Tao Te Ching
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Free Will
We often identify “free will” as making a conceptual decision disciplining ourselves into a course of action that corresponds to the concept. And then we do everything possible to impose that vision on reality. On the other hand, Lao Tzu’s description of Wu Wei describes action flowing out of awareness rather than from a defined idea. Similar to the idea of “journey without goal,” a more realistic understanding of "free will" includes an understanding of the immense influences of biology, culture, and environment influencing our decisions.
From another point of view, these external influences exert an almost complete control of our lives and our only real choice is to accept and become each experience or struggle and fight against it. Some believe and teach free will as only a myth, an illusion while others give it the power over every experience.
Quotes (73)
“For if anyone follows Democritus' theory, saying that the atoms have no free motion, since they collide with one another, from which it appears that the motion of everything is necessitated, we shall say to him 'Do you not know, whoever you are, that the atoms have a free motion, which Democritus did not discover, but Epicurus revealed, namely the motion of the swerve, as he shows from the phenomena?”
“Be a lamp for yourself, your own refuge...Look not outside yourself—to anyone beside yourself—but hold fast to the Truth as your lamp, your refuge.”
“Mankind, tired out with a life of brute force, lay exhausted from its feuds; and therefore the more readily submitted its own free will to laws and stringent codes.”
“The life of wisdom—like anything else—demands its price... You can't be flying off in countless directions however appealing they are, and at the same time live an integrated, fruitful life... You can either put your skills toward internal work or lose yourself to externals, which is to say, be a person of wisdom or follow the common ways of the mediocre.”
“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own…”
“do not wish to be a general or a senator or consul, but a free man, and there is only one way to do this, to care not for the things which are not in our power.”
“Being able to make your own decisions
Is more empowering than receiving a hundred golden letters from the imperial chieftain.”
“And strange to tell, among that Earthen Lot
Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?”
“Buddhas bear the same relation to sentient beings as water does to ice. Ice, like stone or brick, cannot flow. But when it melts it flows freely in conformity with its surroundings. So long as one remains in a state of delusion he is like ice. Upon realization he becomes as exquisitely free as water.”
“. . . it is presumptuous in me to wish to choose my path, because I cannot tell which path is best for me. I must leave it to the Lord, Who knows me, to lead me by the path which is best for me, so that in all things His will may be done.”
“Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty.”
“Our lives, like the universe to which we belong, are mysteriously composed of freedom and necessity… We belong to the laws of nature, even when we rebel against them.”
“Every true thinker for himself is so far like a monarch… He takes as little notice of authority as a monarch does of a command; nothing is valid unless he has himself authorized it.”
“A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.”
“I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”
“A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives—approving of some and disapproving of others... I ought or I ought not, constitute the whole of morality.”
“young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.”
“free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions modified by free will, though thus proscribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.”
“This is the age which, although proclaimed as one of physical and moral freedom, is in truth the age of the most ferocious moral and mental slavery, the like of which was never known before.”
“if you go into the world you will have free will; you will be obliged to have it; there is no escaping it; you will be fettered to it during your whole life, and put on every occasion do that which on the whole seems best to you at any given time, no matter whether you are right or wrong in choosing”
“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”
“the individual is so unconscious that he altogether fails to see his own potentialities for decision making. Instead, he is constantly and anxiously looking around for external rules and regulations which can guide him in his perplexity.”
“I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of choice.”
“Freedom exists, and also the will exists; but freedom of the will does not exist.”
“Desire is when you do what you want, will is when you can do what you do not want.”
“Man does not realize that throughout his entire life he does things he believes. Precisely what to believe and how to believe comprises the solution of the problems of being. Man's free will or free choice molds his destiny.”
“Bulls and bears cannot smash the door of fate; the heart of a dove, however, smashes it.”
“But we did not allow women, even the dearest, to lead us astray. We did not follow their flower-strewn road, we took them with us. No, we did not take them, these dauntless companions followed our ascents of their own free will.”
“What can one weak individual do when the species announces to him that his time has come?”
“Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.”
“You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.”
“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
“We are helpless without grace, but grace cannot help us unless we choose to cooperate with it.”
