TruthSeeker

I guess youz right derr Natasha. Good Point. Ima bee Illuzionseeker

For the people who think they know what enlightenment is and are trying to achieve it...why are you doing it?

Just stop hanging out with them

So this illusion was created for our benefit...so we can experience something good when the illusion goes away?

I'm grateful for the ability to be grateful...Thank you God...and thank you Ayla for this thread...Genius!

Whats the difference between animals and humans?

Maybe every person who thinks they are enlightened or have had enlightenment experiences are just fooling themselves and its just one big ego game?

I Just thought that was funny. Why can humans talk and not animals? (I mean with real words...and I'm talking about all animals besides parakeets )

Its complicated

oh lol...wow...how did you do that lol

First Something hit me...this might be obvious to some people but maybe not to some. It seems like from the way people speak about it that you are either enlightened or not. Like a light switch...the lights either on or off. (enlightened or non enlightened lol) But it occurred to me that this is probably not the case...maybe Leo can confirm...it seems to me that enlightenment is like a light dimmer (http://www.lumens.com/skylark-incandescent-light-dimmer-by-lutron-R204990.html?utm_source=google&utm_medium=PLA&utm_term=&scid=scplp9696261) Except that with enlightenment theres no maximum....everyone is to an extent enlightened or aware of there enlightenment. This awareness can go up and down...meditating helps it go up. Not meditating for a while makes it go down. But theres no such thing as "he's enlightened or not". Its "To what degree is he enlightened" and obviously theres no ruler to measure how much...but I think this is the case. Second Theres no such thing as paradoxes. When two things seemingly contradict. Its just a lack of understanding in one of those two things. There is never actually a contradiction. How could there be? I guess we can call a paradox "two things that seemingly contradict" and its important to live with it and accept that you cant understand or explain the contradiction...but its important to know that there is no actual contradiction in the big picture of things.

Just because you cant see something doesn't mean its not there.

Ok so whats her address? The woman who's vagina you came out of. She will be dead by the morning...but its ok you or her don't exist.

So great, you wouldn't mind me killing your mom. Great. She doesn't exist...she's just an illusion like santa claus. Whats her address and work schedule? I mean I know it appears as if she exists buddy but you know she actually doesn't. How would you like me to kill her? Once she's dead, you will be able yo confirm with your direct experience that she never existed.

If I shoot someone in the head between the eyes in cold blood murder (a close family member of yours that you love)...and we're calling that (the person dying with the bullet) an illusion because Quote: "no one exists", then what I'm saying is: I guess your right. Under the illusion of self...I have free will. In the "reality" of this illusion that we're in and the illusion that we perceive "self", in that "reality" we have free will. Meaning relative to the illusion of self and reality, we have free will. If in "Truth" that means we don't have free will...fine Ill accept that...(I don't really see the practical difference of accepting that.) But just remember that I can easily go up to your close family member and kill her because hey its all just an illusion and no one exists. In as much as you would be against me killing your close family member with a gun is as much as I believe in free will.

No water is easy...try the things I said and then come back to this thread :)...your body will will resist a lot more and you will need to exert some serious free will to overcome

Have you guys ever tried fasting (No food or drink at all) for a full day. I challenge anyone to thinks there is no free will to not eat or drink the whole day. Also don't shower or brush your teeth while your at it. Make sure you have plenty of food and drink in the house. Don't tell anyone about this fast...not even in this forum...just do it. You probably at some point notice your body naturally walking towards the kitchen or without thinking about it your hand starts to grab some food. Each time you stop your self from eating...you are making a free willed decision. This will get harder and harder as the day goes on. If you want a crazy hard challenge...while your doing all that fasting and no showering or brushing teeth...try standing the whole day as well. An even bigger challenge will be not to sleep for those 24 hours...as well. AlexB if you take this challenge...you will see that it CANT be your body pushing you to do those things because in fact it will be quite the opposite...your body will really want to eat and sleep and brush teeth and sit down...in order to bypass those innate desires and overcome, you will be using your free will... Be very aware of what you do throughout the day...what your body pulls you to do and what it takes in order to fight back against the body. Another thing you can do it to try not cursing for a week. You will probably fail. Its very hard. but at some point you might start to successfully hold your self back. And once you do so successfully for a while...you might get to a point where if you stub your toe and have a killer instinct to let out a big "F***" you will in a split second have to choose whether to let it out or not...If you succeed and don't curse even though your toe really hurts and nothing would feel better than to let out a big "F***" then you will have made a free willed decision. Even if you fail and you just let your base instincts and nature rule over you and you let the curse out...you still had a free-willed decision to make...you just missed the opportunity. I don't want to hear anyone else's opinion that theres no free will or why...until you've tried one of these challenges or both and tell me what happened. Enojy your exercise of free will

