The Fundamental Deception
Free will is perhaps the most fundamental assumption of human experience - the belief that we have conscious control over our decisions, actions, and thoughts. It forms the foundation of personal responsibility, legal systems, morals, and how we understand ourselves as individuals navigating through life.
But what if this most basic assumption is an illusion? What if decisions happen before we are even aware of them? What if "you" are not the one choosing at all?
I want to talk about the illusion of choice. You understand the illusion of choice once you understand the nature of the mind.
The more you peer into your thoughts, the more you understand that you do not control your thoughts. Thoughts just appear. They just appear out of nowhere. And they disappear into nowhere.
Whenever you say, "I'm going to choose," or "I'm choosing something deliberately," this is also a thought. Is it not?
The ego is a thought. And the thought is an illusion. And if you are in an illusion, then what is that really that you're choosing?
There's not much of a choice. There's only a thought that pops, and then there's another thought after. But who is the actor?
For most people, the actions are just being taken automatically. Thoughts just pop in their mind, a certain emotional state has been created, and the action has been taken. People act and behave from their emotional states.
But who is acting and behaving? Because if you look into the nature of your consciousness, you will see that everything there is, is just this - infinite awareness.
You are awareness, and everything there is, is just unfolding within your mind. We are the absolute spaciousness, and within that spaciousness, some kind of mental events constantly occur.
From Small Choices to Hard Choices
Think about it.
It goes from small choices to hard choices.
Think about what food to choose. There is an uncomfortable sensation of hunger within the body, and the mind is decoding it, and the voice inside the head says, "I'm hungry."
And that's when the next thought is, "I gotta eat something." “What are you gonna eat?”
You think that you're choosing between the meals, but who is the "I" that is choosing?
The "I" that is choosing is the thought itself.
"Oh, I want sushi," or "I want Italian," or "I want Mexican."
But the moment you said that, the moment you pronounced that inside your head, the thought just materialized inside your mind. The thought “I want something” is already itself a thought.
To ground things, if you look at it, you will observe and you will understand that the same thing is happening in every aspect of your life, for example, choosing a partner.
There's a meeting, then there is an attraction, there's a biochemical reaction, and then, upon that attraction, some kind of chemistry between two people happens. And then there is thought.
"I like you" is a thought. "You are like me, you are similar to me" is a thought. "You are interesting" is a thought.
"I want to meet you again" is a thought. "I'm thinking about you" is a thought. "I want to be with you" is a thought.
And then "I want to spend the rest of my life with you" is also a thought. Until it is no longer what the mind is telling you.
The Evidence: Philosophy and Neuroscience
This idea has fascinated philosophers, neuroscientists, and contemplative traditions across history. Some find it terrifying; others find it liberating.
Few concepts shake our understanding of reality as profoundly as questioning free will.
Let’s look at some of those arguments.
Philosophical Arguments
Determinism posits that everything that happens is caused by prior events following natural laws.
If every decision is shaped by genetics, environment, and past experiences - factors that are beyond our control - where is the space for "free" choice?
Consider this:
A person raised in an abusive home has their behaviour shaped by trauma
Someone with a genetic predisposition toward ADHD experiences the world through that lens
An individual exposed to certain ideas early in life adopts those perspectives (e.g. religion)
Everything forms a chain reaction.
Your choices today are simply effects of previous causes stretching back to before you were born. Each thought, each desire, and each impulse arises from conditioning you never chose.
As philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it:
"A man can do what he wants, but he cannot want what he wants."
A simple thought experiment reveals this truth:
Think of a city.
Any city.
Why did you pick that one?
Did you really choose it, or did it just appear in your mind?
You didn't decide to create the thought - it simply appeared. You couldn't have known what city would come to mind before it did.
Probably something appeared within the space of your awareness simply by association.
The same is true for all thoughts, desires, and impulses. You don't author your thoughts; you witness them arising.
