Life Plan

[Korpo]

How do you know if you are using free will in any aspect of your life as opposed to what has already been pre-determined?

EVERY choice you make is free will. The circumstances may have been set, but your choice remains. I incluce your emotional makeup as circumstance here, too. The body you have is such a circumstance.

You may feel your choice is not free will because you felt pressured. It is still free will, you just exercise it a certain way to avoid inconvenience. Or pain. These are circumstances. Certain key circumstances are preset for your life. Others change throught the free will of you and others. Free will exists, but it is not easy to enact it.

When you say 'guides' help you to map out your life... Does this include morally bad things such as peadophillia, rape or murder? Do you think people choose to do such things or do you believe that it can be mapped out for them and they do it due to external influences e.g. They are born into a family where they are abused as a child and then they grow to become an abuser?

IMO people might chose such lives for learning a certain lesson, to overcome a weakness in themselves by not becoming like that, by not chosing the easy way of acting out their own pain on others. I don't think that it is ever planned to become a rapist or abuser. Some bodies and emotional makeups are way harder choices in that way. Why they get chosen or assigned is hard to tell in this life. Michael Newton's "Journeys of Souls" might be an interesting read on that topic if you think this hypothesis has any merit. He postulated it on the interviewing of thousands of people in deep hypnosis about their life choices.

The thing that doesn't make me believe in free will is that in every cross section of a population of society there will always be percentages that are doctors, builders, teachers, cleaners, entrepreneurs, criminals etc... and then these people fall under personality categories such as confident, shy, adventurous, boring, nice people*, horrible people* etc... You will always find similar people, no matter if they're from your home town or somewhere on the other side of the planet. Admitedly, everyone is different but I would say that is due to individual, external influences and the surroundings upon which they were brought up which contributes to their personality. I think it is impossible for any two lives to be replicated but the expericences can be similar which forms similar personalities. And it is your personality that forms your decision making process and not free will.

No, only if you let it. It takes free will to overcome your personal limitations. Free will is there. Not enacting it is sometimes laziness, sometimes cowardice, and sometimes just plain human. To postulate that free will is not there because life can be tough is IMO just a way of denying your own responsibility for your life.

The thing that makes me believe in free will is that, if I wanted to, I could quit my job tomorrow, get the first flight to Tailand and soak up the sun for the rest of my life but maybe I would just be doing that to prove that free will exists and therefore, it wouldn't really be freewill.

"Free will" does not equal "free ride". The fact that you are right now not lying on a beach in Thailand with a safe financial cushion to feed you might indicate that you planned something more challenging in your life to learn and master than just that.

Take good care,
Oliver

[Korpo]

Because if life is all mapped out, technically you couldnt commit suicide, or get into a major car accident or purpose. Just my thoughts.

Free will enables you to diverge from your life plan. I think suicide is not planned into a life. And yet you could still commit it at any time. (Please don't do it!)

Take good care,
Oliver

[Tom]

Because if life is all mapped out, technically you couldnt commit suicide, or get into a major car accident or purpose. Just my thoughts.

Free will enables you to diverge from your life plan. I think suicide is not planned into a life. And yet you could still commit it at any time. (Please don't do it!)

Take good care,
Oliver

If you must insist that we chose our lives in advance, then can you really prove that despair leading up to suicide is not simply one more possibility which has also been selected in advance ... ?

[Korpo]

The question is - what is learned?

If the purpose is to learn something, not committing suicide and facing your problems and overcome them seems to be more viable. I don't think there is anything to be learned by suicide. JMO.

I don't believe we go through all permutations mindlessly. We do not experience everything. Instead we receive finely honed lessons that help us work on our weaknesses by being offered to make better choices every time we face them. If this is true, what weakness would be overcome by suicide?

Oliver

[Tom]

The question is - what is learned?

If the purpose is to learn something, not committing suicide and facing your problems and overcome them seems to be more viable. I don't think there is anything to be learned by suicide. JMO.

I don't believe we go through all permutations mindlessly. We do not experience everything. Instead we receive finely honed lessons that help us work on our weaknesses by being offered to make better choices every time we face them. If this is true, what weakness would be overcome by suicide?

Oliver

From my point of view it is hard to justify the idea that all the major events in our lives are planned out in advance and that we do it to ourselves. I also have a problem with the idea that life is a series of lessons or even a sort of school. You will find that I am not a believer in "The Secret" or anything like that. Mostly, though, I want to know why you seem to think that suicide is always about running away from problems or giving in to weakness.

[Korpo]

I'm having the idea from Michael Newton - the lesson idea as much as the ideas about suicide.

If you must insist that we chose our lives in advance, then can you really prove that despair leading up to suicide is not simply one more possibility which has also been selected in advance ... ?

This implies that you yourself believe that suicide is chosen out of despair. Isn't that basically the same?