I would like to add that another flaw with that guys experiment as I've repeated many times is that Free Will is only in a case where something is really hard for you. When your nature and basic instincts are urging you to do one thing and you Choose to do the opposite becuase you believe its write...these decisions don't come up so often but when they do you have the opportunity to make a free will decision. If you choose what you believe is the right thing to do, even though your basic nature and instincts are pushing you to do the opposite then it will feel good because you are very getting in touch with a very high level of yourself. The "moving the finger" experiment is not an example of free will because its not difficult to move or not move the finger..it requires no WILL...only something thats really hard for you and you have a really strong desire to do x and you choose y then thats free will. Choosing to go against my nature is free will. Its very hard and requires well a lot of will power...Its possible that some of you claiming there is no free will have never made a free will decision. In that case I feel bad for you. You are missing out. You have never grown or changed. Free will means growing and changing and developing. People who don't grow and develop don't use there free will... they stay the same. Keeping a diet requires using free will because its hard...why do you think so many people fail keeping diets...because its hard...peoples base and coarse nature desires to eat a lot of non healthy food. Even if they really desire to look god and impress someone they cant stop eating that unhealthy food. The people who succeed are those who overcome there base instincts and nature and use there free will to decide that even though they really want the food that they are gong to abstain and not eat that piece of cake. Anytime something is hard for you and you overcome and don't do that thing because your choosing what you think is right and better even though your base and nature instincts are urging you to do other...IS FREE WILL

