Things which mess with your head
The environment creates, the individual (organism) grows.
This is where we get into the reality of how or why we are changed. We are all capable of being changed by our environment and life is an experience of two basic different forms of reality - actual (biological) reality and cultural (conceptual) reality. We can be changed by something in our environment. Once that change occurs we can be further changed and our thinking and behaviour can be further modified. But see at no point are we ever experiencing free will, even if we say decide to no longer follow a particular religion and become an atheist, or vice versa.
The key thing here which I suggest most people learn about, and treat as really important is to study biology and also dabble in the occult enough to learn basic mysticism. This is so as to understand and accept that such things as blame, judgment, a sense of entitlement, self-satisfaction and positive thinking make no sense whatsoever. In other words, trust the science and at least make some attempt to learn about stuff which you were not taught at any point in your formal education. All these things - blame, entitlement, judgment, and so on mess with your head, distort your whole perspective on life and lead you to make really important choices and decisions which make your life much more complicated and difficult than it needs to be in reality.
See not learning about biology and mysticism leaves you with nothing more than moral reasoning and a moral compass. If all you have is a moral compass to go on, then at some point you're going to see some people as lesser and deserving of being treated badly or even abused. You could even see yourself as someone who is lesser and deserving of abuse from other people. You're going to hold other people and yourself responsible for things either they or you had no control over. Or you could decide to believe in privilege and develop a sense of entitlement or privilege where you feel that you deserve to be treated better than other people. This will inevitably create melodrama, friction and conflict in relationships, leading to unfulfilling or exploitative relationships, relationships which lack symbiosis and cohesion. This can lead to a false perspective of self or self-worth. If you cannot understand who you are, then how are you going to understand other people and what's going on around you?
See judgment and even discrimination can easily become suspect. Hating or fearing other people makes no sense whatsoever. It's just like fearing or hating a plant because it is poisonous and inedible. Just because you're good at something or have things figured out in life, it does not entitle you to any better treatment or consideration from others who are maybe not as talented or who have more difficult or messier lives. In the grand scheme of things you're just another human being and member of the human species no less and no more worthy than any of the other 8 billion other human beings experiencing life on this planet.
See believing in all these illusions from social and mental conditioning - which only give you a start in life and in no way set you up for life - muddies the waters and create confusion about the two things which make us humans fairly unique as a species. We are far more adaptive to our environment and circumstances than most other species and we have a certain psychological and emotional protection - the point of mental health issues - and we are the only species alive on this planet able to comprehend and muster enough conscious awareness to know that at some point we're going to die. Consider that most of my work as a mystic and shaman is to inspire enough conscious awareness in you to understand and live with these three key traits of being a human being.
All these illusions that we believe in as part of our social conditioning have not come out of a vacuum. This is all part of our adaptive ability as a species. You see there is a situation where you can receive bad news and know that you cannot do anything to avoid the trauma and suffering involved. The way to get through this is to embrace enough conceptualization and self-deception to reinforce our other evolutionary trait, i.e. the emotional and psychological protection which sometimes can send us towards a mental health issue or condition. But consider that we have only developed or adapted these abilities as a result of being changed or modified by our environment - be it natural or social. Free will and personal agency has played no part in this process.
We did not create or develop such central human concepts as time or money just because we felt like it. I'm hoping that you can see that this is such a ridiculous notion and much closer to the truth is that there were certain environmental factors which created a sense of despair and the creation of such concepts as time, money, society, community, come from nothing other than our human capacity to adapt to issues arising out of an ever changing environment. If you look back on your life, irrespective of who you are, you will find the exact same evolutionary pattern at play.
This means that despite the fact there is no free will, you have consistently managed to adapt to your environment and circumstances in life in a ways where you have changed your thinking, your behaviour, and how you related to your environment and other people. The choices you make in any given set of circumstances is always relative to what opportunities or possibilities you can perceive in your circumstances or environment.
But for you to be able to perceive those possibilities and opportunities, you needed to have experienced different sets of circumstances in the past to develop that level of conscious awareness. If you had made different choices in the past you will make different choices now or even feel you have no choice to make. What I'm saying here is that at play constantly in your life is a mystical transaction between you and your environment. You've been dealing with karma throughout and karma is purely physical (based on energy) and is all about memory, action, choice and perception. Nothing in your life is predetermined, and at no point in your life have you ever used such a thing as free will. All the choices you have made have been responses and adaptations to an environment and a set of circumstances.
Clinical depression
To further understand the reality of human choice coming from our natural adaptive ability, evolutionary trajectory through life and lack of free will, we need to look at depression as a mental health condition. The key factor in depression and many depressive conditions, particularly unipolar depression, is a pathological inability to protect our mind through self-deception. People affected by depression characteristically struggle with creating sufficient conceptual reality to find that emotional and psychological comfort in changing circumstances and perceive reality as it actually is. People affected by depression are less able to rationalize away reality.