If you can't predict your next thought, how can you claim to be the thinker?
And if you're not the thinker, who is the chooser?
Neuroscientific Evidence
Modern neuroscience also provides compelling evidence that free will may be an illusion, revealing a timeline of decision-making that challenges our intuitive sense of agency.
Neuroscientist Benjamin Libet conducted a groundbreaking experiment where participants were asked to flex their wrists whenever they felt like it while watching a clock. They were instructed to note the exact moment they became aware of their "decision" to move.
The results?
EEG recordings showed that brain activity began approximately 550 milliseconds before the physical action, and critically, this activity began about 300 milliseconds before participants reported becoming aware of their decision to move.
What is the implication?
Your brain initiates action before "you" consciously decide.
Building on this work, more advanced research used fMRI brain scanning to study decision-making processes. When participants had to choose between pressing a left or right button, scientists could predict their choice 7-10 seconds before they consciously "decided."
Maybe - by the time you feel like you're making a choice, your brain has already decided.
So where is that "you" in this process?
If decisions can be predicted from brain activity before conscious awareness, what role does consciousness play in decision-making?
The Randomness of Life
Then there is a play of Randomness.
Choosing a career, if you investigate your life, you will probably see that the way you have developed yourself is a lot of disconnected acts of randomness.
The world and the universe, especially with the 8 billion people who are acting out there, from unhinged minds create a lot of randomness in those acts, a lot of unpredictability.
It's just all just natural entropy of the Universe.
I’ll tell you a story.
Last week our building had an electrical shutdown. A few days later my friend went to a funeral.
What happened is one of his friends died at the moment when there was an electrical disruption. This guy was an electrician working somewhere, and he got an electrical shock. He didn't even die instantly. They brought him to the hospital with severe injuries, and that's where he died. He was 34 years old.
In the morning, he kissed his wife goodbye. They had life plans, they had dreams, they wanted to start a family, and it was just a normal day at work for him.
Until it wasn't.
These kinds of acts of randomness happen all the time, but we discount their significance in our lives. And then these kinds of events, they imprint on us, imprint on our minds, and create a lot of further thinking - newly generated thoughts and beliefs.
Some people develop fear, some people develop this constant desire to control, and as a result develop anxiety, because they realize more and more that there is nothing they can control.
Life is a soup of chaos.
There is nothing to control because the nature of the one who wants to control is not understood.
The one who wants to control has to be transcended.
Why Free Will Feels Real
If free will is an illusion, why does it feel so real and compelling? Several psychological mechanisms create and maintain this delusional sense of agency.
First, your sense of being a "self" that chooses is itself a mental construction - an emergent property of mental processes.
The mind builds a continuous, coherent narrative about "you" to make sense of experience. This narrative creates the feeling of being a unified decision-maker.
But in reality, there is no central "self" in the brain - just distributed processes happening automatically. The "self" is a story the brain tells itself - not an actual entity making decisions.
After every action, your brain creates reasons to explain it - even if you have no control over the action itself:
If you get angry, your mind invents a justification: "That person was rude!"
If you crave sugar, your mind says, "I deserve a reward"
You think you are making conscious choices, but the explanations come after the impulse.
Your conscious mind is always slightly behind reality due to processing delays.
It takes time for sensory data to be processed into conscious awareness. Your awareness of decisions lags behind the actual brain activity that initiated them. Your brain has already acted, and your mind takes credit after the fact.
This delay creates the perfect conditions for the illusion of choice - by the time you're aware of a decision, it's already been made, but the sequence feels like: awareness → decision → action.
The Liberation in Realization
It's a scary thought, that there is no freedom of choice.
Thoughts just appear in the mind, and the one who is thinking, and the one who thinks he has free will - is also a thought.
The Identity, the "I," the Concept of Self is just an entanglement of thoughts, a cloud of thoughts that are just happening in the space of awareness.
