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Baby steps or big changes – about self control and habit

When I was 21 I decided I needed to work on my social skills. Instead of getting a hobby or something I quit university and decided to get a job. My parents weren’t amused and the result was that I went for a community college nursing class, which I was kicked out of within a [...]

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Free will and karma

Free will is an important issue in Western Philosophy – usually contrasted with predestination. This gets us, unfortunately, in a very all or nothing kind of discussion if we don’t watch out.Predestination, karma and fate are all sometimes used as ways of saying that what is, was meant to be. However, unfortunately, this is often [...]

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Karma in the Bhagavad Gita

Vijay Kumar commented on my post about karma and free will with the remark that the Bhagavad Gita has something to say about the topic. He stresses the freedom of the Soul, or Atma, and it’s joy in finding itself in life, doing something. He has a point, but how does that relate to freedom [...]

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Free will, freedom and philosophy series

Over the past month or so I’ve written about freedom and free will. It has turned out to be a difficult subject to discuss. Here are the posts in the order I wrote them: Free will, culture and responsibility There is a consistent stream in our culture that everything is determined by circumstance: genes, conditioning, [...]

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Free will, karma and reincarnation

It’s an often asked question: how much free will do we have, if karma rules our lives? I usually answer: Karma rules our circumstances, our potential, our habits. Karma does not rule what we do with all that today. What we do today: thoughts, emotions, insights, words and deeds creates new karma. Let’s back up [...]

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Free will: mind or emotion?

We’ve been discussing free will, and whether we have freedom or not, for a while now. The discussion has, as I’ve noted before, not been very clear. Either the topic is just plain difficult, or the right approach has not been found yet. Perhaps the following may help: When philosophers discussed free will in the [...]

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The freedom of the experience of our lives

The ultimate freedom philosophers talk about, especially existential philosophers, is not so much the world, but our experience of the world. In the words of psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom: Nothing in the world has significance except by virtue of one’s own creation. There are no rules, no ethical systems, no values; there is no external [...]

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How hard is it to discuss free will?

I have loads of notes waiting to be turned into blogposts on the topic of free will, which is why I decided to write a series of posts about the topic. But first I want to note an observation about the comments to my first post in the series last week. First off: neither the [...]

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Free will, culture and responsibility

There is a consistent stream in our culture that everything is determined by circumstance: genes, conditioning, wealth… But most aside from genes, all those are the product of people acting on each other. The free will debate can also be framed as a responsibility debate. Who is responsible? If there is no free will, does [...]

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