I think I am “my own person,” but am I really making decisions about my life that are completely independent? Being the social creatures that we are, where is our free choice?

[KabU]

I think I am “my own person,” but am I really making decisions about my life that are completely independent? Being the social creatures that we are, where is our free choice?

[Mihaela]

We have a free choice not to blindly follow the masses, but instead to follow the path of the soul that wonders how and why we exists.

[Rune T. A.]

I can choose how to react to my thoughts and emotions. I can choose to be or not to be, an asshole. I don’t choose to feel sympathy, but I can react on my sympathy and help, or I can overwrite it and be passive.

[David J]

No free will except the choice to correct or not

[zohreh]

We can never decide independently because we are dominated by genes, social networks and those around us, and the type of culture and upbringing and customs. Our choice is our reaction to currents outside of ourselves

[Jan Koons]

It seems the only free choice I had or used, is who I want around  me because of their decisions. As I became more aware I no longer agree with others decisions all the time and can actually form a decision on my own. Time will tell if they are a good one or not, but hey, I made it.

[Seraphim]

It is clear that I am not “my own person.” Nearly everything that has any relevance or importance in my life has already been predetermined: my gender, race, sex, age, level of intelligence, parents, family, place and time of birth, and, first and foremost, my mazal. The only salient feature of my life that I can really chose is my attitude and, by extension, the quality of my experience of all of the above parameters.

Just like Adam and Chavah in Gan Eden, they could not choose to be born anywhere but the garden, but what they could choose was whether to eat from the Tree of Life, or from the Tree of the Knowledge of the Things-I-Like and the Things-I-Dislike, which was really the same Tree: a mystical plant that the Creator has super-positioned “betokh ha-gan” (in quantum superposition) as both the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. It was only our primordial parents’ attitude toward the non-dual, superpositioned Tree(s) that made the wave function collapsed, the outcome of which we are all to painfully familiar.

[Author]

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