'Freewill' - The Basis of an Apparent Illusion
The alternatives that appear to be offered us at every moment of our lives may not be the pure illusion that we have assumed them to be. It may be possible, theoretically at least, to 'choose'. But in practice it is unlikely that we often can, or that most of us ever do, for in order to 'choose', that is to change the 'alternative' that lies in front of us on the tram-line of our one-dimensional displacement in time, we must necessarily have effected or undergone a change in ourselves - and that happens rarely, if ever, to many of us. But, admitting such a change, or the culminating moment of a process leading up to such a change, it would seem probable that we find the points ahead of us re-set and our tram switches over to a line that, at that moment, is running parallel to our own. On such an occasion we are unaware of any variation in our surroundings (or are we always unaware?), but we have in fact switched over into a parallel life.
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But who are the 'we' that have switched over? Who are the 'we' that have experienced a change in our selves?
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Satori should be the supreme example of such a change-over, and it is likely that all authentic 'spiritual' experiences are so also, but there seems no reason to suppose that such a change is necessarily accompanied by any recognisable 'experience' as such.
The change in the self that precipitates such an event should inevitably be a reduction of the fog of illusion that surrounds the relative self in the form of the supposed personality or fictitious ego, such reduction liberating the element of reality and enabling it to become conscious of life on a more brightly-lit plane.
But what becomes of the other trams which were left behind on the other line; won't they miss ours? And won't they be surprised to see ours on the new line to which we have switched over?
We are only using a metaphor, we are not describing something that exists as such. How difficult it is to bear that in mind! Let us say, then, that the 'points' are a railway junction and that we change trains. Both trains run from a beginningless beginning and go on to an endless end, but one is on the Inner Circle and the other is on the Outer.
And let us remember: there are no trains anyhow, and no passengers, but only fluctuating force-fields in which energy pullulates in diverse patterns, energy that is conscious of itself.
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Why should we suppose anything so 'improbable' as parallel lives? Draw a diagram, or envisage one; for simplification consider two dimensions only - those of the surface of this sheet of paper. Our life follows, let us say, the dimension of these lines I am writing, from 'left' to 'right'. The other dimension, in which I have just written and am about to write, we pass through; it stays put, it is eternity; in it are 'past' and 'future'. But we cannot be 'length' without 'breadth'; we have to exist in the second dimension also (as in the third).
Therefore parallel lives are not a theory: they are demonstrable and inevitable. But the word 'parallel' should perhaps be in inverted commas. Are there any words that should not?
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