NoLiesPlease.com
devved by Jess Cummins (@jesscxc)
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ty13.6.5s
What is natural will? It is the understanding that choices are made due to the entirety of nature’s influences. It is the better counterpart to free will.
Does acceptance of natural will take away your kindness to others? Does it take away your compassion, your desire to grow, your desire to love and create?
I believe it does not.
Accept natural will. With natural will, you are able to experience life more deliberately and directly, rather than being stuck inside your head. Instead of analyzing the past and fretting over the future, you realize you are nature, and so you can be more present in the Now.
Realize that you are a process of nature observing itself. It is nature choosing, not a limited physical body. This allows you to make peace with the past and accept what the future brings.
Watch your body act and your mind run, instead of living inside your head. You can let go of who you think you are supposed to be. Instead realize you are nature interacting with itself.
Free will causes suffering because you imagine you can fail at nature, at your potential in life.
You can make no wrong decision in life. Neither can a leaf falling from a tree.
Watch your experiences with amusement. See how your life is a natural process of the universe, ever flowing.
There is no barrier between you and the world. A change in gravity from a star exploding 10,000 light-years away can ripple out and change your experiences. You are nature, not separate from it.
You are an amazing pattern of nature.
When you accept that your choices are nature’s, you can give up self-punishment.
There is mental suffering when we believe we’ve chosen incorrectly. When you realize you are nature, you can let yourself be in nature. We are experiences in nature, and we cannot defy nature.
To have inner peace, dispense with the idea that you are separate from nature.
Accept that your mind is a natural process and you allow yourself freedom from self-punishment.
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ty13.3.8s
“Because of the chaotic quantum unpredictability of nature, our will is free from prediction.”
Consider it: The universe evolves in an unpredictable manner. We create models in science to predict, but these are always approximate. With quantum mechanics we realize events are based on probabilities rather than certainties. Particles have probabilities of where they will be found. It cannot be known where a particle is until we measure it, which affects where it is going.
If our will cannot be predicted in principle, then we are free from predicting the choices of others.
Our desires are of course determined by the history of our species. The behavior of our ancestors create the world we live in now.
To some extent we have “free want”. We feel a freedom in choosing what we want, what has led our species to be successful in the past.
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ty13.4.18s
If your mind is uploaded to a computer and your body dies, do you still exist?
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ty13.6.1s
O great Mystery, wise mind that permeates this universe, please grant me humbleness before you so that I may climb a little higher on the vine I am clutching.
I sit here now and ponder if there are any fundamental differences between human nature and the creations of the natural world.
Are the telephone poles around us, which seem to break up the fractal pattern of nature, somehow apart from it?
Are we all just living in a system we have grown used to, like the bird that perches on a wire as if it is a branch?
By this I mean, do we take our blessings for granted, running on the hedonic treadmill instead of sitting and noticing the beauty of the space around us? When is enough enough?
Then again, can we really do anything nature doesn’t want us to do, if we really are magnificent emergent information patterns?
Why live in imagined worlds of suffering, so focused on the future or the past? Why not live in the present?
Is it possible with automatic imagination to markedly reduce pain’s influence over our lives? Evolutionary pressures may have made our system of pain be roundabout and complex, but most complex systems have vulnerabilities we can exploit.
The real issue is this:
If we are mental patterns, forces of nature, why not realize these human bodies are tools to wear?
Why not accept that free will is a trick? Why not notice our senses are moving along sense-objects?
Does this not actually give us more freedom from suffering and worry?
If we realize our minds are nature’s, does this not give us more ability to be comfortable in experiencing the Now?
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ty13.6.2s
Your mind is an interpreter of stories – information patterns. The mind thinks in stories.
The sense of self, of identity, is a fictional story. It sometimes helps you cooperate with others.
When you are tricked into believing that your identity exists in reality, you allow suffering. Inner peace is challenged when you believe you must be a certain way.
The truth is that nature is a certain way. As a force of nature, you should accept what is happening.
You are the doing, not the doer nor the done. Your body is a wonderful mechanism that nature has put together.
The information patterns of your mind are inscribed by nature, there’s no need to try to control them.
When you recognize you are nature, your awareness can watch your body behave according to the scripts it follows. Yet you aren’t tied up in them, you are free to watch.
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ty13.6.3s
O great twisty math of the universe, please reveal yourself to me. My mind cannot fully absorb the subtleness of the infinite mysteries of reality, yet please aid my quest as I try to grow and better myself.
Here I sit, in a room of human creation, and yet I must ask, does not the rest of the universe deserve some credit for our deeds? Don’t galaxies light-years away that are influencing us in unpredictable ways show us our hubris in declaring our inventions as “human”?
Aren’t we each awarenesses in a process of bending back, yet fundamentally beholden to nature?
If so, how can free will be at all sensible or appealing? Isn’t this sense of control merely an illusion, built up because of evolutionary advantages? What evolutionary reasons could these be?
Perhaps this feeling of volition is really a meme that spread, like the idea of a flat Earth. Like what happened with the idea of the Earth at the center of the Universe, hopefully we will develop better models and see the benefit in not being tricked by the illusion of control.
This benefit comes by easing the pain of suffering which is caused by resisting what Is in favor of what one thinks Should Be.
It’s silly, isn’t it? We blind ourselves to the simple truth of our minds being imagined ideas, which causes suffering when who we think we should be doesn’t match what is.
This trick of a persistent self may help us cooperate with others in a consistent way, but when we fail to stay in our imagined bubble of acceptable living we beat ourselves up, as if the process of awareness requires an identity.
