RE: How Can Free Will and Fate Coexist? (You're unlikely to find the answer in this post)
I don't know if that comment of the circle to which he refers is mine, but after all, you came to the same conclusion as me. Maybe it's because we started from the same premises.
Time is a circle, because it is perfect, it has no beginning or end, unlike a line. Time is eternal, a line can not be eternal.
It is also cyclical as @builderofcastles said. Patterns and patterns that repeat themselves from the past, and that we continually drag.
Those who created us, the universe, god, creator, nature, divinity, or whatever, whatever you prefer to call it, or in what you prefer to believe, is eternal, that is, it is found both in the past, as in the present and in the future, so he can know with certainty each of the things you are going to do before they happen, without violating your free will.
Almost all ancient civilizations, whether from Europe, Africa, Asia or America, almost all, believed in a cyclic universe, which was destroyed at some point and was reborn, from the tree of life.
This has a lot of metaphoric content, which should not be taken literally, but as always, to a good listener, few words are enough.
Yes it was a comment from you and also one from builderofcastles on the same post. Thanks for that. Who would have known at the time it would come back to slap me in the face while writing this post.
Before then I had thought that for the Creator, time is to them very much like space is for us. But I am definitely thinking on this circle thing right now. One problem I have is that you say a line cannot be eternal but a circle can. When I picture time as a circle, I see it as a ring, which, I don't know if I am just being pedantic here, but it is a line. That's what a circle is to me, the only possible way to draw a never ending line.
I think I owe this another day's thought before I speak on it though, because it feels very likely that by tomorrow I will have a different understanding of this.
Exact.
So I followed that line of thinking and I am a little shocked at where I've stopped to look around.
Do you think it possible the movie the matrix is a very real depiction of how we as spiritual beings have been trapped within a never ending cycle or reincarnations in a material world with time as the shackle that binds us to our physical forms?
I have had meditative experiences where I have lost all sense of time and when I have came out of it, I did not have any clue if a moment or an hour had passed. I felt good upon rearriving back into time, but obviously, I have no actual memory of what transpired while I was in "the gap."
You seem to know your shit, so what would you suggest as a potential recovery method to retrieve and access - though then there will the problem of interpretation - the data which I know I must have collected during my time spent in the gap- though I realise now I didn't spend any time in the gap. Lol. I am going to bed. You will forgive the nakedness of my imagination today I hope.
Many see the movie Matrix, and it's about determinism and indeterminism, about destiny and free will, others see it and it's about materialism and immaterialism, about the visible and the invisible, others see it and it's about the oppressive system current and about liberation, others about capitalism and socialism, others about many other things. For some it's just an action movie. Do you know what this means? That the meaning of the film is not in the film itself, but in the mind of the one who sees it.
Things don't have a meaning, people give it to them. You and I may be having the same conversation now, and we may be interpreting things very differently.
The meaning of things, the answer to all the questions, are not found in a book, or in someone's mouth, they are in the interpretation of things, they are in ourselves. Sometimes I find answers in places where I was not looking for them. And that is because we are the ones who develop them.
Sometimes I read something and I think it's just nonsense. But years later I read the same again and it has a different meaning, and it becomes an answer. Because the answer is not in a text, but in us and it is what gives it meaning.
Socrates said that we are the ones who must develop our own ideas, and this is so because if we look for them in others, or in something external to us, we will lose that capacity of natural interpretation that enables us to get an answer to things.
The answers to those questions that you ask, are not in me, I don't have the answers, but I am sure that you will have one, because you have been developing your own answers.
It's great advice, though I don't feel I needed it. I understand this all very well, though I could never have put it as well as this;
It is through conversation that I best develop my own ideas though.
But in regards to the matrix, I understand that meaning is in the eye of the beholder, but so too must there have been an intended meaning by the author of the creation. I am more curious about that than what any random interpretation may be. Though I shall concede it's not anything I ever expect to know for sure. It's still good exercise to ponder.