Description

Jeffrey Satinover MS, MD uses an example of stopping a train with your thoughts to explain that the concept of creating one’s reality (presented in the film What the Bleep Do We Know!?) shouldn’t be taken too far. Rav Michael Laitman, PhD states clearly that humans have absolutely no free choice, even though it seems as if we do.

Transcript

Dr. Jeffrey Satinover: The film makes the claim that in a sense, you can stand on a railroad track, eventually develop the ability to stop the train just through your thoughts. If you have two people standing on the railroad track, and one of them is convinced that he can stop the train with his mind, and actually sees the train stopping, and the other one doesn’t, and instead gets off the track—the one who doesn’t get off the track is gonna get flattened.

But you do have the power to alter your reality in profound ways. For example, by getting off the track if there’s a train coming towards you.

So you have, at any moment in time, you have a choice to make about whether you’re going to manage the train, by wishing it to stop, or get off the track. And so there is a certain practical wisdom in not taking the point about creating one’s reality too far, because there’s a lot of reality that you can’t create.

Rav Michael Laitman, PhD: I would like to add to what was said about free choice. Should I get off the tracks or not? Well, you shouldn’t get off the tracks. But the wisdom of Kabbalah states very clearly, that there is no free choice. There is no free choice in the five senses, in the human existence, in the reality in which we exist there is no free choice. It is hidden from us.

In that, we are like animals. We are within nature, and nature dictates, either from within, through genes, our upbringing, everything that we receive from within, or through society, which just lays heavily on us and compels us to react according to its values, and so on.

From inside and outside, we’re closed in such a way, that it appears to us, it is hidden from us, but it appears to us as if we are operating freely. Gradually, and through science too, we are discovering that there’s a gene for everything. Eventually, science will help us see that if we do not transcend the five senses, transcend the body, we will remain functioning out of necessity that emerges from within us.

And those that go out into the sixth sense, they observe existence in the five senses, and see that that’s the case, while with the sixth sense, there certainly is freedom.