Don, when you "choose contrary to [your] current spiritual state", would you then say this decision is without cause and without reason? Only then it would be a decision of free will, otherwise it's determined and not free. An act is not free only because it's unexpected. I guess you won't say it is uncaused and unreasoned, because you said you're not unconconcious doing when deciding that way, and indeed, free will would be counterintuitive to consciousness, mind, reason, as it would be unconnected to anything before (and thereafter, if every act would be free).
  (My formulation of the problem is similar as Kant did it in his "Critique of Pure Reason". His "solution" isn't really a solution I find though.)
 
Dave shows that the word "free" isn't useless, it only must be clear "free of what". "Free to" is the other side of it, but too problematic- we only know for sure that someone was free to do something when it really happened. We can't say anything for certain about if someone was free to do something when it has not happened so far. (This is from a philosophical viewpoint- in justice there is all the time spoken of virtual possibilities to have been free to do or omit sth.) 
  Your iteration and feedback view includes cause and effect Dave, right? Although, if you consider quantum effects there are some imponderabilities in the small range, mostly statistically equalized, but still under some conditions maybe (positive feedback/amplification) create unforeseeable ("chaotic") effects. (Some say the brain is nothing else than a quantum-process amplifier, nice way to introduce spiritual influences into the physical).

Spooky

Right, Spooky. "Free to" and "Free from" are at the heart of this.

Like most psychologists, I learned good behavioral technique, as well as a lot of relatively naive behavioral theory, all of which came on top of Freudian and post-Freudian neurological theory. I have yet to find a reason to fault these areas - except that they're a bit closed minded about subjectivity, they appear valid.

If we view ourselves as individuated actors on the biological stage, our roles are pretty well defined by physics and chemistry. We react in ways that are novel to us, but in each case, we follow our own predestined psycho-physical determinism.

In deep meditation we often feel as if we have left the level of stimulus-response and in some manner have reached the core at which reality emerges. We hear this described as "knowing God", or attainment of "samadhi" or any of dozens of other metaphysical expressions that indicate that we have placed our awareness at the "point of cause". At that time, I suggest that we have gone beyond our training and the limitations imposed on us as individuals, and instead we represent the free will that was manifested at the instant of creation.

This is interesting to me. In a sense what we are doing here is simply discussing our own programming in ways that have been programmed into us. Struggle as we will against it, we are the products of a material reality much like little wind-up toys from one of those places that is having an international recall for lead paint.

The freedom that I personally discover in this is two-fold. First, we didn't have to take on an incarnation in this or that form initially, but as part of the initial enthusiastic projection of "Self" we left the central identity with Godhead, much like a spark leaves a campfire, and here we are. That was an act of personal freedom based on awareness prior to existence. That we are presently in a deterministic situation does not negate the initiation of the activity, any more than the "follow through" of a golf swing negates the initial effort to hit the ball.

Second, starting in voidness, there is no limitation to the creative impulse, save that things must be logical. At this point we discover that God disperses a nearly infinite array of parallel universes, most of which are compatible, and which are occupied by one of us. This is the world of statistical distributions, quantum effects and suchlike. All the statistically related parallel realities began as an unrestricted creative impulse at "Event One". You and I are riding along in one or another of these realities. Now that we can see where we are, we can (predictably) alter our path to be in a better place because it feels better, and the mechanisms of karma help us in this respect, just as feedback helps any other automaton. In a sense, we live in the "follow through" of the swing that created the universe.

The fact that we get together in groups to discuss this stuff is liberating, in the sense that it allows us to assist one another to return to the Source. Having been using this faculty for some years, with awareness that I am only free to the degree that I am acting from the point of initial creation, I am inclined to ask, as did Albert Einstein, whether God could have created the world in any other way, or was God constrained. Personally, I'm still inclined to side with God in this, that creation was free, like a cosmic painter sloshing colors on an infinite canvas, and all the rest is fallout and follow through, a time of shading, adjusting, and revising to obtain the most pleasing effect.

And then, the Hindus tell us, God withdraws this world and casts forth another. However obscure to us this might be, it seems to be fun for God. Hence the Hindu terms it "lila", the play of God. And the secret to all of this is that it is us who are doing it.

dave

Hi Spooky- I still think your observation about "free to" and "free from" carries the essential question. With that I am fully in accord. But you ask an interesting question which has gotten me thinking about the details half the night. While I wouldn't want to admit to fuzzy thinking, you've pointed to a couple loose ends, which I will nail down here ... maybe.