It is a scary thought to think that there is nothing that you are really choosing in life.
That Life is choosing. It's almost like life is pulling itself into a thread. And the only thing that you can do is to remain what you are - to stay aware of how life is unfolding itself.
But another side of it that not many people consider is that this realization also comes with the deepest degree of liberation.
If there is no freedom of choice, if there is nothing that you choose, then a lot of surrender happens spontaneously in the moment.
You realize that you can let life unfold the way it must, the way it will, regardless of what choices you make.
There is no need to control because the one who wants to control is an illusion.
And with that deepest realization, it doesn't mean that you completely need to forgo and abandon your responsibilities.
No.
You still do things, you still go to work, you still continue your relationships with people, you still continue doing the things that you do.
Chop wood. Carry water.
But now, all the things that you do are happening differently.
They're happening without that degree of attachment, because you realize the illusion of it all. You realize that the one who thinks that he's in control, the one who thinks that he's choosing something is a complete and utter illusion.
"I choose," "I decide," "I control" is merely a thought too, and just like some other thoughts, they just pop up without any control.
Randomly.
The End of Guilt and Self-Blame
Understanding the illusory nature of free will can transform our relationship with ourselves:
If thoughts, emotions, and behaviours arise on their own, why blame yourself for them?
Your habits, preferences, flaws, and virtues are just the unfolding of causes and effects. Seeing this deeply reduces anxiety, guilt, shame, and regret.
This doesn't mean abandoning self-improvement efforts, but it changes the motivation and approach - from self-punishment to compassionate understanding.
When the illusion of being a separate controller falls away, a paradigm shift occurs.
If you see thoughts as not "yours," you stop being attached to them. If you recognize emotions as arising on their own, you stop being controlled by them. If you accept that life is happening by itself, you move beyond struggle and resistance.
Many non-dual philosophers and contemplative traditions suggest that realizing this "non-doership" is liberation itself - freedom not from circumstances, but from the suffering that comes from believing you are separate from and in control of life.
Freedom from the Doer. Freedom from the Chooser. Freedom from the Controller.
Freedom from Self.
Taking a Different Approach
That realization leads you to understanding that even though you are not your thoughts, you still ARE your thoughts.
What you think, you become. Your mind creates your reality.
And there are certain things that could be done through concentration and targeted attention.
Awareness that is sharpened and channelled into an object is attention. The way you focus your attention on things, is the way you train the mind, because the mind works with the same principles as everything in the physical world.
The physical universe follows the law of energy conservation, the path of lowest energy expenditure. And the path of the lowest energy spent is the habitual thoughts.
If you used to think a certain way, if there are certain habitual thinking patterns that the mind is trained to follow, then that's how the mind will think.
That's why it's so hard to change yourself. It's because the mind is addicted to thinking thoughts and focusing on thoughts that are familiar and habitual.
The transformation process happens when you start shifting qualitatively your thoughts and you start focusing and concentrating on different thoughts, and then these thoughts create different states. New states materialize themselves in different ways because you go and act on those new thoughts from the novel inner states.
Identity as a Mental Construct
But the very cornerstone of identity transformation is the realization of it. The realization that you are not the identity, that identity itself is just a construct.
It's the mental construct that your whole identity, your whole understanding of self is built upon. It is the product of the mind, a concept of self completely manufactured by the mind.
Your name is just a sound that two humans who met each other and had sex and gave birth to you decided to call you. For simplicity and for practical purposes, or maybe they wanted to supercharge your name with some kind of meaning.
There is nothing true about what you believe because all your beliefs are simply programs that are installed in your mind as a result of deep conditioning.
Your religion is false, because it has never been your religion. Your association with the country is false because you associate yourself with a place simply because you were born there, from the notion of “country” that some people created before you.
Your society is conditioned, and your cultural conditioning is all the product of a simple random happening of you being born in that particular place, in that particular time, with those particular life circumstances.