Oliver

[Korpo]

As far as I can remember you often expressed the idea of life being forced upon us and that certain things have to be overcome. I do no longer share that belief either. I think in certain ways I would find it as hard as you would the other way round to justify why.

Oliver

[Tom]

Suicide is not easy to discuss theoretically like this. I was asking you why you think it couldn't be accounted for in advance, if you believe that there is a plan for your life and a list of lessons to be learned in the process. Your answer seemed to be that there is nothing to be learned from suicide so there would be no way it could have been chosen ahead of time. Once again I stated that I don't agree that life is mapped out in advance. Okay. What if the lesson of suicide is that quitting the game before it has a chance to be played out fully is a mistake, and that it isn't a good idea to keep hitting "reset" when things seem to be completely out of control?

[rapidlearner]

Who is to say what is a lesson and what isn't a lesson. Don't all experiences (incluiding suicide) contribute to learning?

And if they do, we can't use free will to avoid learning. Thus, making all learning pre-determined no matter what it is.. you can't choose not to learn, therefore, free will does not exist in a learning context. Everyones circumstances determines what they learn, there is no choice. Even if it feels like one.

For example, If someone was born into a cult and is easily influenced by the group, sees or hears nothing else but the preaching of the cult throughout his life and one day they decide to stage a mass suicide and he joins them whole heartedly believing he is doing the right thing... The circumstances caused him to join in the suicide. Free will (if it ever existed in the first place) was eliminated by his circumstances that were predetermined.

We are all born into a circumstance. Everyones thinking is biased. That bias comes from past experiences which shape our thinking patterns which, in turn, was biased by previous experiences.

[Korpo]

For example, If someone was born into a cult and is easily influenced by the group, sees or hears nothing else but the preaching of the cult throughout his life and one day they decide to stage a mass suicide and he joins them whole heartedly believing he is doing the right thing... The circumstances caused him to join in the suicide. Free will (if it ever existed in the first place) was eliminated by his circumstances that were predetermined.

I think that is oversimplified. Even the most influenced person makes a lot of conscious decisions. Even if they are of the kind "I'm afraid so I give in".

What you basically say is a decision must be easy for you to be accepted as free will: When I don't like my life I should be allowed to lie around a beach in Thailand. If I'm in a cult I should be given a clear and easy way out of the cult. According to your reasoning that you would accept as free will. To me that is not "free will", but "free ride". You're asking not for the ability to decide and bear the consequences, but a way out of the consequences.

Let my explain what I think by laying open my assumptions:

Let's assume you incarnate multiple times. Let's assume your soul desires to evolve and overcome certain restrictions in character. Let's say your soul has had problems in multiple lives with resisting peer pressure and standing on its own. Let's further assume your soul wants to learn this lesson once and for all and choses a hard lesson.

So the soul goes - this whole scenario is taken from Michael Newton's ideas, which base on thousands of hypnotic regression cases - to a life choice, and together with guidance selects this life where circumstances bring the soul into a group cult. All the souls in this group cult have selected this situation to overcome a very strong peer pressure. At this point before incarnation the soul just desires to learn and is fully aware of its choice.

The soul gets born and selective amnesia erases most of its memory for its life time. Now the soul is faced with the imminent mass suicide of the group. The soul had some experiences in its life that might help to resists the group pressure, but also unresolved traumata that impair this. The decision is really, really hard. Going against the pressure has all kinds of negative consequences - being excluded, being rejected by the group, losing all social acceptance at once (for some people worse than dying), by believing in the doctrine of the sect the person also loses all self-respect, because its self-respect is based largely on being a "good" cult member, by following rules.

If the soul now choses suicide, it has given in - in a way. The life it chose to learn a difficult lesson might not have born as much fruit as the soul hoped. If the soul succeeds in making the hard decision, bearing responsibility for turning its own life around, it might have learned more in this life time about group pressure than in half a dozen others. In a certain sense it is a high risk gamble by the soul.

I, personally, find this scenario convincing. I have read dozens of similar scenarios in Michael Newton's books, and to me they just "feel right".

Just because the decision is hard does not mean we have no free will IMO. Sometimes people die a heroic death. Sometimes taking a hard decision means to die regardless. But to me it is free will, as long as I can decide. I can commit a capital crime tomorrow or I don't. Just because my emotional makeup makes it unlikely does not prevent me making that choice. Just because my circumstances favor a non-criminal life-style does not mean I cannot. Just because a person grew up in violent surrounding does mean the person is destined to be violent. Etc.

The key is, in my opinion is that sometimes enacting free will is just very hard. But it does exist. You can argue whether there really is a necessity for choices to be hard, if it would not be better if they were easier. Surely I would prefer that for my life, too.

But IMO free will exists all the time regardless of the circumstances.

Oliver