The classic antimony is between :
(1) action that is chosen freely and
(2) action that comes about through physical causation.
To date no instance of a physical event in the brain or body has ever been traced to a non-physical cause suggesting there is no free will. But our experience of the world is that we have chose between things and are free to make that choice. The entire West in fact is based upon this idea of "Freedom" which is taken to extremes in philosophies like Sartre or in the US Ayn Rand. Freedom begins its story in the Bible which argues that disobedience of God's order not to eat from the tree Knowledge was original caused by the Devil and represented freedom of choice. Odd that the Post-Renaissance West now celebrates this freedom despite claiming to also follow God.
Anyway we can see this duality in meditation. When we struggle to sit to meditate there is a conflict between what we want to do and the knowledge that we should meditate. Even when we are sitting there is a will to draw us away from meditation and then after the mind wanders that moment comes when we realise we have let the mind drift and we return it to the object (the breath if we are doing breathing meditation).
So meditation seems to be on the "outside" and something that we bring ourselves towards. Even meditating the breath seems to be on the outside and we bring ourselves towards it and then wander off. It is though we then need to pick up our attention and then put it back down next to the breath. The breath is over there and seems to happen by itself. We have breathed ever moment of our life from that first breath in the maternity ward with our mum, perhaps our dad, and surrounded by nurses and perhaps a doctor. Even if we have held our breath we are still in the process of a breath of some type. Yet how many of these breaths did "we" do? Nearly every breath happens by itself. So when we are meditating we can see breathing as happening by itself. This is like the physical causation side above. The world is actually doing the breathing.
When we start to watch the breath closely we can start to see it as "our" breathing. We can stop it, start it by will and then it really becomes "our" breath. If we try to count 10 breaths in perfect concentration without our mind wandering we may deliberately take over the breathing to speed it up to get to 10 breaths more quickly thus achieving the goal! "We" are now doing the breathing. We sit behind it and push and pull the chest to make the breath happen. This is the "free will" side above.
So which is it? Do we cause breathing, or does it happen by itself?
And equal question is: do we do the breathing, or does it happen to us! When the body is breathing by itself then it appears to be happening to us now. We are watching it as something on the outside and receiving the experience coming in from outside to our awareness.
So which is it? Are we watching the breath from the outside or are we making it happen from the inside?
Well it's neither and both. It's actually in the middle.
The point is that sitting to meditate and watch the breath is not pushing "anything" to take a seat and watch the breath. There is not the decision to sit, and then some force needed to make an entity come and seat. There is just the sitting. Struggling to sit and meditate is not a battle to get "ourselves" to sit, and then we decide and we then make the sitting happen. There is no middle man. The struggle to sit is just a struggle to sit and ends with the sitting. There is no struggle to set "someone" to sit . No inner entity needed to be convinced and then get involved as a second stage.
Likewise no one is being brought near to the breath to see it and watch the meditation happen. As argued recently, when breathing is being seen we are already there, there is no realising the breath has gone and then bring ourselves back to it. We have already been brought back at the moment we realise!
"Happening" happens in the instant at the moment we realise. But we try to force a wedge in there so that there is a gap between "happening" and the person it happens to. In that gap we introduce choice so that the "person" can take on board the happening and then decide. But like with seeing, what is seen is already seen. Things "far away" do not then get seen again by the person "near by" they are already seen. Likewise what has happened and been chosen has actually already been chosen. The deliberation we experience is not conducted by a "person" inside, it is happening now.
There is no ball of "self" being tossed around. The forces we think are pushing the "self" around represent thing that have already happened. We are already going to sit when we think we have decided. We are already focused back on breathing when we think we just realised we have drifted off. The delay is because we are not in the Present Moment and are instead dancing a doll around a mental stage duplicating everything that is happening. When we become aware of the breath again why bother to instruct the doll to pretend its doing a "bringing of the awareness back": that already happened in order to give the stage direction! Just "Be" Present.
However we can go too far and start to think "we" are just a distant observer on the world. Putting the doll down and just watching the stage directions now without bothering to re-enact them in some imaginary "self" it seems like we are completely unnecessary. An epi-phenomenal ethereal observer of the world like the air, or the lighting of the stage.
But we are still operating a doll! Except this doll is now a spirit doll that has stepped off the stage into the air to watch the stage directions. This is too far the other way toward free-will.
When see see the stage direction come in, that is it! There is no point operating a doll at all so we can say we have "decided" to act on these stage direction cos its already happened. But at the same time there is no point in inventing a doll to watch the stage directions either. There are just the stage directions. When our mind comes back to the breathing that is all that has happened. No one was drifting off and has been brought back, and no one lost control and how now taken control again. There is just the object of meditation (which is usually the breath).
