Letter to Richard Dawkins

Dear Mr. Dawkins

I have read a number of your books and I love them. It is probably more than 25 years since I read “The Selfish Gene” the first time. I think of myself as someone having a scientific outlook on life. I am not interested in religion, spirituality or New Age superstition. Evidence is of course much more important than belief.

However, I have experienced some very strange synchronicities in my life that I cannot understand.

I am convinced that synchronicities are real, paranormal phenomena but I cannot prove that I am right. Synchronicities cannot be studied with scientific methods because we cannot create them on demand. They are very rare phenomena and cannot be reproduced in laboratories.

Those who have experienced synchronicities or meaningful coincidences know what I am talking about, and those who have never had any such experiences (or never noticed them or rejected them) will think that I am just one of those millions of nutcases who are indulging in paranormal nonsense.

It is possible that I have deceived myself, absolutely. Illusions are common. But what if my synchronicity experiences are not illusions? And what if some of the many other synchronicity stories out there are also true stories? How can we find out? How shall we sift the wheat from the chaff? And how shall we interpret these observations? Shall we simply ignore them? Shall we ignore experiences and evidence that we cannot explain?

It is a pity that there are so many nonsense discussions about these things in the so-called spiritual circles. It is not possible to discuss synchronicity with New Age people, not with religious people and of course not with scientifically minded people. It is difficult to discuss these things with almost all pepople.

This is the reason why sincere people who have experienced synchronicities often avoid talking about them.

I think that you and your followers have never experienced any synchronicities. It can also be that you have had such experiences but that you never paid attention to them or maybe you explained them away because such phenomena are not on your map.

Free will is an illusion

You are acting in accordance with a worldview, which has been transmitted to you from your family and friends, from your church or your spiritual community, from your teachers in school and from the marketing and mass media industry. You are a puppet connected to many strings.

You are a Muslim or a Jew, a Protestant or a Buddhist, a free market liberal or a neo-Nazi…

You try to talk in a way that you believe you should talk and you try to think in a way that you believe you should think. You dress up in a way you think you should dress up and you conduct yourself in a way you think you should conduct yourself.

It is not your will, but your mother’s will, your friend’s will, your husband’s will, your teacher‘s will, your...

Who are you?

Who is talking and who is listening,
when you are talking to yourself?

Illusions

The sun does not sink down behind the horizon.
It is the earth that is turning.
And rainbows do not exist
if no one is there to behold them.

Things are not what they seem to be.
You are not what you think you are.
We have misunderstood and misinterpreted most things in life.

I don’t write these words.
Scientists have discovered that the brain processes that trigger an action
for example, when I am pressing a key on a key board,
begin more than half a second before I consciously decide to act.

We have no free will according to modern brain science.
We have no Self that is responsible for our actions.
Nevertheless, you can see the rainbow clearly
and it goes without saying that you are accountable for your actions,
the whole of you, not just the imaginary part of you that you call your Self.

Of course we have a free will.
We can easily be deluded, yes,
and other people can stop us from doing what we want,
but the will is there and it is very real.

The Self does not exist in the same way that physical objects exist.
It cannot be weighed or measured.
Activity in certain brain centers can be measured, when we do something, 
think about something or look at something.
However, there are no particular brain cells
that gives rise to the sense of “I am here”.

The self is like a rainbow
and rainbows do exist.
The idea that the Self is an illusion, is a delusion
and the idea that the Self is something real and permanent
is also a delusion.

However, to ponder over these things is a waste of time.
The world is in total chaos and disorder,
war, pollution, exploitation, starvation, religious madness…

And you care only about your Self.
You should ask yourself if you have been fooled
or if you have fooled yourself.

You should ask yourself why you are fighting so hard to defend your delusions.
You should ask yourself why other people are fighting so hard
to defend their delusions.

Your religion is not the only religion here on this planet. 
Your political ideology is not the only one.

What if your religion or your political ideas are just mind stuff
that you have picked up from other people.