Of things some are in our power, and others are not. In our power are opinion, movement toward a thing, desire, aversion (turning from a thing); and in a word, whatever are our own acts: not in our power are the body, property, reputation, offices (magisterial power), and in a word, whatever are not our own acts. And the things in our power are by nature free, not subject to restraint nor hindrance: but the things not in our power are weak, slavish, subject to restraint, in the power of others. Remember then that if you think the things which are by nature slavish to be free, and the things which are in the power of others to be your own, you will be hindered, you will lament, you will be disturbed, you will blame both gods and men: but if you think that only which is your own to be your own, and if you think that what is another's, as it really is, belongs to another, no man will ever compel you, no man will hinder you, you will never blame any man, you will accuse no man, you will do nothing involuntarily (against your will), no man will harm you, you will have no enemy, for you will not suffer any harm.

• stoicism
• power
• opinion
• desire
• free will
• freedom

Some have tried to argue a finalistic view of the unprecedented accumulation of energy in the atomic era. Theodor Litt, for example, has suggested that man might realize his own nature in the face of a crisis situation by using his free will, deciding in full responsibility, taking the risk, in one direction or the other. Currently the decision is over the destructive and military use of atomic energy, or its 'constructive,' peaceful use. \nIn an epoch of dissolution, such an idea seems completely abstract and fantastic, typical of intellectuals with no sense of reality. First it presupposes the existence of men who still possess an inner law and sure ideas about what course should really be followed — and this, beyond anything that relates to the purely material world. Second, it presumes that these hypothetical men are the very ones entrusted with the use of the new means of power, in one direction or the other. Both suppositions are chimerical, especially the second. Today's leaders are caught in a tangle of actions and reactions that evade any real control; they obey irrational, collective influences, and are almost always at the service of special interests, ambitions, and material and economic rivalries that leave no room for a decision based on an enlightened freedom, a decision as an 'absolute person.' \nIn fact, even the alternative suggested above, over which our contemporaries agonize so much, may present itself in terms very different from those advanced by a pacifist, progressivist, moralizing humanitarianism. I truly cannot say what the person who still has hope for man should think of the imminence of quasi-apocalyptic destruction. It would certainly force many to face the existential problem in all its nakedness, and subject them to extreme trials; but is this a worse evil than that of mankind's safe, secure, satisfied, and total consignment to the kind of happiness that befits Nietzsche's 'last man': a comfortable consumer civilization of socialized human animals, aided by all the discoveries of science and industry and reproducing demographically in a squirming, catastrophic crescendo?

• progress
• science
• energy
• existentialism
• civilization
• power
• freedom
• peace
• ambition
• control
• destruction
• responsibility
• free will
• government
• politics
• apocalypse narrative
• humanity

The input to the divine hallucinatory aspect of the bicameral mind was auditory. It used cortical areas more closely connected to the auditory parts of the brain. And once the word of god was silent, written on dumb clay tablets or incised into speechless stone, the god's commands or the king's directives could be turned to or avoided by one's own efforts in a way that auditory hallucinations never could be. The word of a god had a controllable location rather than an ubiquitous power with immediate obedience. This is extremely important.

• bicameral mind
• hallucinations
• religion
• command hallucinations
• authority
• authorization
• evolution
• freedom
• free will
• law
• guilt
• god
• power
• obedience

...the price they paid for their vision was the possession of that vision

• magick
• will
• free will
• visualization

To be inevitably compelled by God is to be one with God, and in this way, determinism becomes freedom.

• fate
• free will
• god
• freedom

Script analysis is then the answer to the problem of human destiny, and tells us (alas!) that our fates are predetermined for the most part, and that free will in this respect is for most people an illusion. For example, R. Allendy points out that for each individual who faces it, the decision to commit suicide is a lonely and agonizing and apparently autonomous one. Yet whatever vicissitudes it goes through in each individual case, the 'rate' of suicide remains relatively constant from year to year. \r\n \r\nWhat, then, is the responsibility of the parents?  Script programming is not their 'fault,' any more than an inherited defect is, such as diabetes or clubfoot, or an inherited talent for music or mathematics.  They are merely passing on the dominants and recessives they got from their parents and grandparents.  The script directives are being continually reshuffled, just as the genes are, by the fact that the child requires two parents. \r\n \r\nOn the other hand, the script apparatus is much more flexible than the genetic apparatus and is continually being modified by outside influences, such as life experience and the injunctions inserted by other people.  It is only rarely possible to predict when or how an outsider will say or do something that alters a person's script.  It may be a casual remark accidentally overheard at a carnival or in a corridor, or it may be the result of a formal relationship such as marriage, school, or psychotherapy.

• awakening
• chaos theory
• destiny
• free will
• suicide
• transactional analysis
• fate
• life
• parents
• will
• experience
• responsibility
• marriage
• relationship
• influences
• respect
• mathematics
• music
• analysis
• other
• programming

If the whole of existence is relative, conditioned, and interdependent, how can will alone be free?

• free will
• will
• existence

One may save anyone who does not want to be ruined; but if the whole nature is so corrupt, so depraved, that ruin itself seems to her salvation, what's to be done?

• free will
• salvation
• nature

The three tasks for which educators are required - One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speakandwrite: the goal in all three is a noble culture. Learning to see - accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgement, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophically speaking, is called a strong will: the essential feature is precisely not to 'will' - to be able to suspend decision. All un-spirituality, all vulgar commonness, depend on the inabilty to resist a stimulus: one must react, one follows every impulse.

• education
• free will
• identification
• spirituality
• stimulus
• will
• culture
• control
• learning
• patience

Radical means are indispensable only for the degenerate; the weakness of the will - or, to speak more definitely, the inability not to respond to a stimulus - is itself merely another form of degeneration.

• free will
• identification
• react vs respond
• will
• stimulus

What is restricted is the free, spontaneous expression of the infant's, the child's, the adolescent's, and eventually the adult's will, their thirst for knowledge and truth, their wish for affection. The growing person is forced to give up most of his or her autonomous, genuine desires and feelings that are not autonomous but superimposed by the social patterns of thought and feeling. Society, and the family as its psychosocial agent, has to solve a difficult problem: How to break a person's will without his being aware of it? Yet by a complicated process of indoctrination, rewards, punishments, and fitting ideology, it solves this task by and large so well that most people believe they are following their own will and are unaware that their will itself is conditioned and manipulated.

• early childhood development
• family
• free will
• society
• truth
• will
• knowledge
• thought
• how to
• ideology
• expression
• patterns

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.  They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

• free will
• suffering
• freedom
• react vs respond
• will
• stoicism
• circumstances
• attitude

A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining.  What he becomes - within the limits of endowment and environment - he has made out of himself.  In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints.  Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.

• fate
• free will
• nature vs nurture
• self
• environment
• other