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Six Ways to Direct Free Will as You Like
“Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir.” he read, “You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next — and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine.”
―Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
A “wish” is desire without energy. After a wish may come “intention” — the plan to do a thing, to fulfill a wish or desire. But “will” means: “I act until I get my wish.” When you exercise your will power you release the power of life energy — not when you merely wish passively to be able to obtain an objective.
― Yogananda Paramhansa
The dreaded question of late-night, caffeine-fueled speculation, is free will a property of conscious matter, or is free will merely a side effect of mental life, a passive observing rider of a deterministic system living the joyful, despairing delusion of calling the shots?
Let’s say you witness another doing something big, important… not one of those little choices which don’t usually matter. I often wonder about why that happened? Was it an accident, intentional, unconsciously on purpose, habitual, or what? It means a lot to me about who that person is, to decide whether I think they are confident, effective, in charge of their own…
