Free Will

Modern brain research has concluded that free will is an illusion. However, it can still be very tangible if you find yourself in a grocery store with a three-year-old. She is kicking and screaming her lungs out because she is denied the chocolate cookies she wants.

It may be that the scientists are right; we don't have a will of our own, and perhaps previous events determine everything. Maybe no one should be blamed for what they have done, not even the worst war criminals. However, you don't care what they find in the scientific laboratories if you shop for groceries with a furious three-year-old. You don't live in a laboratory; you live here in the everyday dimension.  

You don't know what is happening on the sub-atomic level; You don't know which genes are activated in your body on the biological level; you don't know what the angels and demons are up to; you don't know what's going on in your subconscious mind; You know what is happening here on the mundane level. And you have to make a decision.

Determined Life without free will Robert Sapolsky

Asifism

You have to live as if you have free will, as if life has meaning, as if you can do something to make the world a better place. The belief that free will is an illusion makes it harder to kick a bad habit. It makes it harder to do anything.

You have to live as if humankind will not perish in a nuclear war or because climate change will make this planet inhabitable.

You don't have to live as if there is a God somewhere who cares about you, but this belief can help you to endure and weather the storm.

The more you understand how the world really works, the more depressed you become. That's the reason why superstition, escapism, and delusions are helpful, and that's the reason why they have evolved and why they are ubiquitous.

Thoughts

The thoughts come from the brain, but they weren't there initially. You didn't learn to talk by yourself. You are not the one who invented the words in your vocabulary. You have learned what they mean and how to use them.

This means that your thoughts have been created somewhere outside your skull.

Your beliefs are thus not your own. You have picked them up from somewhere, from parents and peers, gurus and priests, philosophers and politicians, mainstream and alternative media. And, of course, they have also picked them up from somewhere.

Your self is, to a large extent, created from stuff outside of you.

A crucial point about genes related to brain function (well, pretty much all genes) is that the same gene variant will work differently, sometimes even dramatically, in different environments. This interaction between gene variants and variation in the environment means that, ultimately, you can't say what a gene" does," only what it does in each particular environment in which it has been studied.

Determined Life Without Free Will Robert Sapolsky 

The unknown

Humankind has acquired a lot of knowledge; science has made fabulous progress in the last 400 years. However, most of what there is to know is still unknown. For example, are there tons of universes out there, or is this one the only one? How did life come to be? What is matter really? What do the electrons and quarks consist of? What is dark matter and dark energy? What does a thought consist of? What does consciousness consist of? There are endless amounts of questions that we need answers to.

So, we have the part of the world that we know of and the gigantic part that we don't know anything about.

The unknown part of the world is a mystery to us, and we can't do anything but speculate about it. Here, we are all on equal footing: scientists and spiritual teachers, philosophers, and laypeople.

We don't know if life and suffering have a purpose, we don't know if the universe has a purpose, and we don't know if a God is hiding somewhere. We don't know how things really are.

We are like sailors in a small, rickety boat, in a heavy fog and uncharted waters.

"I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me."

― Richard Feynman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvle4tfIelM  

Synchronicity

Synchronicities appear in different ways. One example is when you, for some reason, come to think of an old classmate you haven't met since high school thirty years ago, and then you suddenly bump into him in the afternoon.

Another example is when someone has a weird dream about a relative and later gets to know that he died in a car accident that particular night.

You can also wonder about a word or a concept you have never understood. Then suddenly, you find the answer in a stupid magazine you would never ordinarily open. You found the magazine on the bus, on the empty seat next to you, on your way home.

I think that the Santorini synchronicity was an exceptional kind of synchronicity. We did not know each other before, but we were connected through Isla Mujeres and Monica. Maybe also in some other mysterious way. But we were not supposed to get married and have a life together. Perhaps the purpose of that meeting was simply to open our eyes to the mystical dimension of life.

That meeting proved to me that there is a mystical dimension in the world. However, I am not at all interested in New Age stuff and YouTube spirituality. And I am not interested in religion. I am a die-hard skeptic. How can it be that almost all spirituality seems so silly and simplistic? (Not all.)

I am scientific-minded, but science dismisses spirituality as woo-woo. When Galileo offered the Inquisition authorities to have a look at the moon through his telescope, they refused to look. They were not interested; they knew he was wrong beforehand. Science today is like the 17th-century Catholic church.