So your mind is out of control and you want to control it. Guess what. You shouldn't. Trying to control the mind is like trying to flatten out water, you just make more waves. Because that's the nature of the ocean, it has waves. You don't say there should be no waves in the ocean. Well, the natural state of the mind is full of thoughts or mental noise. Once you accept that, you can go beyond it. Because you are not the mind, you have a mind.

But the problem is you have been identifying with your mind, with your thoughts, for your entire life, if you were the ocean why would you identify with a wave, it's just a wave. Well, you are that which observes thoughts, stop identifying as thoughts, it's just a thought. And what is every thought made out of? Nothing.

You bring it to life with the attention you give it. Every single day we have 50-70 thousand thoughts but the ones that stress us are the ones that we keep putting our attention on, but these thoughts don't have any more strength than any other. Stressful thoughts come like a knock on the door and you keep letting them in or you say no no no I don't want you to come in, no no stay out. So both aversion and attraction feed and multiply thoughts.

The secret is just don't mind the mind. Know that this is the natural state of the mind. Don't feed it. You do that by not trying to control it, just hold your ground, and your thoughts will go away. This is the law of the universe: Everything Passes. You don't have to fight, control or defeat the mind. Just stay as the observer of thought, as a pure awareness being in a higher place, a realm of silence. You do this by not touching, not resisting, labeling, or creating a story around your thoughts. Just stay as the silence in between two thoughts and the mind will dissolve itself into the nothingness it is. (Prince EA)

On the other hand, think of your mind as a forest, if you don't walk through it or if there's no traffic and lively action then the growth of what is naturally there will grow up and just be whatever. But if you actively cultivate it or you walk through and make a path that route to a memory or skill then it is further developed. And only if you continuously develop upon it does it hinder anything to your life. So the more you do it after a certain amount of days it becomes the main occurrence, then it becomes a habit, then a lifestyle. From this lifestyle, it becomes a governing or judgemental perspective of what you do or what affects you.

As Garth Kroeker puts it: One's life, or mind, or brain, is like a forest with many paths.

There is some literal truth to this metaphor, in that the connections in the brain that form memories and patterns of behavior, most likely exist as pathways between many different neurons, with the pathways consolidated and strengthened further every time they are activated. Some of our forest paths may be well-trodden but lead us into dangerous territory every time (maybe into poor relationships, addictions, recurrent self-destructive thoughts, depressive symptoms, or other harms to self). But it is not easy to navigate new paths.

The familiarity, ease, and convenience of the old paths make them the most likely to take. You may need to do hard work forming new paths in your forest, resisting the urge to take the old familiar ones. The old paths may never "close up" entirely. Look at the paths in a literal forest outside. Even paths that are overgrown for years are still apparent, and if someone was to make a new path in that area, chances are they might choose that same old overgrown one. But old paths gradually weaken, if they are left untrodden. You may need to leave them dormant for years (imagine those protective fences they put up in forests to protect "ecologically sensitive areas" from being trampled by hikers--put some of those up in your own mind and in your own life)."

Habits are not only synapsing neural pathways, but they are also traits that decern our very character at the macro level. This allows our character to govern our behavior, in a way that doesn't depend upon our choosing every single time what we're gonna do, we just end up behaving in a way that a person with that particular set of habits behaves.

This is also set in the larger picture of normalization, in that you're more likely to develop what society perceives to be a normal character. Philosopher Martin Heidegger would suggest we are always already in the flow of these normalized expectations, and there are only moments where you might come to consciously reflect deeply on your ability to not just go with the flow, he calls these moments of authenticity. But they are never outside of the flow, there is always a new posture to go along with the flow. This is because our habits, knowledge, and judgments are still embedded because of being there and being practiced over and over, we may only alter the path or canal you can't just cover it up or destroy it.

It's only how often we retrace a thought, a brain pattern, or the storage of something that happened, that we are then able to retain the details of what happened. If you don't try actively to remember things, you don't store it and utilize it the same, and so you lose it.

