- - THE VIEW IS GETTING BETTER - - -

Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, "Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free. The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it."

A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.

For instance:

In the 1970s, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, wired up the brains of volunteers to an electroencephalogram and told the volunteers to make random motions, like pressing a button or flicking a finger, while he noted the time on a clock.

Dr. Libet found that brain signals associated with these actions occurred half a second before the subject was conscious of deciding to make them.

The order of brain activities seemed to be perception of motion, and then decision, rather than the other way around.

In short, the conscious brain was only playing catch-up to what the unconscious brain was already doing. The decision to act was an illusion, the monkey making up a story about what the tiger had already done.

Apparently the mind, like the body, works quite well on it's own and tells us the best choices through intuition, if we don't interfere too much.

It's hard not to think of the similarities with what Ezekiel heard, that "still small voice" he wrote about and the dreams and visions all the prophets saw or even the spirit that "will lead you into all truth", of sacred texts of old. It's an interesting thought that God talked normally to Adam, His voice boomed out with Moses, then, chronologically Ezekiel heard a still small voice. Now we pray and don't hear anything, except for only a few who do. Is it supposed to be that way?

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