a road through the wasteland
and streams in the desert."

~ Isaiah 43:18-19

How is The Imaginal Realm Different from Human Imagination?

Someone recently asked me why I use the term 'Imaginal Realm,' and wondered if it was the same as 'imagination.
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First off, the Imaginal Realm, like the Chinese Tao, cannot be named or defined.

We may examine the Imaginal Realm in the way a physicist studies an atom. Some activities and very limited results of the atoms existence can be observed, but never is the dynamic atom seen. If that is true of the miniscule atom, how much more of the vast Imaginal Realm which originated the atom? Perhaps these are more closely related than we realize as William Blake said, “To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower/Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.” (Auguries of Innocence)

I use that term 'Imaginal Realm' to distinguish it from 'human imagination', or the 'imaginary' work of people. 'Imaginary' refers to what we make up with the human will, like making up a story, creating a television commercial or constructing ideas for projects, etc. The Imaginal Realm is beyond and before human imagination, or imaginary human musings. The two areas clearly intersect because all human 'imaginings' are ultimately connected to the Imaginal Realm.

The Imaginal Realm is the arena of dreams. It is the Psychic-Sea in which we swim. It is the Realm of Psyche or Soul. It most often takes us into the depths, into the deep, into the abyss, into the labyrinth, into the matrix, into the womb of darkness, into the caverns of Hades. It is the realm of myth and fantasy - but again, these are not humanly constructed fantasies; rather they are unexpected and alien ideas, daydreams, thoughts and emotions.

The Imaginal Realm transmits those intrusive and often annoying feelings of awe or dread that seem to arrive from nowhere, those waves of overwhelming love or murderous resentment, and those flashes of clarity or confusion that seem to drop in 'out of the blue'.

The Imaginal Realm removes our limiting blinders and shows us, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly, the evolving Numinous Realm, the sacred spheres, the worlds of the Gods. Sadly, most modern humans try to assign the responsibility of all such experiences to the human mind and 'free will'. That is a huge mistake, and an impossible burden for us to bear. All ancient cultures realized that the Gods were the authors of such 'revelations'.

The Imaginal Realm conjures up the invisible playmates of some children, and sends us sudden insights into deep problems. It manifests itself as puzzling nightmares or shocking erotic interludes that interrupt our dreams. These perplexing images require us to move beyond a current ego-self, beyond the literal 'manifest content' of the dream, as Freud would say, to the 'latent content' wrapped in the dream's symbols. In other words, the Imaginal Realm loves to give us riddles and cryptic psycho-spiritual codes to crack. Humans love codes and riddles! That is why we are always finding religious, political and relational conspiracies everywhere!

The Imaginal Realm reminds us of our inevitable appointment with death, takes things apart we thought were solid and introduces transformational periods of depression, addiction, grief, insanity or other 'neuroses'. These useful psychological terms can also be misleading when we assume there is something 'wrong' with us and the cosmos. These necessary, normal and purposeful chaotic pathologies and painful symptoms, like the knotted root-ball of a potential plant, spread their tentacles into the deep rich loam of the Unconscious and prepare us to blossom.

The Imaginal Realm rearranges our understanding of 'love' and calls us beyond our ego and self will. It always surprises, troubles and nudges us beyond our current world securities and beliefs in what is taken for granted. It is the inner undiscovered jungle, and the Guide into that jungle of the unexplored unconscious, often showing up like Gandalf the Wizard from the Hobbit, prodding us on an adventure and into experiences which we could never have imagined would have entered our lives.

Rod Serling called the Imaginal Realm the Twilight Zone, "We are traveling through another dimension. A dimension not of sight and sound, but of 'mind'. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition; it lies between the pit of man's fears and summit of his knowledge."

The Imaginal Realm is like a stack of 10 trillion kazillion Lego pieces which can be constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed into an infinite number of images - both physical and psychical. It is simultaneously chaos and creation. The Hindu Sankhya philosophy calls this ‘prakriti,’ the eternal substance from which all physical and mental forms arise.

