Free Will and The Subconscious...

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again i have to accept .. very very limited verbal capacity here .. reading just snippets of thread ..

consciousness mentioned .. what popped up ..

discussing consciousness .. one image i've heard .. The Simpsons intro .. Marge and Maggie in the car .. BOTH turn their steering wheels in time .. looking just like they both drive the car .. Marge turning the actual real steering wheel .. and Maggie turning her toy steering wheel ..

probably .. to Maggie it feels every bit as real as to Marge .. an image of our consciousness, maybe .. it feels real and in control .. because we need and want it to .. perhaps .. consciousness as self-fulfilling ..

Here is my reasoning for believing there is free will. Living things will instinctively do whatever will help them survive. Regarding the earlier discussion of being in a fight, if you are about to get beat up you will instinctively run away, or fight if you have to. But people sometimes decide to engage in behavior that is destructive to their well-being, even to the point of committing suicide, and their instincts would never tell them to do something like that.

I think of the subconscious as an unfocused consciousness, and free will as the ability to focus.

So is "free will" what comes once the subconscious has been processed?

If we by free will mean the ability to focus our mind, then it is exercised in the process when going from a subconscious state of mind to a conscious state of mind. This is how I look at it. Others might have a different view.

I liken the process to what the photographer Ansel Adams, and other famous photographers of the time, called "The Decisive Moment."

For Ansel, standing alongside his huge view camera with his finger on the shutter release, this was the culmination of all his years of learning and experience.

All he'd learned about chemistry and light and people: How he would acquire, prepare and use them, both in the camera, in the field or studio, in the darkroom were all ideas whose understanding and preparation had brought him to this moment.

He used all of his previously acquired experience (memory of same) to "decide" on a direction which (if deemed correct) would indicate memory and subconscious merely tools.

This is the process I believe most people use.

Of course you could say his subconscious did the choosing but a simple light-handed application of Occam's Razor says otherwise.

This would treat the subconscious more as memory with a (personally) self-generated "attitude."

I liked this so I thought I'd throw it in.

Those who see into the Unconscious have their senses cleansed of defilements, are moving toward Buddha-wisdom, are known to be with Reality, in the Middle Path, in the ultimate truth itself. Those who see into the Unconscious are furnished at once with merits as numerous as the sands of the Ganges. They are able to create all kinds of things and embrace all things within themselves. --Shen-hui (as translated by D.T. Suzuki)

It's about mindfulness.

^^Thank you, that's very lovely ^^