Maybe you don’t believe in ghosts.
But they believe in you.
We are all living in ghost stories that we have created ourselves … with cadaverous characters who inhabit M.O.L.E.’s we forged years ago. If you are already walking The North Path, then perhaps you no longer believe in these ghosts. But they still believe in you, because you have not yet helped them rest in peace. Even when we have chosen a new M.O.L.E., old human behaviors associated with that M.O.L.E. continue to play out the stories we casted for them, like old echoes of a past occurrence … a haunting of ourselves.
So how do we give these ghastly ghouls final peace?
We have to first abandon the theory of determinism as it relates to our past lives.
And this is no easy feat. Just as formidable as the Curse of the Aztec Gold, the belief that events in the past determine, not only untold suffering, but us to be the way we are today, is so entrenched in us and piratically perpetuated by society, that sometimes freeing ourselves from such a curse seems hopeless.
But we choose what we believe in. We choose those ideas which we embrace. And since any theory is just an idea, just like a curse, it can be lifted.
Determinism states that every event has a preceding cause, and hence everything we do is determined by a cause that came before it. Even these very words that I write are not freely chosen: I am writing this blog article because some event that happened before led me exactly here. With determinism there is no “I,” because no one is free to choose anything. We are all rational rats living out our lives in a motivational maze.
We are cursed. And even returning the missing piece of Aztec gold cannot save us.
The Scottish philosopher, David Hume, most acclaimed for being a causal skeptic, exposed the ridiculousness of such a theory by showing that we cannot know the cause of anything. He pointed out that, if determinism were true, we would be able to observe and predict causes accurately.
But this is not the case.
Let’s take his famous billiard ball example.
Say we are playing a game with billiard balls and it is my turn to break, which means that I will be using my cue stick to hit the white ball into a triangle of multi-colored balls at the other end of the table in order to break them up so that we can continue our game. “I,” the agent, am the cause, and my hitting the white cue ball and the other balls will be the effects.
The only problem is that no matter how many times I have practiced this, there is no guarantee that I will actually hit the other balls, let alone the cue ball itself! If I could know the cause of what makes me strike the cue ball, I could do this flawlessly. But, in reality, in the complicated series of actions of my hitting the cue ball (e.g., holding the stick, the movement of my arm, the amount of force used, etc), there is no way to no which of these is the actual cause.
It is not uncommon for children to blame themselves for an event happening and then to create a M.O.L.E. thereafter based on this deterministic deeming, one which often brings great suffering to them. But how can they know that they were really the cause of their suffering?
They cannot.
We cannot.
In my old M.O.L.E. I blamed a tragic event as the cause for me seeing the world as chaotic, hostile, and unsafe, and I have spent most of my life not trusting life or the people in it, deciding instead to live in my own safe world of imagination.
But causes are nothing but ghosts. And until we stop believing in these Ghosts of Determinism we will never be truly free to rewrite our stories as free agents … as joyful “I’s.”
It is time to let the ghosts rest in peace.
Yours in the infinite joy of the “I,”
Phoenix Richardson.
Ghost photo courtesy of:
By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26302476