"As long as causation is ubiquitous, whether deterministic or indeterministic, my will is never in a state that is not affected by prior causes. There can be no such thing as an act of will that is the act of a 'prime mover unmoved' or a will that is 'so free, that it is completely unconstrained.'" (pg 124)

Flanagan compares Compatibilism and Incompatibilism as follows:

"Compatibilism: Free Will is compatible with causal determinism. Most compatibilists say that free will requires causal determinism in the sense that the state of my will (itself determined by prior and contemporaneous causes) must be a sufficient cause of any choice I make.

Incompatibilism: Free will is incompatible with causal determinism. Incompatibilists take one of two roads. Libertarians claim that since we have free will, determinism is false. Libertarians employ the concept of free will as Cartesian agent causation or those who sense its incoherence by a promissory hand wave in the direction of 'something or other that does the trick but that is yet to be articulated or formulated to anyone's satisfaction.' Hard determinists claim that since determinism is true, there is no such thing as free will." (pg 125/26)

Once we understand all this we can relieve ourselves from this dream of free will as libertarians see and therefore relieve ourselves from this vice. As Aristotle says in his Ethics, that virtue is finding the mean between two extremes, both of which are vices. This goes to the incompatibilist set of extremes: one had it the pure libertarian free will, that's a vice, the other side pure determinism, that is also a vice. And somewhere in the middle is this compatibilist view that is increasingly informed by neuroscience.

Aristotle and Dewey

"Cries for 'freedom' are typically pleas for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness --that is for political freedom, not metaphysical freedom… This suggests that the manifest image of an age may tenaciously defend an idea that is not only false but unnecessary… Perhaps the same applies to free will. Many people think they need a notion of free agency that involves a self-initiating ego in order to undergird the idea that they are free. Maybe something else can do the job, something where the distinction between voluntary and involuntary does not turn on a distinction between acts initiated by a completely self-initiating will and those that are fully explicable in causal terms." (pg 112)

Because we have thought of our actions as causal or noncausal it has led us all to collectively need the thought of it. In some senses, I do choose what I do but at the same time, I've just been on autopilot since I was born. I've been auto-piloted through opportunities that if I choose to take, it then unlocks more opportunity but it's just been a linear progression of continual being. So if I don't care or don't choose to think of whether or not I am committing an action or if it is just autoplay, I still end up somewhere in the end anyways.

"Both Aristotle and Dewy argued that at a certain point in development a person has character or personality, a set of relatively stable dispositions or habits of thought, feeling, perception, and action including various virtues and vices, aims, goals, and projects. Character or personality is conceived as resulting from the complex interaction of an individual with certain innate dispositions with a natural and social environment, and the results in the creature that is me.

There is no need to assume, indeed there is every reason not to believe, that who or what I am is ever permanently fixed. I have personality or character, but who I am, what I am like, changes over time. I am a being-in-time. But there is every reason to think that when I act voluntarily, I do what I want and that I thereby express myself. Sometimes we act out of character, and normally we regret this. But normally we act in character." (pg 118)

Our Old Manifest Image is Philosophically Diseased

"Buddhism is quietistic about creation, and thus it is what we would call theologically agnostic. When Buddhists talk of human agency, they frame it in terms of what they call codependent causation. Roughly, the idea is that everything is in causal relation with everything else within its spatial and temporal bandwidth. Humans cause things to happen and are caused to make things happen.

Furthermore, all of these causes and effects produce other, novel cause and effect relations. I both have and produce bad karma if I am caused to take the wrong road or if I take myself down the wrong road. Dharmic practices, meditation, reflection, and compassionate acts provide techniques to move myself onto the track of good." (pg 106)

Flanagan covers this as he discusses a good character vs the principle actor, they are kinda one of the same where that the good character is only perceived as good in the right situations. If someone else isn't there to perceive it, is that action still good? What holds the moral ethics to an action. If you are the only one locked in a room for an eternity, then it's your entire governing alone. Whereas, if you're influenced by other observers and you agree with them then you allow the prospective to influence yours.

Where Do Virtues and Principles Come From?

