Dear Canfora,
I've just watched the video, it's quite a striking experiment. It's very helpful, because I think what I've been experiencing is some resistance in accepting what I see, insofar as free will is concerned.
Describe decision, intention, free will, choice and control.
Decision: the thought process that precedes an action. We'd like to think that it is managed at a conscious level, but consciousness actually comes at the end tail of it. It happens by itself, without a director leading the orchestra, and depends on a complex web of existing factors, including experiences from the past and anticipation of the future.
Intention: the will to orient the decision-making process in a certain direction, so that the actions will be aligned in a certain way. Intention is born from the spontaneous compilation of past experiences and hopes for the future, and is geared towards ensuring pleasure and avoiding pain. Once hatched, it becomes one of the factors influencing decisions and actions.
Free will: the illusion of controlling the processes described above. It is a wrong conclusion based on a certain interpretation of thought-experience and its apparent dependency on a separate self. The belief in free will greatly contributes to consolidate the illusion of self, and the attachement to it.
Choice: choice is a decision favouring one option rather than another, when two or more options are available. The process can be described in the same way as "decision", and it is often influenced by intention. See above!
Control: control consists in mastering a situation, an object, a being. In a lot of cases, it is more pleasant to feel in control of things, as it seems to vouch for less suffering. So trying to gain control is almost like a survival instinct. It is very deeply rooted in the subconscious mind. The feeling of having control is a great contributor to the illusion of self and something that can become quite difficult to let go of because it brings a sense of safety. But the fact that control exists doesn't mean that
someone is in control. It is just the way the dynamics are played between elements of a given situation.
What makes things happen?
An incredibly complex cocktail of factors of which only a few are accessible to the conscious mind. The conscious mind enters the stage after things have happened. It takes stock of what has happened, but because it has no access to what has led to it, it tends to generate cause and effect explanations. In those explanations, it claims a big defining role it never had. There is no way to tell how something happens. Some factors are tangible, others not; influences from the past, fears and hopes, thoughts, situations, society, culture, love, nature, cosmos...
How does it work?
I realise my troubles with that question were driven by the question Why, not How. Letting go of Why and looking at How, I can just surrender to the complexity of it. "It" works by itself, and all the illusions that are piled up about Self making it happen come from looking at things after they have happened and pretend someone was at the helm before they did. There is a scary aspect to acknowledging this. A big big surrendering to the flow.
What are you responsible for?
There is a "you" in that question, which makes it tricky to answer. There is no self, so no separate entity is responsible for anything. However, thought processes are not completely wild. When an intention hatches, it can bend action in a certain direction. At the root, it is driven by the avoidance of suffering and maybe also by a natural life force akin to love.
Ethics come from the collective will to avoid collective suffering. In the big pool of thought processes, a certain order takes shape, just as stars and planets are shaped and aligned in the cosmos. It is an impersonal process which, from the human point of view, feels very personal.
Hence the illusion that we are in command of actions and responsible for their consequences. It is true that actions have consequences and that unskillful actions will most probably backfire at some point, but this is like a law of nature; at the root of the action, we might find factors that culminated in it, but we cannot find a separate self.
Give examples from experience.
Here are two from today:
My daughter has had a tummy ache for some days. Every morning, a decision has to be made about whether or not she should go to school. All sorts of considerations are weighed into the balance, including the standards of good parenting. In this debate there is no firm guideline and there is a sense of chaos, but somehow, a decision always emerges at some point. It has simmered like a soup and, pop!, it's ready. There is no control there, no one aligning the thoughts, there is just a spontaneous maturing of the decision. (The girl is still in bed.)
Later I sat at my computer with admin stuff to resolve before doing some bits of writing. Sure enough, here I am in the forum instead. At no point was there a decision made about it. Just click click, "this feels right", a soft pushing into this direction. What is noticeable, is that although there is irritation about time passing and the day moving on without any writing done yet, it is just this: slight irritation.
Before our conversation a few months ago,the same situation would have brought a lot of beating "myself" up for not doing this or that, accomplishing stuff that confirmed, consolidated, magnified, improved the self, or brought rewards to it. There would have been guilty feelings, a dreadful sense of not being productive enough. The day was a rigid ticking the boxes
on the path to a better self.
There is nothing like that anymore. Just ah well, hey-ho, this feels important now, let's just do it. Self was like a big project that absorbed lots of energy. It rested on the illusion that someone was directing the project and directly profiting from it (ME). Without the project, there is only now and and even greater energy shaping activities from minute to minute. At no point does it feel like someone is in charge of deciding what the next minute will contain.
Dear Canfora, take your time in replying to this very very long post. It was really enjoyable to write, and surprising as well, because when I saw your same questions coming back, I had no idea how much clearer it had all become over the last week. It looks like the same applies to clarity as to decision: it just happens...
Hugs!
Eau Vive