The Imaginal Realm is a crystal ball containing visions which may calm us or scare us. It was accessed by Shamans, Greek Oracles, Hebrew Prophets and Christian Apostles (cf. Apostle Paul, Colossians 1:15ff.). It is described in the Bhagavad Gita, chapter eleven.

The Imaginal Realm captures what we see when we shut our eyes and visualize, or listen to what is beyond the audible senses, and beyond our own intentional thought. Some today call it channeling, others call it being filled with the Holy Spirit or speaking in tongues. It is what Jesus referred to when he talked about 'the Kingdom of Heaven'. It is the Hindu Ganesh, a boy with an elephant's head. It is Alice Through the Looking Glass, Neo Anderson escaping the Matrix, Dorothy entering OZ through a tornado and all fantastic journeys into fantastic lands. It is the Realm of the Living Archetypes, which we call 'gods' and 'goddesses'.

Perhaps most importantly, we must remember that this Realm existed long before the human being, long before the human brain evolved. The Imaginal Realm is NOT synonymous with our neural biology any more than a television image is the result of the televisions internal technology. Both the television and the human brain receive their 'images' from a realm that is beyond the container holding the technology, beyond brains and microchips. To identify human bio-chemical cognition (the brain) with the Imaginal Realm may be the biggest and most deadly mistake in modern psychology, and the cause of our modern pharmaceutical culture.

Industry and technology are modern manifestations of the Imaginal Realm, but not to be confused with it, or seen as substitutes for humanness. The Greek God Hephaestus was the God of technos, constructing and inventing from the world of stuff, but he was homely and limped when he walked. Perhaps the Greeks recognized that technology, as wondrous as it is, contains a kind of ugliness and impairment of humanity. We see increasing numbers of people welded to their iPhone, iPod, television, computer or other techno-gadgetry. This is the shadow side of technology. There is a kind of ugliness and impairment of relational and communal intimacy. The wondrous product of the Imaginal Realm has replaced the Imagination, replaced revelation and creativity. We ought to stop using the ‘hardwired’ metaphor for the human brain. The Imaginal Realm reminds us that we are 'soft-wired,’ pliable – not machines. We need some Totos today who can do to us what the little dog did to the Wizard of OZ trapped behind his inhumane 'computer' screen. Toto drew back the curtain and revealed the human as primarily a receiver of personal contact, not a transmitter of second hand images.

The Imaginal Realm will never be defined, located or controlled. It is the sea of infinite potential and usually beyond human manipulation. I say 'usually' because at some minor level we are allowed to use our thoughts and intentions to create reality. But we do NOT create all reality. Man is NOT the measure of all perceptions, as Protagoras said. The Imaginal Realm created us as an author writes a poem, and It still continues to make us into unique poems. This realm screws with our perceptions in the most annoying ways.

Let me repeat: Most importantly, humans and specifically the human brain with which we are so enamored these days, receives the Imaginal Realm. The brain does not originate it. When this solar system runs down, shrivels into a smoldering ember and eventually fades into a cold, dead intergalactic debris field - after all sentient life has been consumed - the Imaginal Realm will continue to unfold new imaginings, new fantasies and infinite realities beyond our humanly 'imagined' ponderings.

The Imaginal Realm does NOT depend upon us, but we on It. That is why the ancients spent so much time addressing issues of destiny, fate and necessity. That is why even moderns, as they become older (ancient), begin to look in the rearview mirror of time and see forces beyond human will.

I have a series of comments and quotes regarding the Imaginal Realm on my blog site:
http://michaelbogar.blogspot.com/2007/01/what-is-soul-making_14.html

God is One, and Two

The irony of dualism is that until we see good and evil as part of the One, we are dualists.

When you say, "God is all there is," are you paying attention to the word 'all'? All is more than one. To say "God is all there is" implicitly recognizes duality by using the word all.

One cannot separate evil or any other thing from God without being a dualist. One must recognize duality in order to cease being a dualist, just as one must recognize the equality of two opposing football teams to see it as a perfect union of One Game. The Two (or more) and the One are both eternal. That is why the Yin/Yang symbol, and every other religious symbol, contains One and Two together.