Re: The 800 pound gorilla and free will How do you define yourself?

It is the world of cause and effect in action.

DQ has misread the article as saying ...ALL is predestined... And You are all effected tremendously by it, by the cause - being DQ. Your vision, or more correctly, your blindness, is effected so much by what you think of each other.... in what each other are saying. And the votes are reflective of that.

It is DQ and the herd right here in front of me. The cause and the effect - Absolutely hysterical and precious. Thank you all. Go baaaa.... baaaa...ck and reread it. Or, keep following the shepperd by letting him read, or misread, and then follow his comments. -'Cuz we will really be needing plenty of canon fodder in the near term. :)

turiya wrote

Please be careful to not paste your own interpretation over what has been posted. The article states that our lives are both predetermined and also not predetermined. That whatsoever is associated with the material world, whatsoever one is identified with relative to the world of things, the body-mind, ideas and concepts is predetermined. But there is continually something there that remains undetermined. And that something is consciousness. 

"If you are identified with your body and your material existence, in the same proportion you are determined by cause and effect. Then you are a machine. But if you are not identified with your material existence, with either body or mind – if you can feel yourself as something separate, different, above and transcendent to body-mind – then that transcending consciousness is not predetermined. It is spontaneous, free."