"Think of the person of good character, who ordinarily acts well without conscious deliberation, as one ideal type, and the person who always consciously routes a moral decision through a principle or set of principles as an ideal type at the other end of the spectrum of moral agency. Here I am using the term ideal to mean a useful fiction, not perfection. For what it is worth, I would prefer a world with neither pure type. In any case, the question we need to ask is where might the relevant moral equipment, the virtues or principles that guide the action of these ideal types, come from?" (pg 148)

"Similarly, it may have endowed us with capacities to learn and abide by principles. Indeed, Mother Nature undoubtedly did both of these things. But to become a Good Character or Principled Actor one needs moral education. Where did our ideas of what makes for a good person come from? Thin air is one possibility. Another is that God or nature endowed each of us, as our birthright, with knowledge of what is right and good. A better idea is that we discovered, and are continuing to discover, what makes for a good person and a decent or healthy life… The causal network here is immensely complex. But it includes a person with all sorts of agentic powers. I am still here, and how I feel, think, deliberate, and choose makes a difference. Minimally persons co-author their lives. Indeed, there comes a point in development when we rightly say we are the primary authors of our identity."(pg 148/49)

Mike Strum also adds that:

"Forest fires and the human mind have more in common than most people realize. Well actually, it's not so much the forest fires that are like the mind, but rather the forests themselves. Let me explain. You see there's this notion within those practicing mindfulness that somehow the goal is to purify the mind, rid it of the bad or destructive thoughts and inclinations — the end result being an idyllic crystal clean spirit that can do no wrong. But nothing could be further from the truth. I don't believe such a thing actually happens. I don't believe it's possible. I don't even think it's really desirable.

Fires Are Part of the Forest

As anyone who has been practicing mindfulness for any period of time will tell you, the mind is a crazy and unpredictable place. Thoughts, feelings, memories, and desires pop up, escalate, and fall away many times each day. Wonderful feelings of pleasure, contentment, and relaxation wash over you, and then give way to something else. And so on, and so forth during our waking hours. And that brings me back to the forest.

As any forest geologist will tell you, forests aren't lush and green from end to end, they're populated with both dense, green areas, and sparse, dying, dead, or even burning areas. That's right, forest fires — which make us tend to feel on edge and as if we need to act swiftly — are a natural part of the life cycle of a forest.

Lightning strikes or spontaneous combustion in dry conditions happen in forests and burn the dry and dying parts of it — dying out as wetter, healthier parts are encountered. Portions of a forest also die, decay, and create conditions for future growth. The animals wandering around also play a part. And this has been happening for millions of years.

The mind, in many ways, is like a forest. And if you don't believe me, sit for just a few minutes and be mindful of what kinds of things pop up in your mind. You'll see that like a forest, there are lush, wonderfully peaceful parts of it, but there are also ugly, dry, and sparse parts of it — parts that may be on fire with various feelings you'd rather not have. The temptation may be to try to put out the fires — to replace the dry and dying parts with lush green sprouts and spend more time and energy taking care of those. But I don't think that's the right approach to take.

Burning and Acceptance

Rather than trying to put out natural fires or stop natural decay, why not embrace them as part of the forest? Let them die out in the same way they popped up — without getting wrapped up in them, and possibly making them grow stronger and last longer. Being mindful and trying to cultivate a healthier mind are noble goals. But we cannot allow idealism about what we should feel, think, desire to make us expend too much effort on something futile.

Rather, what we should do is allow the fire or decay in our minds to happen — not take over, but just run its course. The trick is to allow it to play out, but not contribute to it. As I once read in a mindfulness meditation training, simply observe, but do not get involved in those unproductive, unhelpful thoughts and feelings. Much like forestry personnel observe and monitor a natural forest fire, but do not get boots on the ground and start meddling.

Most important in this analogy between our mind and a forest is the following: you must accept the mind as a whole, rather than focusing on small parts of it. Your mind is more than the undesirable thoughts and feelings that pop up, much like a forest is more than the sparse, dry, and dying sections of land within it.