“The minute you choose to do what you really want to do, it's a different kind of life.”
“The human soul is nine-tenths subliminal urges representing the animal heritage of millions of years and considerably less than one-tenth conscious reason, which has had great development only since ten thousand years ago,”
“A liberal education frees a man from the prison-house of his class, race, time, place, background, family, and even his nation.”
“Man today is confronted with the most fundamental choice: not that between Capitalism and Communism, but that between robotism (of both the capitalist and communiste variety), of Humanistic Communitarian
Socialism.
”
“Every decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that will never be.”
“As long as mankind is made up of independent individuals with free will, there cannot be any social status quo. Men will develop new urges, and these will give rise to new problems, which will require ever new solutions. Human life implies adventure, and there is no adventure without struggles and dangers.”
“When human beings are governed by 'thou shalt not,' the individual can practice a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by 'love' or 'reason,' he is under continuous pressure to make him behave exactly the same way as everyone else.”
“To the Russian, the exciting event in Pavlov's experiment was not the conditioning of the dogs but of the laboratories. But to the Westerner, the revelation that he was a preconditioned robot... was a most disagreeable discovery.”
“Those who truly think for themselves are like monarchs, they recognize no one above them and no more accept authorities than a monarch does orders. They don’t acknowledge the validity of anything they have not themselves confirmed.”
“The whole dear notion of one's own Self—marvelous old free-willed, free-enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self—is a myth.”
“if the individual temporarily abandons human will and so allows himself to be guided by nature, nature responds by providing everything.”
“Freedom is the name of the game. Freedom to be nothing... The longer we practice, the more we have a clue about how to slowly become free.”
“The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.”
“The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.”
“guard yourself and your conscience — no one else will — and know that a bad decision at the right time can destroy you far more surely than any bullet!”
“We can only control the end by making a choice at each step—obscure admixtures, blends with no proper tool by which to untangle the components—… and we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence, an unfolding process.”
“If anything appears to be a permanent feature of reality it is power — the constant impingement on us of superior forces both without and within. Everything from changes in the weather and acts of national governments to the irresistible push of instinct and the process of aging”
“I would like you to think twice about what you see as your role in this country. It doesn't matter so much about your own particular development. But you should pay some kind of attention to a society which is slowly decaying and full of maggots and worms. We don't want to sit here idle discussing subtleties of philosophy only pleasing ourselves while the rest of the people are suffering immensely... spiritually they are suffering, economically, politically people are suffering.”
“Maybe the chain of events will not flow so smoothly in reality… Just maybe, there are too many maybes. But there is no alternative. There is not the luxury of choice.”
“A function beyond the will... without the intervention of that kind of independent organ—the kind that elevates us to new heights, thrusts us down to the depths, throws our minds into chaos, reveals beautiful illusions, and sometimes even drives us to death—our lives would indeed be indifferent and brusque.”
“it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.”
“The less we know about the chattering, muttering voice in our heads that tells us what to do, what to believe, what to buy, which people we should love, and so forth, the more power we give it to boss us around and convince us that whatever it says is true.”
“For years I lived under the impression that I was the master of my life, and the CEO of my own personal brand. But a few hours of meditation were enough to show me that I hardly had any control of myself. I was not the CEO – I was barely the gatekeeper.”
“Doubts about the existence of free will and individuals are nothing new, of course. More than 2,000 years ago thinkers in India, China and Greece argued that ‘the individual self is an illusion’. Yet such doubts don’t really change history much unless they have a practical impact on economics, politics and day-to-day life. Humans are masters of cognitive dissonance, and we allow ourselves to believe one thing in the laboratory and an altogether different thing in the courthouse or in parliament.”
“Humans certainly have a will – but it isn’t free. You cannot decide what desires you have... Every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself. I can choose what to eat, whom to marry and whom to vote for, but these choices are determined in part by my genes, my biochemistry, my gender, my family background, my national culture, etc – and I didn’t choose which genes or family to have.”
“If governments and corporations succeed in hacking the human animal, the easiest people to manipulate will be those who believe in free will.”
“Finding ourselves in situations that we did not choose but that have come about through our previous actions is simply another facet of living within webs of causality that we ignore at our own risk.”
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