It doesn't require a lot of intelligence to see that.
All it requires is just the skill of observation and reflection - looking and examining your life to understand all these layers and layers of conditioning that you can observe and you can look through them and discern where exactly this illusion has been happening.
It's not a function of age, it's not a function of time, it's not a function of effort, it's a function of a sincere desire to understand what is true and what is not true.
By investigating the very nature of your mind, you start looking into how thoughts are operating. And everything you can think of is a thought.
A deep sincere investigation is all it takes to notice this.
Practical Examples of Conditioning
I'll give you some examples. I work with one of my clients these days, and she has trouble building friendships.
Everyone thinks that she's a social butterfly because it's so easy for her to jump in and start connections very quickly. She doesn't have social anxiety. She's great at small talk, extremely intelligent and well-educated. But when it comes to maintaining the relationships, this is where the layer of external programming starts to happen.
We had to do some inner work to unfold and unravel her mind and eventually understand that her fear of not being able to follow up and maintain relationships comes from the fear of rejection.
That fear of rejection comes from a dysfunctional relationship with her mother and her dad, with whom she never had a true connection, and who never invested proper time to raise their daughter in love.
I work with another client who is right now stepping into the path of content creation, and this fear is constantly sitting there because the mind has been conditioned. Externally, it has been conditioned to look for external validation. And the whole game of external validation is just illusions of the mind imposed on itself.
Some form of dysfunctional thinking that has never been untangled. Because a human who is spiritually mature, grounded and completely unapologetically anchored in all sources of internal validation cares absolutely not about what the world has to say or think about them.
In order to be able to track down all these thoughts, one has to have absolute dedication to understanding what is working and what is not working in the Mind.
The Alternative Path
And that is my invitation.
This is something everyone can do if you really start looking into understanding what is that constant sense of "I want to control, I want to chase, I want to accomplish, I want to form, shape my reality, materialize things."
And we get so frustrated, irritated and upset when the reality does not follow our intellectualization. But that's because any form of intellectualization, any form of expectation is just a mental construct that the mind is imposing. It's like a personal movie that your mind is showing to you, and you believe it, you are mesmerized by it but there's absolutely nothing solid within that movie. It’s a phantom.
And then, there is an alternative path, and the alternative path is to live the life of an awakened being.
To be constantly present, to be constantly attuned to what is real right here right now, living hyper-aware. But this is only possible when you slow down, when you look within, you start realizing that the whole nature of the mind, the whole thought scene is just a sham. It's a grand and utter illusion dominating humanity.
It's so ridiculously simple to prove it to yourself, to confirm it within yourself, to experience it within your own being.
You just sit down, and for 30 minutes you try not to think, and you will see that the mind is just bouncing and oscillating all the time. It's just jumping from one thing to another, and there's absolutely no control.
You do not choose your thoughts.
And the You who thinks that he chooses is a Thought himself.
Practical Guidance for Living Without Free Will
How does one live with the understanding that free will is an illusion?
Let’s consider this.
Observe Thoughts Without Owning Them
Thoughts just pop. They appear out of nowhere, and they disappear into nowhere, and should you decide to, if the thought is too fascinating, if the thought is too mesmerizing, you're gonna jump onto that thought, and then you start feeding it with the energy of your attention.
The thought grows stronger until it overwhelms the body with the emotional state, and then the body acts, automatically.
This is probably the most foundational of all metacognitive abilities - it is the ability to observe and detect a thought without engaging with it.
It's the skill to just sit and watch the mind doing its own thing without doing nothing.
Watch the thought.
But do not label it, do not action it, do not judge it, do not pronounce it, do not absorb it, do not repel it, do not engage with it, do not try to ignore it.
Any kind of thought that pops, it pops, and then you just stay there where you are, who you are.
Because if you don't, that's when the mind starts wrestling with itself. The thought appears, and the next thought appears: "I got to do this thing," and the next thought appears: "how do I do this thing," and the next thing appears: "but I can't do this thing," and the next thing appears: "but you must do this thing," and so on and so forth.