Therefore struggling with depression is not about feeling sad, or being lazy or unmotivated. I would even go as far to say that it's a disability simply because people who struggle with depression struggle with finding emotional and psychological comfort in certain circumstances and lack the ability to rationalize away reality like most other people as part of their natural human evolutionary ability.
What makes depression so unpredictable and difficult to manage is the fact that any environment is constantly changing and multi-dimensional. This inability to adapt to changing circumstances and an ever changing environment is why quite often out of the depression develops anxiety disorders such as social anxiety. People affected by depression cannot buy into the self-deception and rationalization which protects other unaffected people. Many people unaffected by depression cannot handle the perceived reality of someone struggling with depression simply because it challenges their protective, conceptual framework and Ego structure and may result in perceiving the person struggling with depression as being negative or even draining.
However we also have to think about why such a mental health condition exists in the first place. It exists because all too often people find themselves in such difficult circumstances where they have to rationalize away reality too much, and buy even more into the illusions of free will and personal agency. It works out for a time but all too often either the experience of trauma and struggle becomes too much, luck runs out, and often there's an awakening moment where all the illusions crumble and you're left with nothing else other than your environmental reality.
So we see that once again from this example of clinical depression that it's development is circumstantial and there is no free will. If there was free will then people would be able to avoid developing clinical depression. But they can't.
Being transgendered
Another fairly clear example of human choice arising out of environmental circumstances and our natural evolutionary adaptive ability is being transgendered. However this time round the existence of transgendered individuals strongly suggests a lack of determinism among human beings. However in order to illustrate this and understand what it means to be 'trans' we need to understand the middle path between being gender critical and also, equating trans identity completely with non-trans identity.
The key factor in being trans is the inability, or pathological inability, to connect to society and function as an individual with a congruent or matching sex and gender identity. While biological sex is determined at birth nobody is born a man or a woman. Becoming a man or a woman - irrespective of whether you're transgendered or not - is a social and evolutionary process. This social and evolutionary process starts at birth. If you are born with a penis you are subject to different assumptions being made about you from your social environment and these assumptions are different from those which happen if you were to be born with a vagina.
The way you are raised and the kind of childhood you experience, i.e. your environment, largely determines how you develop into a man or a woman. It's the exact same principle - the environment creates, the individual grows. We are all born with a natural ability to constantly take the easy way out and follow the path of least resistance. Usually by the age of eight or nine we have some concept of how we want our life to turn out. We at least have an answer of who or what we want to be when we grow up. But as children we lack insight, experience and a well developed Felt Sense of Immediate Experience. However we have some notion of how we're going to go about life and how we're going to relate to other people.
But this is often not how it works out for those who are trans. Certain things happen in their social environment which creates confusion, doubt, unease, discomfort, so much so that the social identity they feel most comfortable with bears no relationship whatsoever with their physical body. There is a sense of being trapped in the wrong body, a sense of disgust at one's physical appearance or Ego, or sense of self. While some claim to have known that they were their acquired gender in childhood, this is no more than a belief or a premise, or even a possibility. Here we need to understand that we perceive the past and memories relative to our present level of conscious awareness.
Another thing I want to point out that being transgendered is not about believing you are your acquired gender or wanting to be a different gender identity. There is little or no individual choice involved. To believe that there is is to deny the central condition of gender dysphoria - which is very very similar in experience and how it manifests to clinical depression. In fact if you were to ask many trans folk at the start of the process most would beg you on their hands and knees just to have a congruent sex and gender identity. It would spare them the trauma, misery, sense of isolation and loneliness and despair from different life experiences which stands between their birth gender and their actual or acquired gender identity. Therefore that belief in their 'real' gender identity which they talk about realizing back in childhood is usually backed up by many different experiences and development of their Felt Sense of Immediate Experience.
But what makes trans women women and trans men men lies in their social and evolutionary process and human natural adaptive ability. How they become women and men is no different in reality to how non-transgendered individuals become men and women. While they may not have experienced the exact same set of assumptions based on their genitalia at birth, the whole point of transitioning is to go through the exact same process to become a man or a woman as a non-transgendered individual. It is the same adaptive, social and evolutionary process and it is this process and how you deal with it and process it which defines the transgendered experience. Believing that you're a man or a woman is not enough, and neither are the physical changes of hormones and surgery. You also have to transition internally and socially not least to resolve the underlying gender dysphoria.
How social conditioning messes with your head
Now this is where at this point when reading this I'm making certain assumptions about you the reader. I'm assuming that you are not street homeless. I'm assuming that you're not struggling with the existential crisis that persistent poverty and inequality creates. I'm assuming that you have gone through the education system relatively unscathed and have been taught the necessary cognitive, thinking and logical processes to not be too challenged by what I'm writing about here oir the register I'm using. These are just some of the assumptions I'm making about you, the reader.
