free-will

The process of miraculous change is twofold._ One: _I see my error or dysfunctional pattern. _Two:_I ask God to take it from me. _The first principle without the second is impotent. _As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, your best thinking got you here. _You're the problem but you're not the answer. The second principle isn't enough to change us either._The Holy Spirit can't take from us what we will not release to him. _He_won't work without our consent. _He cannot remove our character defects without our willingness,_because that would be violating our free will. _We chose those patterns, however mistakenly, and he will not force us to give them up. _In asking God to heal us, we're committing to the choice to be healed.

You can__ change the past. You can__ even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.

The mother of goodwill is freewill, if untainted by evil.

How wrong we are to ignore our hearts to follow the familiar path.

No man is good enough to govern any woman without her consent.

The only true, unchallenged, and un-legalized free-will we have is internal.

When the whole world is silent,Even one voice becomes powerful.

But in actuality, the assumption that there is no freedom leads to the exact opposite of order in human behavior. If we all really felt we were not free to make our own choices of how to face and deal with the conditions set for us by heredity and environment, we would also feel no responsibility for our behavior. And we would be right. We couldn__ be blamed for action over which we had no control, so we would make no real effort to act responsibly. We would give free rein to our passions on the grounds that whatever we did was part of the cause-and-effect sequence of events preordained by the conditions. Instead of orderly human conduct, there would be chaos. In fact, much of the irresponsible antisocial behavior that characterizes our modern society stems from the fact that many people have studied or otherwise absorbed this scientific doctrine of determinism. As a result, they have unconsciously excused their own behavior as well as that of others on the grounds that it is determined by factors beyond control.

Blue for everyone but it was not for freedom.Just like you, like me

The goal of spirituality is total and permanent freedom from psychological sorrows and sufferings. This is only possible when we will stop taking birth as individuals again and again.What makes us an __ndividual_? The ignorance.What kind of ignorance? Our idea about our self that __ am an individual_.

If this is truly the time that will decide, we have no business refusing people who feel the way we do. No right to decide that they must huddle in their homes waiting to see if they are still slaves or not when the summer ends.

Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said: Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will (Man can do what he will but he cannot will what he wills).

Every man has within him only one life and one nature ... It behooves a man to look within himself and turn to the best dedication possible those endowments he has from his Maker. You do no wrong in questioning what once you held to be right for you, if now it has come to seem wrong. Put away all thought of being bound. We do not want you bound. No one who is not free can give freely.

Perhaps, there is no such person who can be called truly free, but only those who can be deemed so by comparison.

... how terrible is the pain of the mind and heart when the freedom of mankind is suppressed!

Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible, and makes itself the property of history, in which is has not a free but a predestined significance.

You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.

You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.