Georgius wrote: Sat Jan 11, 2025 7:28 am

Fidibus wrote: Fri Jan 10, 2025 6:28 pm causality is an illusion

In my mind it’s a very useful concept. I remember Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Representation” where he ideated very nicely how this unconscious sense of cause and effect creates objects for perception. It’s a book which is very good to read, understandable speech and not that hard to follow. Maybe a little wordy for today’s taste but this helps to absorb his ideas. Recommendation for people that are interested in this theme.

Dear Georgius, I have only read about a quarter of the famous Schopenhauer book. It didn't affect me, but it was more than 30 years ago. My philosophy professor died in 2023. Peter Bieri. Did you know him? At that time I wrote about the topic “Idea and Reality”. There is a very good book to my approach from a German professor: "The concept of the jump..(by Kierkegaard) Christa Kühnhold. Jump might not be the correct english word. I would best describe myself as an existentialist.
Fidibus

Fidibus wrote: Sat Jan 11, 2025 7:58 am My philosophy professor died in 2023. Peter Bieri. Did you know him?

No, I don’t know him. I’m no philosopher, just one snuffeling at things which smell interestingly …

Georgius wrote: Sat Jan 11, 2025 3:22 pm

Fidibus wrote: Sat Jan 11, 2025 7:58 am My philosophy professor died in 2023. Peter Bieri. Did you know him?

No, I don’t know him. I’m no philosopher, just one snuffeling at things which smell interestingly …

You know the movie
Night Train to Lisbon?

No, sorry.

Ok, sorry.
I thought that
who Schopenhauer reads
reads more philosophy than Schopenhauer.

I did.

That is not a surprise.

It is interesting what kind of books do find us, find our heart. That fits to this subject. Free will.

I had a crazy experience in a lesson on Wittgensteins tractatus. The first philiosophical book I read was Repetition from Kierkegaard.

What about yours, Georgius?
What does it say us about
Determinism?

My wife had a experience as little girl on a carousel. She sat in a little car and pretended to direct it on the round of the carousel. As it stoped she got out and her parents said that she made it very well. She was terrible shocked that she thought it was just a toy and now she was told that she really directed the little car on the carousel.

Do you understand my point?

Might

We van tell the past
but not the future.

Is it my free will that the back of my head is itching right now? Is it my free will that I'm scratching the back of my head now? Are thoughts also reflexes or are they controlled by our will? If I study for a test, is it free will that controls it? Because I'm actually more of a lazy type who doesn't like to put in that much effort.

"Immortality and free will, having nothing to do with the body, are the real forces that work in the true, free act of will in the human being. The profound mystery is that when we investigate the free will, we find that nothing mortal in the human being carries out the actions, but we find that free actions are carried out by the immortal part of man." (Rudolf Steiner, Reincarnation and Immortality, 1918).

"Genuine freedom of will as of consciousness and delight and being can only be in a divine state, for only the Divine is genuinely free". (Aurobindo, The Incarnate Word)

When I lived and worked at the Aurobindo ashram in India, I once asked the meaning of work.
Why do we have to work?
The answer I was given was that the karma yoga is the yoga of action or work; more specifically, karma yoga is the path of dedicated work: renouncing the results of our actions as a spiritual offering rather than accumulating them for ourselves. Karma is both action and the result of action.

Free will is working by offering our action and the results to the Divine.
It does not matter what you do but if you keep doing it "in consciousness", you contribute to the descent of immortality in the matter and the body, what Aurobindo called the Supramental.

"When Aurobindo died in 1950, there was a stretch of eighteen hours, yet Sri Aurobindo’s body had not only not shown any signs of decomposition, it had actually acquired a new lustre and the radiant complexion of life!

The Mother described the new lustre as the Supramental light, and helped Dr. Sanyal also – who at first couldn’t – to see it: “a luminous mantle of bluish golden hue around him.” And his
portrait has almost an epiphanic quality: “Spiritually imperial – this is the only description fitting the appearance of the body…. The atmosphere of the room was vibrant with a sacred power to cleanse and illumine, a power which appeared to emanate from the Master’s poise of conquering rest and to invade the bodies of all the watchers… as if… there came pouring down to humanity the life-transcending grace of the Supermind.” (Sri Aurobindo Trust).

A life spent in consciousness with free will, yet he could not escape death even if he tried very hard, all his life, to bring the Divine in every little cell of his body.