Description

Free will, determinism, and predetermination are encountered by Perceiving Reality. The structure of our ״I״ is explained as embedded within four factors that determine our characteristics and behavior from within our genes and from our environment.

Transcript

Perceiving Reality: Free Will

We don’t know which of our actions are actually free and which we just have an illusion of freedom. Because we’re blind to the laws and forces that manage us we assume that there is no management at all - and this gap in our perception is what we feel as free will.

But we have no freedom of will at all except in one thing, other than that everything we do is dictated to us by inner and outer nature and defined by four factors.

In order to discover where our freedom really lies we need to look at a level of life below ours to catch these four factors at work.

Let’s look at a seed of wheat

1. The First Factor: the Bed, the First Matter

You can take that seed and bury it in the ground, it will decompose and the body of the seed disappears but the information about the qualities that are going to develop doesn’t die with the old form, it gets transferred into a new one – and that information is the primary cause of everything that follows.

Likewise a drop of semen contains the abstract force from our ancestors. And we come into the world with their accumulated knowledge, physical and mental qualities that we feel as our own subconscious tendencies. But they aren’t ours, they’re installed in us and we can’t choose or change them in any way.

2. The Second Factor: the Cause and Effect that Stem from Itself

So now the information in the seed receives a new form, but the form doesn’t change the information. It will never become an apple tree or a squash. It only develops the qualities it carries from the seed. The only change that happens is in quality or quantity but it can only grow as a stalk of wheat.

(Upward arrow emerges from the ground with a question mark above it – that transforms into wheat)

Geneticists tell us that there is a gene for everything, even what we consider our deepest personal wishes. They’ve identified which genes predispose a person to good or criminal behavior, to addiction, to sexual response, The inner system we think of as our I is a fixed set of qualities controlled by a program that switches them either to the positive or negative. We have no direct influence on that program.

1. The Third Factor: the Inner Cause and Effect

How well the stalk of wheat grows depends on specific external factors that work directly on its essence and programming for better or worse; the amount of sunlight, rain and minerals in the soil. A different set of minerals won’t provide the right nourishment to make good quality wheat. All these forces must be there and no others.

Our inherited program of desires thoughts and attitudes develop positively or negatively depending on our family, which we don’t choose, and the way they bring us up and on how and where we’re educated. We’re helpless as children so all this is done for us by them, which compels us to be influenced by a constant chain of interactions with their characters, ideas and values. So what ever we are will be the result of agreeing with or reacting against these forces but we can’t change the laws that transform our essence or how they do that, and there’s no free will here either.

1. Cause and Effect through Alien Forces

These are environmental forces that unlike rain and minerals don’t have any direct relationship to the wheat. Forces like hail, wind and other plants influence all of the other er 3 factors as a whole.

Obviously a plant can’t get up and move but for us regardless of the fact that we don’t determine any of the first three factors in our development, we can influence all of them only by the choosing our surroundings. It is our single point of freedom in the physical world, and it’s from this point that we can harness these laws, to sling us in the direction of our goal. A person can have negative or weak first and second factors, and just by placing those factors and the system of development in the proper environment, the quality of development can be enhanced and its speed accelerated enormously. The worth of our life is judged only by this, because once having chosen the environment all of these laws again kick in and that environment then shapes all our future conditions.  

That’s why the Kabbalists advise us to choose the right books the right friends, and the right teacher.