Roger,

Origen (225 AD) endorses the potential ability of every believer to exercise prophetic gifts. In his own exercise of this gift, he reports alternate worlds that sound very earthlike (e.g analogous geographical regions), but seem to be worlds from other dimensions.  Important soul work is performed in these worlds.  The Bible embraces not reincarnation, but the soul's preexistence.  The Bible does not expound on the nature of this state to the extent t hat Origen does and the Council of Constantinople decided that Origen goes too far.  But The Bible does imply that one's vocational calling and character in our world are affected by our preexistent state.  I have often wondered if the apparently unfair suffering in our world is at least partly determined by our actions and fate in our preexistent state.  So Christians and reincarnationists share in common a belief in the importance of a preexistent soul state.  This is a tantalizing mystery.

Don

I agree spookey,but lets look at it this way.God could have robots,but no,I will wait for them to come to me of there own free will,no matter how long it takes,because I do not want to lose not one of my sheep.George

Matthew,

Thank you for the eloquent post.  I agree with you completely.

In Buddhism, one learns that karma is as you have described and that the practices of compassion and lovingkindness (PUL) can generate more positive karma.  And eventually enlightenment after many, many lifetimes.  Though one description of Buddhist cosmology I've read  considers a much bigger universe than our physical universe and posits that those lifetimes can be spent on any of the unfathomably large number of possible worlds. 

Viva free will (and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle)!

Pat

Hmmmmm......not that I can remember! Ha! (I don't recall a past life). 

No but seriously Seraphis my friend, you must be way out there if you got that impression from my rather straight forward post.  Scratchin' my head here - nothing mentioned myself in anyway or incarnation.  If your question is, can a maniacal sadist simply decide to change and become loving, and not work off their Karma, by exercising free will, my answer would be no, not right away.

No one goes from loving to harm another, to being a loving enlightened person at the flip of a switch. 

People make too much out of karma.  Karma is passive, not active.  If you plant seeds, they grow.  You reap what you sow.  The escape from karma comes, not with  "Hitler" type person waking up in a hell and saying "please!  I was wrong!  i won't do it again!  Now let me into heaven!"  No, just being unhappy doesn't change the amount of love in you.

However, change is the rule, not the exception.  And a hateful being will have choices to make in their hell (or on earth).  Each time they make choices, the karma entailed will change their future state of being.  Should they continue, with free will to voluntarily choose to act unlovingly, they will, be subject themselves to those conditions.  But in doing so, karma is not binding them; they are binding themselves. 

And don't kid yourselves.  karma is a true force, but to some extent self inflicted.  The soul realizes the awful things that others have experienced due to its actions.  It initially can't forgive itself.  So we seek forgiveness from those we've harmed, and ultimately from ourselves (we are our own harshest judges).  When some former evil doers come into a change of thought, and allow God's love to enter into their lives, they can find forgiveness from those they've hurt (eventually), and at some point after atonement, they forgive themselves - and then move on.

I am sure that there are those slow to learn the lessons of love, who appear trapped in a demonic type existence.  I won't debate that possibility, yet I would say that static thought is highly unusual and that change or evolution is more the rule.


Matthew

Related to what Spooky and others said:

As far as I'm concerned having a free will isn't a matter of a person being able to do whatever he (or she) wants regardless of how it affects others, because then he is giving into to his self-centered motives, and how can that be free will?

Freewill is about having the freedom of mind to live according to love and what serves the oneness, and be joyful as you do so. The more our souls grow, the wiser we become, the more we are able to live according to true free will.

Or in other words, it is a matter of having the freedom of mind to respond to circumstances with wisdom and love.

I can't say I have complete freedom of mind, sometimes I listen to my attachments, but I've found that the more I've grown spiritually, the more freedom I've obtained to live according to love and universal wisdom.

Matthew:

When it comes to people who use their free will in a negative way, I'm not one hundred percent certain about what takes place.

