Admittedly, I am never really quite sure how to react to this sort of thing.
Consider:
Once the parts of an automobile engine are put together correctly the car can be driven. No one will question the parts themselves. As mindless matter, they do what they do because that is what needs to be done with them in order for the car to be driven.
But what about the minds of the men and the women who invented the engine? the men and the women who assemble the invented parts into the engine? the men and the women who choose to drive the car to point A rather than point B?
How is this matter different from the matter in the parts of the engine? Given that it is said that all of the matter that make up all of the elements in the universe came from exploding stars billions of years ago.
But: How it came to evolve into living matter, into mindful matter, is still the big mystery. The whole conundrum embedded in “dualism”.
Thus to ask what we all ought to do [on this thread] is still entangled in turn in the extent to which what we choose to do either is or is not only that which we ever could have chosen to do.
But what does that really mean when discussing matter able to become mindful of itself as matter able to discuss something like this?
If we are “powerless to do anything other than what we actually do” than how are we not just the “parts” that nature managed to assemble into brains much the same way in which our brains assemble the parts of the enigine?
Here I always come back to dreams. In my dreams – “in the moment” – I am convinced that I am choosing to do what I do. But instead it is my subconscious and unconscious mind – the chemical and neurological interactions in my brain – that is/are calling the shots. But only as they ever could have; as, in other words, just a more extraordinary manifestation of matter.
We simply do not know what is [b][u]really[/b][/u] going on here. Or, rather, I don’t. Others might. God might. But until I am apprised of how it really works, I don’t.
Perhaps there is a more positive word to use than powerless. Anyway, we are only really powerless unless we see things that way and feel no hope. But then again, psychologically speaking, maybe that experience of powerlessness is a gift and what lights the fire under us and gives us the momentum to make the choice to transcend it or plow through it ~ that is, if we want to experience personal freedom.
We can reasonably say that we had no other choice in the matter in view of what we saw and how we saw the future if we did not take steps to become pro-active and change something ~ in other words, to be self-determined creatures and re-create our reality. Is that being powerless?
Perhaps. But that still leaves me unable to determine definitively if what you write here and what I read here is only ever as it was all going to unfold anyway. Whether we feel powerful or powerless is the same thing: an inherent manifestation of the immutable [mechanical] laws of matter doing the immutable [mechanical] laws of matter’s thing.
Was Martin Luther King powerless?
Was Frederick Douglas powerless?
Was Helen Keller powerless?
Was William James powerless?Those are just the few who popped into my mind. History is full of reminders of how we do not have to be powerless.
In a wholly determined universe however everything that everyone thinks, feels and does is only as it ever could have been. Going all the way back to why there is something instead of nothing; and why it is this something and not another something altogether.
Or so it seems to me.
But: Whatever that means.