I view this as having to do with cosmology and ontology as well as biology and physics, and all of that long before we reach psychology. My take on ontology is that in the initial instant of creation there was a pattern of, at the very least, some way in which logical structures might occur. Then, contingent on having additive space, everything must have emerged in terms of the initial logical pattern. That gives us a series of events in which the initial terms combine with one another to form new terms, those combine to form yet another layer of new terms etc, essentially an iterated complexion (or iterated power set if you prefer). No matter what the initial pattern of logical stuff might have been, this incorporates its evolution, because it incorporates all functionals over additive space.

In topological terms, we perceive these patterns and identify with one after another so as to move through space and time, more or less generating a geometry in which to live. At the same time, the geometry pre-exists by virtue of logical connectives between states. So we wander through potential space like a vagrant wandering through the streets and sidewalks of a city, free to choose any of the pre-existing paths and byways.

To get obdurate matter from this means that we must make a committment to some specific state or event, and invest our own reality into it, so that we become commensurate with it in some maner. That gives us the illusion of "extension". Since we are still limited by logic, once we take a posture, the rest unfolds acording to what we call "the laws of nature".

What actually unfolds is simultaneously all the endless sequences of combinations, and all the "parallel universes" which are permutations of the ways to form those combinations. (For example, you can count your fingers from thumb to pinky, or vice versa, or in any of 118 other ways, giving 120 parallel universes between starting the count and ending it.) These are static definitions, in the sense that they are well defined logically, and extend arbitrarily toward infinity.

We sense this logical evolution as dynamic in the sense that having attached to some criterion, we interact with context to extend things, so that one level of projected implictions preceeds the next, until we arrive at the level in which the accretion process is very slow, and we perceive the projection of past reality into future reality as occurring in "time". If we assume that the universe started with a dyadic initial structure, then our present manifest cosmos is at about complexion iteration 4.3.

When I, prior to everyday experience, made the primal choice to invest myself in some initial state, I did so with the insight of a chess player who is trying to look several moves ahead. To that degree, I attempted to limit myself, but ultimately, my choice was initially arbitrary. Having no experience, I am free, but also ignorant. Later on, I am forced to again make that choice, but in different terms, as my initial attachments projected outward are later presented inward as karmic recoil, and also as part of my surrounding experiential context as I blunder my way through the world acquiring knowledge.

Here we have a seeming paradox in which I am free to make a choice, which requires that I make another choice, which requires that I make another choice, and so on. My initial act extends into every other action I make, and it defines the kind of deterministic loading I place upon later choices. In this sense, my initial act is carried perpetually forward requiring me to ratify it in a succession of states. By that I am perpetually continuing to make the same initial, unconditioned choice, although now in context. In this I am "self-determined", or free. At the same time, I am locally determined by physics, limited by my biology, and shaped by the karma that I have called up from context. In that I am "other-determined" and not free.

So we have a logic more like that of Nargarjuna, in which at one instant I am subject to an exclusive OR dialectic, being determined or not, and at the next instant I can point to the manner in which I am both free from determination, yet also subject to logical limits which define me, an inclusive OR. Depending upon viewpoint, I am thus globally free, as I am acting from the "Point of Cause", yet fully determined, as my initial choice from the "Point of Causality"  carries a string of subsequent implications which I cannot evade.

We have a tendency to confuse creativity with freedom. When I take two conceptual objects and merge them to give rise to a third object, such that the third object is, by virtue of synergy, different from either of the two beginners, then I have been creative. To be creative in this manner does not equate to having will "free from" external causality.  I might just be following a recipe for arroz con pollo.

It's on this basis that I suggest that the moments in which I free myself occur when I "return to Center" and operate at the "Point of Causality", nirvastarka samadhi. At the time I act as an element of the "Uncaused Cause" in the general Thomistic sense. This is unconditioned action. However, the alien nature of samadhi also makes it a state specific situation to which I cannot relate in my everyday life, nor can I define. In that lack of definition, however, is freedom, and in the repetition of the states called up and subsequently manifested, I again make an unconditioned choice.