On the one hand a person like Max seeks to hurt people not because he is ignorant of what he is doing, but because he derives pleasure from doing so.

On the other hand, if a person (soul) clearly understood that it is preferable to live according to love rather than a negative way of being, there is no way he (or she) would choose a negative way. To imply that a person would choose a negative way even if he knew the difference, is to imply that a negative way of being has just as much to offer as a love based way of being (no way).

When it comes to free will for myself, I've found that there are certain tendencies of mind that have given me some trouble. For example, it took me a while to overcome my fear of unfriendly spirits. It happened in increments. It was a matter of finding more and more that it is up to me and nobody else whether or not I live according to positive qualities such as love.

I believe a key to having free will is understanding that we can be wrong at times, regardless of how intelligent we consider ourselves to be.

We have to understand that sometimes a certain way of thinking makes sense to us not because it is true, but because of how our mind is psychologically conditioned. We have to find a way to extricate ourselves from our own conditioning. A hard thing to do if fear and/or overconfidence in our intellect deters us from looking at our beliefs honestly.

Consider what happens when somebody discusses something such as reincarnation. Are people considering the issue with a mind that is free?

Look at this way. Sometimes our children make mistakes because they haven't had the time to develop wisdom.

Perhaps Max's soul was a young child like soul who hadn't developed wisdom while in this World.

Sure he could've listened to his higher self (and therefore his conscience), but sometimes people lose track of their higher self. The more they act in a negative way, the more they do so.

Perhaps if we want to allow souls to have the freedom to become wise in their own way, we have to allow them to learn through their own trials and errors.

I don't mean they should be allowed to hurt others. I wonder why they are allowed to do so as much as they do. Sometimes I wish the people who do things such as rape and beat others would be beamed over to another planet. I don't have enough information to understand why they are allowed to do as they do.

Perhaps some of us agreed to live with people/souls who manifest in a negative way with the hope of inspiring them to be positive. If you put them in a situation that is completely negative they might become worse.  Consider how some people are more negative after prison than before.

Matthew,
I must say I haven't found an argument against my opinion, that "free will" is nonsense. I try to clarify.

Quote: "A person's current state of being is the sum of their experiences and consequences of those (the karma they wrought).  However, we do have free will, we are able to forgive others and ourselves (with effort, grace and practice - along with eating some humble pie), and thus we can make new decisions."

   I agree in that we make new decisions, but these decisions are the result of our history, of what we've learnt/experienced. If our decisions were the result of a free will, this very free will would negate our ownership of this will, as it is the attribute "free" together with "will" which clearly indicates that this will is exactly NOT a result of our personal cause-and-effect history, and would be, as I said, an element of pure random within an orderly time chain of events, which would mean a break in our personality, because it would be a break in the order of time, as long as we define us as beings within time, beings which can change on an evolutionary basis (including of course an evolution of our mind). Now, someone could say that such a break can actually happen, and I admit that this might be true, but then we can't speak of a will anymore which is mine or yours, it is a will then which comes out of nothing, if it is free.

   A word on quantum mechanics. It is indeed the case, that for instance the known double slit experiment shows results which are not only inexplainable by our normal vision of time and space, but even indicate that time and space don't exist as consistently as we (still) think they do. It is but quite ironic, that the quantum mechanics theory, as every scientific theory, is based on time and space (and with time, the order of events, causality, in a probabilistic interpretation), so when time, space, and causality is not anymore considered as valid, then the theory of quantum mechanics necessarily isn't valid anymore, too. The "unsharpness", the unpredictability in single events and the statistical predictability of the sum of a large amount of events nicely shows the bandwidth of randomness and order- statistical order. "Free will" has nothing to do with quantum mechanics, as long as "free will" means something different than randomness.

   So let's forget "free will", as it is indeed nonsense. That's my only intent with these posts, to simply suggest not to make use of that phrase anymore as it is illogical and therefore isn't an argument, and isn't a reason, for or against anything.

Spooky