What's more — and this is key — those dry and sparse parts of a forest that seem imperfect and ugly, those are perfectly normal parts of a beautiful whole. In the same way, the imperfect thoughts and feelings that keep popping up in your mind — the ones that seem ugly and anxiety-inducing to you — are part of the greater whole of your mind. If you can accept them as they are, and simply restrain yourself from contributing to them, you will feel so much better about yourself. That alone will help immensely in being more at peace with yourself, which goes a long way in helping to be at peace with others, and do what needs doing."

Information and Causation

"A computer program operates by symbol crunching. A program is a set of rules that governs the behavior of a system capable of detecting what symbols (normally electrically encoded or represented) are presented to it. The system manipulates these symbols in accordance with the rules embedded in its program, performs whatever computation is called for, and moves to the next stage to perform its next task, as determined again by what it detects and by what rule applies... The existence of these sciences, and the actual existence of computers, is proof that there are systems that do their thing by manipulating symbols in accordance with rules. A guiding idea of contemporary mind science is that we are such a system. We are systems that function by, among other things, manipulating and processing information." (pg 137)

"The standard view nowadays is that if the mind is a computer, it is one composed of many minicomputers in massive interaction… Connectionist systems comprise numerous processors, each with an initial probability of being activated in one way rather than another. Such systems have their weights rest by receiving input, giving output, and then receiving feedback about whether they are moving in the right direction as measured against some external standard.

It may be that to model the mind computationally, we will need to weld together all the known computational architectures, as well as others not yet invented. Still, we now understand how causation can operate without collisions of the Galilean-Newtonian sort. It can do so via information processing. The electrical transitions involved in computation information processing are causal, but not remotely collision-like." (pg 138)

"In any case, it is a standard assumption in both the contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience that reasons can be causes. If this is right, then even if computer science at best provides analogies for the mind, we have an understanding of how reason-sensitivity is possible. And reasons-sensitivity was on our checklist of requirements for an acceptable conception of free agency. Rational deliberation, the next requirement of our list, is best conceived as the process of building an overall rationale for some conclusion or course of action by blending together the relevant information in a principled manner, so as to yield a sensible conclusion or choice.

Again, if we conceive of causes not as collision-like events but as algorithms or heuristics, sets of rules for dealing with information, we can see how rational deliberation is possible for complex creatures, artificial or natural." (pg 139)

A side note, I sometimes have Déjà rêvé, the dream version of Déjà vu in which I have seen something so I have been here before, or I have felt or had this before so I am here again. Déjà rêvé, can kinda be perceived as an oracle stance where you can get future dreams where later on in your life you hit/reach that point? In that is it destiny, is it free will, is it something predetermined.

Because I had that dream it will happen but I have the free choice to choose what happens up until said date. If you practice good sleep meditation, you can notice times or dates better and distinguish between a dream vs reality; but on a general perspective, people don't normally try that and so just knowing that something in the future is going to happen do we have the choice to change it or is it just predetermined automation is it an algorithm in which the more we practice our own algorithm we can manipulate the higher algorithm. Kinda like the matrix where neo breaks his own algorithm and hacks into the higher power to become the owner.

Focusing back on Déjà vu, neuroscience, and how memory happens, and there's certain sorta pathways more deliberately formed and then the uncanny experience of Déjà vu; typically are a feeling not of something that's going to happen in the future but are usually something that this has already happened before or I've already done this. Phenomenologically it always happens in a moment, that you have this uncanny feeling that you have experienced before or that was just foretold.

But think about how memory works, memory is a part of our holistic simulation function, which makes us highly adaptive to our environment is our ability and our consciousness to think about what might happen. We can simulate possible futures, which also means we can simulate different possible right nows. And we know because of time and processing there is a sort of different recursive processing that is happening in different parts of our brain. It may be that our brain is throwing up these simulations and there's a sort of time lag and then they catch up and we feel like, wait a minute, I have this uncanny feeling like I've been here before. And it's like no your brain is doing what it always does when you're anywhere, it's allowing you to perceive where you are. It's just that there was kinda a delay or echo in the system.