Hmmm - Y'know, it kinda sounds as if we are forced to be free.

dave

Hi Vajra-

I'm not being very Buddhist in my expressions, but you might notice what happens when you take the Prajanaparamita Sutra literally.

Given that everything is nothing and only because it is nothing can it be everything, we ask where are we? We are no-where. Our nature is no-thing, and we are no-body. Allusions of being somewhere, as an extended thing, with a human embodiment are due solely to errors arising from attachment.  Aside from them, our nature is being in pure potentiality.

Given that, then the karmic process you described applies. And for physics, love translates into a state of equilibrium, so we have love here, and thermodynamics there. Thus, once we attach, we shift potentiality to materialization, but interactions get karmic feedback, so everything settles nicely. Or, in terms of physics, hot things cool off and come into equilibrium with their context. Our nature is dynamic, not massive, so we actually reach a dynamic balance, like a comfortable oscillation.

When our state of balance ultimate is guided into rejection of the attachment by which we got hooked, we fall back into "Mind",  and are again at Cause.

While here, we are determined by birth issues, parenting, past life phenomena, social learning, education, conditioning, habits, physiology etc. These define our life, and due to their nature, they define us. We thus are not free from our circumstances.

However, the act by which we initiated our attachment, and thus incarnation, was free and volitional, and included, by direct implication, the series of choices which follow on until the end of the series of incarnations and return to Godhead. So, we make the free choice at the first, and then we cope until we are back at "GO" again, in the state of emptiness, from which everything emerges.

When people describe this in terms of past life regression they express a happy entry into the "Spirit World", some kind of interactions there, and finally, as one person put it, "Oh, it's that time again." And thus, what is done in spirit, as we make attachments in emptiness and then follow them without letting go,  is what ultimately hooks us back to another round. This is a microscopic version of the entire cycle from Creation to Termination.

In my opinion, withdrawal from life is necessary only to the degree that you are harming yourself. -  But we all knew that.   Withdrawal from attachment is different. That's the way out, and it's done by going through the discipline of spiritual development.

My personal guess for the next few decades is a repetition of the 45 year cycle in which the 20's led to the 60's and 70's, and now the upwelling of new ideas that will come into sharp focus in roughly 2010 or 2015.  Hopefully this will be an upsurge of rational thinking, but it might go toward another episode of social insanity.

Dave:
I see what you mean. It is though the question if to call this initiate decision to connect to possibilities "free" is appropriate. On the one hand, of course there are no restrictions and influences coming from a biography at the beginning. But it is as well like starting from scratch, like a baby that falls on the floor, and we won't say it made the decision to do this. And, too, there finally must be something there, something which makes the decision, the mysterious individual, now in it's purest form, without experiences, but still a being able to decide. So there is a cause, laying in this indivdual; but yes, in this early stadium, it might not be called the cause, determinating it's decision (maybe better to say it IS it's decision).
  Another thing is, if we actually can go into a state at one with the initial cause of our individuation, the starting point of our complexion / iteration in time, it is somehow suggesting to me that this way we go here in the time-realm is to be seen embedded in an "already finished" realm, including all time there was and will be. It's a sort of intuition I have- if I'd think long enough I'd surely find a logical proof for it  .

Vajra, what I see in modern life, which is different from the older days, is that even the average person in the "up to date"- parts of the world has to deal with much more intellectual issues than ever before, alone because of all the technical stuff we are flooded with. This is consuming much time and energy. Might be that people had to work harder in former times, but despite that, they may have had more time for chat and letting the mind flow freely than many people today have. So, "simple living" is almost a must-motto for every timeout we allow us so that we get to think of something different than instruction manuals for cellphones, mp3 players and such...

Spooky

dave_a_mbs wrote on Sep 14^th, 2007 at 11:58pm:


   There is!  By living the most core of the core truth, the one thing that we as humans have erected walls upon walls against.

   Summed up in "others, Lord, others" and "Your Will be done, Not my (the limited self's) will be done".   The more consistently and purely one lives that in relation to all of creation, the more everything is opened up to them perceptually. 

  All the rest is just emotional and mental masturbation with no orgasm at the end.

  I choose, and am in the process of learning to choose orgasm (as we all are to varying degrees of conscious consciousness), simply because it feels better.