Did you choose your words?

• What's Free Will by aussie boy, 4/11/99
  
  

People experience. Their ability to imagine the world and their ability to sense the world results in the retrieval of experience other than the experience they had a second before. Is that change called manipulation? If I purposely am aware that my "output" is stimuli that has an effect on others (which it always does) is that manipulation? If I don't know about that effect, is that manipulation anyway simple because it has the same effect? Or, are you thinking such interaction between a person and the environment is only manipulation when the environmental other is aware and has a mindful goal? Then, is socialization, love, courtship, education, parenting, etc., manipulation? Yes.

Is "manipulation" really the word YOU wished to express or is it the result of a teaching/learning that manipulated your experience into a particular (biased) category and way of stating a point and question? Yes.

In other word, the word "manipulation" is not a very useful as a concept for speaking in a sophisticated manner about the phenomena of experience change. It presupposes an odd dichotomy and that in itself creates a conclusion along a conceptual line of thinking that doesn't tell us much in the end.

Yes, EVERYTHING, "pushes" experience around (read, "manipulates" experience). Everything. Can this happen to a person without his or her awareness – yes, it happens all the time. It is happening right now to both of us. It happens in education, socialization, courtship, parenting, strolling on the beach, movies, news, books, walking on a city sidewalk with strangers, etc., thinking by oneself even.

I hope this helps you rethink your question with a bit more depth, if nothing else.

On the practical side....you might ask …can one be greatly and (quickly) be permanently manipulated in the ways you mentioned? Possibly, with sufficient contact and attention being given. It can happen more likely by accidental interaction than by skillful tactics, I imagine....but either way, its happening is about as remote as the chance that you will be hit by a falling satellite...it can happen...but there are lot of other, more likely things, that can happen with experience and that one ought to understand instead.

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