In other words, I'm assuming that you are one of the lucky people in life who it can be said you have your shit together. But see, if you are able to read what I'm writing here and speculate on whether you do have free will or are in total control of your destiny - as you have been socially conditioned to believe - it's got to be said that you are one of the lucky people in life to have made it through the various social environments and circumstances to actually be in this position.
However I'm also very well aware that my premise, that there is no such thing as free will or determinism, challenges much of your belief system and takes the wind out of your sails when it comes to your perceived accomplishments and achievements.
- "What do you mean I didn't find my job?"
- "What do you mean I didn't succeed and create my own business?"
- "What do you mean I didn't earn my degree?"
I'm sure you could argue that you worked hard, that you struggled, that you sacrificed and so on. But it's important to take a step back here and see the bigger picture. I recognize the fact that saying you didn't exactly earn these things and were simply fortunate is kind of deflating and may be hard to take for some of you. But see buying into that kind of thinking also buys into the other side of the issue that the people who were less fortunate also deserved their poverty, their inequality, and their struggles.
This also doesn't change the reality that most people in life, the vast majority, do not get the recognition or even the acknowledgement for their achievements and accomplishments. Most people on this planet, and very many people in our society, are not assigned or given anywhere near the level of privilege or social power which ever comes close to the ideal. Most people are struggling with some form of deprivation or hardship. Many people experience some form of discrimination, neglect, social stigma, or they are ignored. Many people are considered unworthy enough of attention or opportunity, and this is because they are being treated badly, or even abused, exploited, and this is also over things which they had no control over.
My intention here is not to try and find a way to deflate your Ego, but to liberate you from your assumptions that society works out fairly, that there is such a thing as social justice, and that everyone gets what they want out of society. This is not the case. For some people life starts becoming a struggle in their teens and as more people become affected, the older they get life doesn't get any easier. In most cases life gets harder, more complex, more complicated, and more challenging.
We are experiencing the struggles of an evolutionary mismatch and conflict
It's very important to recognize and understand the fact that we are a highly successful species of primate - the last surviving member of hominid apes - who collectively evolved to survive in savannah and grasslands and live in small hunter gatherer communities. Here I'm referring to a period in our evolution where we were the most successful, where we evolved past the characteristic violence and male domination of other primate species, and achieved both unity with our natural environment and also a level of egalitarianism in community not seen in any other primate species.
However starting with a period some 15,000 years ago we settled into agrarian societies and have evolved into living in large complex, artificial or conceptual societies and through this process have collectively lost our way as a species. Indeed our desires for utopia in society are coming from the collective of human consciousness and conscious awareness from our former evolutionary successes in the grasslands and savannah and our hunter gatherer communities.
We are still making mistakes based on our gnosticism and belief in separateness, in Ego, our distorted sense of self and belief in personal agency and free will, and this stems from a desire to control and shape our environment. Out of this we have invented such concepts as socio-economic status, various stuff, and various systems which are all based on the unequal distribution of stuff. Pay attention to the fact that much of this is based on the somewhat foolish belief that we can somehow control our environment, where the reality remains that it is our environment which controls, shapes and changes who we are as individuals.
Most, if not all of our social issues stem from this evolutionary mismatch and conflict. Take for example poverty, inequality and deprivation. When I last checked some years ago 70% of the human population live out their lives in poverty, deprivation and hardship. Somewhere around 90% of the people born into poverty and who experience poverty in childhood will experience some form of poverty, inequality or exploitation throughout their lives. Another example is obesity, a social and health condition which often arises out of stressful living conditions, fast food, and having to eat shitty processed food sold in supermarkets. Yet even today many people still assume obesity is an individual issue caused by laziness and greed.
What I also want to point out is the fact that in the vast majority of social issues you have people who are experiencing a lack of control, a lack of free will and personal agency, who have to deal with circumstances which they have zero influence over, and who experience an increased level of individual trauma, misery, suffering and despair. Given the fact that I'm referring to or writing about most people in society for me it's somewhat fascinating how anyone can actually believe that free will exists and it's somehow universally accessible.
This is what makes most political systems and systems of government, which are all based on some artificial efficacy of work, individualism and free will, somewhat primitive in nature when compared to other aspects of our social experiences.
Please also keep in mind that for 99% of human evolutionary history, stretching back some 2 million or so years, was focussed enough and reliable enough to provide widespread human social benefit to the species as a whole. It's only in the last 15,000 years that it's gone off the rails and also, in the past half century or so when we have access to digital technology, the internet and social media, that our natural human abilities of adaptation to environmental circumstances and ability to conceptualize and create emotional and psychological comfort through self-deception, that it's becoming so socially destructive.
