the non-reality of free will

[Jonathan Bricklin]

Greg Goode, quoting me, writes:
>
> >The only way we can move into the future is backwards, with our eyes
facing
> >the direction opposite from that toward which we are moving, seeing the
> >next moment only after we have passed through it, just as scenery comes
to
> >a train passenger sitting with her or his back to the engine car.
>
> The ONLY way?  As nice an illustration as this is, you can certainly
allow
> for other ways of looking at this concept, can you not?  Why think about
> time at all?  Many teachers focus on attending to just what is before us.
> All that appears is in the now, an appearance or mentation, even if it
> carries some sort of implication of futurity or pastness.  In Western
> philosophy classes, when radical empiricism is covered, it is stressed
that
> we can't even prove that there is a past or future.  Since no idea of
> either one occurs in the past or future.  All that appears is here, now.
> Can we not just look at that?  For me, this really de-localizes the sense
> of "I" almost as much as the "there's no personal do-er or free will"
concept.


I had a week in which I was in the exact center of each arising moment, and
the past and future vanished as landscapes between which I commuted.  I
suspect others on this list server have had this experience at well.  It is
bliss, and will probably as close as I will ever get to enlightenment.
Now those landscapes have returned.  I believe they are ultimately illusory
and  I am well aware, as you and Pat, and just about everyone else on this
list server, as well as anyone else who gives the matter a little thought
that the past and future so far as they exist only exist as present
moments, just like everything else that can lay claim to existing at all.
The next step, by the way, is to question the validity of an everchanging
present, as Parmenides and ultimately Advaita does.  But, to go back a
step, thinking about the now is not the same as living in the now, and
until you do live only in the now, you've got those landscapes to contend
with.  If you are telling me that you *are*  living in the now, and that
you don't see a past landscape or a future landscape, and are in no way
commuting between them, then I'd say you are having a pretty blissful time.
 For the rest of us, still waiting our release, still looking into a future
that they may not ultimately *think* to be a reality, I offer the advice:
turn around.
The metaphor of walking backwards into the future, was, by the way, the
everyday way the Ancient Greeks looked at how we related to the future.
How did we ever get turned around?

Jonathan Bricklin
.