This can then be expanded to the classic antimony above. When we imagine "free will" we are creating a mental doll which we manipulate through the unfolding events so we can say "I choose." When we imagine causation and reflexes then we imagine that doll going behind stage to watch the stage direction which are the forces and stimuli of the physical world. In fact no one needs be behind stage or on stage for the direction to exist. The directions are what make the play and are all we need. That is "Present Moment" and links directly to "Non-Self."
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The above can be seen in team sports. In the thick of the game when there is no longer time to manipulate mental dolls we start to behave immediately. We absorb "into" the game so that we are present "in" the game, not on the outside as an ego or person "deciding" to take part.
That famous faked clip of Evan Longoria catching a ball during an interview. Now it doesn't matter that it was staged, it illustrates--albeit in an extreme form--those moments when we are focused on one thing but the brain is able to respond to another. That "other" part of us is not imagined and modelled in consciousness there is no mental doll, it is just happening as it was happening. This is unlike the main action, in the case taking an interview, which is often well modelled and we experience a self actually doing it. For those automatic things we do we are not separate from the event, we are present IN the event. If this was real, then Evan here would be conscious of having the interview, that would be the mental doll, but he would actually be IN the catching of the the ball!
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This reminds me of a very simple Zen story. I can't remember all the details but a novice monk was pestering his master to explain what the true self was. After some time the master explains that he was not ready to understand and dismisses him from the monastery. As he walks away the master calls his name and the novice turns around: that, says the master, is your true self. True self exists IN the world, indeed AS the world. It is not a separate thing that MAKES decisions and has things happen TO it. There is no WORLD vs SELF distinction. All that "separation" happens in our thoughts as we try to make sense of the world and make up stories about what is going on.
Returning to previous blogs on vision. When we see something, even far away, the "hallucination" of it existing there IS the seeing. A thing "far away" has already been seen (else how would we know it was there far away!). The secondary process of it being "seen" by the body/person/being "over here" that we call our self is a secondary thing that happens in narrative and thought. The actual seeing was already done to make the thing "over there"! The "being seen" is a thought about how we got to see it and who saw it!
The "true self" is present IN the "hallucination" of the world around us. The presence of a world IS SEEING. The narrative of a person with a name at the centre of it all doing the seeing and thinking and living a life, that is all story that we layer onto the world mentally.
So it is with action. We exist like Evan Longoria IN what we do. The narrative of somebody making decision and then deciding and then doing is a mental story we add to the world.
Now this realisation can go adrift. The two extremes are that everything that happens starts with a Self that decides what to do with FREE WILL. The other extreme is that we have no part to play and the body operates like an automaton. I spent some time in this view as a teenager and it is scary. What if I do something terrible, how will I stop myself, I am a passenger in a car with someone else driving kind of feelings (indeed western teenagers often dream of being in a car with no one driving or with someone else driving to narrative the awakening of their adult life of making choices for themself).
Both these extremes are too far. The truth is that we EXIST IN the middle. We are not outside the moment either "inside" pushing the body along, or "outside" watching the body be automatic. Reiterating what is said above we are the actions themselves. We are the doubt, we are the deliberation. It does not mean that action is instantaneous. Some decisions are hard and we need to think. But we ARE the thoughts. That mental representation we create like Rodin's "The Thinker":
That is not what it is like at all. This is pure EGO. We are not thinking, we ARE the thoughts.
This separation in our lives between things and ourselves is the illusion created by the brain narrativising the world and ourselves. But its a mental creation, its not the Present Moment truth.
So why do Human do this? When the tiger enters the room all this evaporates and we go into Immediate mode to escape. Only afterwards thinking back do we see what we did and go "wow" was that really "me?" In less stressful moments that "wow is this really me" can catch up almost to the present moment so it looks like we are the person in the thought. We can manage ourselves this way by swapping out the truth with our mental image which is "almost the same." But an instinctive action is needed to push them apart again.
We do all this as a defence. But its actually a perversion of what the narrative thing is about. The narrative thing is about recording and writing things like this blog. But we pervert it to make a "hero" out of ourselves in our own life. We are safe with this made up mental hero. But the seemingly harmless switch from the true self to the fiction has an enormous impact because it means we start living a fake life of a soulless doll.
We are the puppet master who has got fixated by the doll that we operate. That doll can do anything I like and that gives us power and freedom. We forget that the truth is that the true self is operating that soulless doll.
When we look at what we think is "our self" sitting at the desk or where ever we are reading this its odd that this thing is actually rather flat and empty. We can see the inside (obviously as eyes take what is outside in), we can feel the inside somewhat but not a lot, we have the overlay of "thoughts" and "feelings" swirling around appearing from nowhere and going nowhere but there is no explanation of how all this happens we can't see that, its all rather flat and mysterious: you could even say soulless you certainly can't see the soul supposedly in all this. The soul does not reside in the thing at the centre of my world. All the activity is going on outside or in that swirling overlay of thoughts, feelings, imaginings but not clear where that is.
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