http://www.creativitypost.com/science/has_neuro_science_buried_free_will Synopsis Why scientists should not jump to the unwarranted conclusion that free will is just an illusion. Our commonsensical view holds that everything we do in life is a choice and we are totally free to choose between the options which we think are available to us. Many scientists, however, see a fundamental problem with the conventional wisdom about free will and claim that it is nothing more than an illusion. After all, the adult brain is a 1.3-kg mass of jellylike tissue made up of billions of neurons. And all those neurons consist ultimately of atoms obeying the exact same laws of physics as everything else in the universe. Everything that happens- in a physical universe such as ours- must necessarily have an inevitable cause. This means that for any decision we make, we could not have done otherwise. So, we have no true choice. No free will. Amen. Since the cause-effect relationship is the fundamental tenet of science, if you are in one fashion or another defending free will, then you are wasting your time and giving in to this anti-scientific nonsense, saying that here is something which has not been caused. When talking about free will, the one thing that is almost invariably brought up by free will deniers is the famous Libet experiment. Nearly three decades ago, a neuropsychologist by the name of Benjamin Libet at the University of California, performed one of the most thought-provoking and controversial experiments in neuroscience ever. Libet asked experimental subjects to perform a simple movement such as flicking the wrist or finger whenever they wanted to. Participants could watch and specify the position of a moving spot of light on a special clock when they made an arbitrary decision to move their wrists. Libet wanted to determine when participants became consciously aware of deciding to act prior to the actual movement by monitoring their cerebral activity using scalp electrodes. Libet's recordings revealed that the report of the conscious decision to act occurred about 350ms after the onset of an electrical signal in the motor cortex- the area in the brain triggering and preparing the muscle to move. What this means is that consciousness comes on the scene too late for it to play any role in initiating action. This hammered final nail in the coffin of free will as it provided "the much anticipated empirical evidence" in support of the you-have-no-free-will argument. Libet himself has been somewhat careful in interpreting the implications of his experiments. Many others, unfortunately, have certainly been certainly less modest. In the following years, others researchers produced results similar to the original Libet experiment. With its ever increasing popularity unmatched by any other brain imaging technique, it would be virtually impossible to imagine a neuroscience experiment not armed with fMRI- functional magnetic resonance imaging. Indeed so, in a study published in Nature Neuroscience in 2008 by Chun Soon, participants were asked to push one of two buttons with their left or right index fingers anytime they wanted and Soon tried -using fMRI- to predict which hand a particular subject was going to use to press the button. The brain activity that predicted which button would be pressed began 7 seconds before the subject was conscious of his decision. Although many of the limitations and intricacies of the technique were glossed over, most media outlets went bananas over the story, spreading it around the globe, either overselling or watering down the message. The assumption behind all this empirical evidence against free will is that conscious decision takes place at an instant which can be compared with the neural activity corresponding to it. It is however very likely that- like many processes in our bodies- it is rather a smeared-out event, which can’t possibly occur instantaneously. It would be like asking when a baby starts talking: there is no clear-cut, dividing line between the baby’s silence and speech. It is a process, a continuum. For the experimental protocols that Libet and his followers used, relying heavily on awareness of actions and time estimation of accuracy, this is a crucially different definition. Another fundamental aspect which is widely overlooked in these studies is that they provide no proof whatsoever that brain activity could happen without conscious decision taking place. This is a critical point particularly because neural activity precedes the conscious awareness of the decision corresponding to it. Understandably, it is not surprising that brain activity that takes place before the will has been historically thought as the source that leads to behavior. Anything preceding an effect must be a cause. Not the tiniest shred of evidence exists, however, in favor of the idea that brain activity can occur without the corresponding decision-making. This is an argument piercing the veil of the fashionable you-have-no-free-will dogma that we are being told with religious certainty and confidence. A methodological flaw that strikes me as odd is that these experiments always involve a test subject fully aware of the choice they are going to make. Is it surprising than that our brain would prepare for this decision? In real life, as opposed to the simple, binary decisions of Libet, we are faced with many complex situations where we have not a clue of the options available to us beforehand. The volunteers in the experiment had no choice other than the timing of their actions. They could not decide among different action alternatives as the action itself was predetermined. But more than that, in simple actions like flexing your wrist only procedural memory is involved, whereas in typical free will situations, requiring a deeper assessment of the current situation in tandem with memories of the past experiences in our cognitive toolkit, episodic memory plays a substantial role. So, it’s very much doubtful that the experiment is telling us something about free will. If anything, the Libet experiment is nothing more than a very crude oversimplification which is very difficult to justify in terms of everyday situations that we all encounter in real world. Instead, monitoring brain activity as we go around making more complex choices can be more interesting but this is no trivial task to accomplish. Aside from all these methodological criticisms and flaws, there is one fundamental assumption at the core of the scientific framework in which all these experiments operate. The view that there is no free will because the brain is made of atoms and molecules that obey physical laws is a great example of reductio ad absurdum. Let's take a water molecule- two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen- if you'll pardon the cliché. When combined, they produce a colorless, tasteless and odorless liquid. Can you take the hydrogen and the oxygen atom in isolation and predict that water will emerge from their combination? A possible reply from a physicist would be that once we acquire all the necessary knowledge of the underlying physics, we'll be able to explain all the seemingly emergent properties which at the moment we can’t explain. But not every physicist buys this argument. Here's the rub: the Nobel prize winning condensed matter physicist Philip Anderson wrote a famous article entitled ‘More is Different’ in 1972 where he defended the view that the laws and principles he studied as a condensed matter physicist were emergent and there are plenty of phenomena exhibited by macroscopic systems whose existences cannot be predicted directly from an underlying, microscopic theory. In other words, the information obtained from the whole can’t be explained by the sum of information from each individual element. Simply put, just because matter in the universe- including all atomic constituents in the human body- obeys certain physical laws, it really doesn't follow that the choice itself must also be bound by the same laws. There is a huge gap here which is not explained by this line of reasoning. This is simply bad logic. Thanks to the seeming there-is-no-free-will consensus among some mainstream scientists who have espoused their ideas loudly enough with a great air of confidence, many others-scientists and lay people alike- followed and accepted their line of thinking uncritically. For people, free will matters. So it's very important that the science shaping our understanding of free will is accurate. Before I, for one, give up my free will, I’d like to await more persuasive hard evidence and avoid forming premature conclusions. Is that too much to ask?

Oh...thanks...I had no Idea what he was talking about... Why does free will require an agent of will...why cant there just be free will. No "agent"...No "I"...Just WILL...That, you can find.

Not everyone loves what they do all the time...I doubt it...for the times when one is not as in love with what he is doing, he needs discipline to succeed.

enlightenment comes from the word light. Where there is light you can see...where there is darkness you cant see anything...its a metaphor...This is a spiritual light which helps you see beyond the physical world

A person can spend his entire life studying the properties of water and live till 120 yrs and still not know everything about it. It could have only been created by God. Not even Google can make something like water. Here are some interesting facts about water to wet your tastebuds. (Similarly...if you saw the inner workings of a wrist-watch in the desert with all the gears and twists...would you assume all those parts randomly came together...or was just there randomly ...or someone made and designed it? The eyeball is 10^100 more times complicated than water...just studying the eye alone one should think right away...someone must have designed this thing...Its too complex...insanely complex. ) Btw the way I think I have a solution to the whole free will debate...Ill write about it soon...

Awesome...I guess I was assuming when the dimmer is off all the way...then its off :)...but awesome insight

God is infinite. The next time you eat...right before you put the food in your mouth, think "Who created this food". How did the world get here...Did it create itself? Did this food create itself? Recognize who created it and thank your creator. Its the least you can do. Think of all the things he does for you...every time your heart beats its because he's willing it to beat every second. Every breath you take...every move you make!!! Its all him willing it into existence and giving you the ability....Thank him