You don’t need an identity any more than you need a belief in invisible pink unicorns. The universe happens – and you’re in it.
The ego, the sense of an identity, is fundamentally an imagined idea. If you want to turn your attention on the experiences of living rather than the illusions of thinking, you can.
Your body is a force of nature in the universe, and your sensation of mind and awareness proceeds from the natural processes of your neural wetware.
If nature wanted you to be different, you would be.
If the math running the universe rolled out for you to be different, you would be.
So should you feel alone? Should you feel broken? What about bliss or comfort?
It turns out that these emotions are created by your brain. This is a natural brain, not exempt from nature’s mathematical laws.
The processes of thinking and emoting and worrying are created by nature, you don’t need to try to control it.
This is why the ancients, in texts like the Bhagavad Gita and the Tao Te Ching, constantly speak of developing motivelessness and detachment to desires.
It’s because these desires are imagined ideas! Wrapping yourself in the comfort of the fruits of purposive actions only serves to strengthen the trick that you are in control!
Instead, shake off that yoke of identity which causes suffering. You are neither the watcher nor the watched, you are nature watching itself.
Your body is an observational tool. It is an instrument that was built up by the processes of reality.
Let yourself break from the idea that you need to do something. When the time comes, it will either happen or not. There is never a good time to worry.
While life is not like a movie, where it all works out in the end for you, it does proceed by the impartial rules of nature. You don’t need to try to control that. To do so would be like trying to rewrite a movie that’s already been filmed.
Belief in free will is optional. If the circumstances work out where you realize identity is just a belief, not a fact, you can learn to live without the pain of imagined suffering.
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ty13.6.4s
I ponder now if the ancients had it wrong when declaring motivelessness and renouncement of desires as the best path to enlightenment and peace.
That is, rather than expecting things to go our way, we should accept that attachment to desires brings pain to the soul.
Yet is this the truth of the matter?
My question is not whether motivelessness is superior to feeling the urge to keep up with the Jones’, because I do believe detachment from the fruits of actions does help bring peace.
Yet is this the best way?
The real problem that I see with the texts of the Bhagavad Gita and the Tao Te Ching and Zen Buddhism is that they seem to posit that one actually has control over one’s life. Frankly, that’s just not so.
The universe creates and the universe is. The epiphenomenon of the mind is nature playing itself out.
The universe constructs the brain which allows the mind, and the mind is inseparable from the universe.
What is an illusion? It is a fiction that deceives us into believing it is real.
Now, I am all in favor of believing whatever makes you happiest. No axiom, not matter how obvious, is provably true. At the core, you can only assume, never know. This means that you should choose what will aid you in your quest for inner peace.
Yet let us think deeper on this issue: If inner peace comes from detachment from desires and living in the moment, how do we do that? How do we experience the Now instead of living in imagined stories of good versus evil?
It seems to me the illusion is only broken (or most successfully broken) when we accept that nature is going the way it will go, and we get to experience it, rather than force it into a predefined box.
So what does this tell us?
Well, it informs the awareness that is digesting these words that freedom from suffering comes from acceptance of natural will.
The libertarian notion that we control our destinies is hurtful fantasy. Do we imagine molecules control their destinies? Do we blame them if they “fail” to?
If we spare ourselves from the belief in control we actually can watch our bodies and minds exist in-place, rather than being unconscious to the fact of there being no free will.
When we accept our bodies and minds and environments are happening naturally, we allow ourselves inner peace.
By realizing it’s not necessity to renounce the fruits of action, we can grow to realize that our minds are happening because of natural processes.
Our brains run on the math of the universe. Buying into notions of what should or shouldn’t happen can cause us suffering.
Zen and the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita seem to presume that free will is possible in this universe.
The mind is not separate from the brain: it is the process of the brain.
This is what nondualism means: the brain and the mind are one, and so the universe is one.
Some might say that evil is objectively wrong, that theft and wars and violence are always and forever damnable offenses.
Yet how true can that really be if our actions are proceeding naturally?
Is a computer program responsible for its actions? No, it is an output of a natural environment.
This is not to say that imprisoning destructive programs or violent people is wrong, just that their behavior and our imprisoning are both completely natural. The behavior is out of the hands of any one person, or even the hands of the galaxy.
The universe is unpredictable, and in that sense we go down many different paths. We, even as self-aware animals, have no idea which path we go down.
So what’s the point of all this chatter?
The point is that suffering comes from belief in free will, not from attachment to desires.
We are totally natural experiences.
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ty13.6.14s
I ask today of the charges against natural will and whether they are valid.
Specifically, are we made worse by not believing free will exists? Does it constrain our actions? Does it make us lazy?
Can the theory of natural will capture the essence of life and not drain it of meaning?
I propose it can.
If will is the faculty of choice, then what is natural will? It is choice made due to the entirety of nature’s influences, not a separate ego.
Understanding natural will helps us see that the feeling of free will is detrimental.
Rather than setting us free, the idea of free will imprisons us in suffering.
Belief in natural will actually allows for a more fluid, less self-conscious way of life.
Instead of judging yourself harshly when your goal is not met, you realize that identity is an illusion and you couldn’t have acted any other way.
You can’t force the universe to conform with your choices. You only have an illusion of choice.
With the understanding that will is natural, you can let go of preconceived notions of who you’re supposed to be and what you’re supposed to do.
Is this a bad thing? Does it make you a less productive person?
Well, free will doesn’t make sense as a concept, so it’s really not up to you to choose to be productive or not. It’s the universe’s choice.
You are an awareness watching life unfold. That is a more elegant idea than being trapped in your head.
So let yourself be truly free: Choose natural will.
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(more to be published)