There's a chain reaction within yourself that creates this utter conflict of the Doer.
But there could be the awareness of the chain reaction. There could be something that can watch and understand that - the awareness that sees without speaking: “hey, all of this isn't real”.
Drop Blame and Extend Compassion
Extend compassion to others.
Observe people and see that no one is truly "choosing" their actions:
Recognize that people act the way they do because of forces beyond their control.
Note, that this doesn't mean tolerating harmful behaviour - all this mental model does is that it removes hatred and judgment.
Apply the same compassion to yourself - your mistakes weren't freely chosen either.
You are the product of randomness. Chaos of the world meeting chaos of the mind.
This perspective dissolves resentment and transforms your relationship with Self and Others. Well, there are no others - there is only Self.
Relax into Non-Resistance
If life unfolds by itself, much suffering comes from fighting against what is:
Notice the tension of trying to control everything. Experiment with letting go of the controller. Allow actions to happen spontaneously, without the narrative of “me doing” or “me controlling.”
Trust the intelligence that already runs in your body, in your breath, and in countless processes of the mind.
This doesn't mean becoming passive.
It just means that you have always known how to flow with rather than against Life.
Reconcile with Practical Life
While the philosophical understanding is profound, daily life still requires navigation:
Society operates on the assumption of individual agency - engage with this as a practical convention.
“You” can “make” "choices" and “set” "intentions" while recognizing these too arise from causes.
Planning, goal-setting, and personal development can continue, however they continue with much less attachment to outcomes.
Think of it as playing the game of life while knowing it's a game.
The game is playing itself.
There is no player.
The Freedom of No Choice
Watch that game of the Mind.
Thoughts appear, and then the next thought appears, that "I'm choosing, I'm deciding, I'm in control. I have to, I should, I must do that." All of these are just thoughts.
Just like the first thought, these thoughts just pop, and appear, and everything tracks down to that original "I-thought". The origin of all ego-based thoughts.
But who is the "I"?
"I" is the ultimate illusion.
There is no one to act, there's no one to choose, there is no one to decide.
There is just awareness in which everything unfolds. And with that knowledge comes peace.
If there is no freedom of choice, then there is a freedom of NO choice.
Then there is the freedom of "I don't need to choose anything."
I just have to understand the mind, see through its nature, and not give in to its illusions and traps.
And only then, the concentration can happen on the thoughts that bring qualitatively different life experiences. The very distance between the observation and the thought will already create a qualitatively different living experience.
Experience of peace, experience of calm, experience of no anxiety.
In that state, that state of constant surrender, counterintuitively, and surprisingly, you will find yourself observing the opposite effect.
Life itself will start aligning itself.
Because the person, which is created by the mind, the fighting person, the arguing person, the controlling person, the resisting-to-reality person is seen through. And in that, you will find peace.
That immense, unbound, all-encompassing peace will manifest itself in all areas of life. This deep, primal wisdom will unravel itself and flow into all areas of life, and you will see that this state is available to everyone.
The state of Freedom From the Choice.
What Remains?
If free will is an illusion, what is left?
Who or what are you if not the thinker and chooser?
The contemplative traditions point to awareness itself - the knowing presence in which all experience appears:
Before thought, you are.
Before choice, you are.
Before the sense of "I," you are.
When the illusion of being a separate controller falls away, what remains is simply being - awareness experiencing itself as life unfolding before it and within it.
You might be asking, "What should I do?" But who is asking?
Look closely.
This "I" that wants to do something - is it not just another thought? And the desire to "see clearly" - is that not also just another arising impulse of the chaotic mind?
The mind wants a method, a path, a way forward. But liberation is not something you "do" - it is simply seeing what already is.
So instead of searching for an answer, pause.Right now, in this very moment - before the next thought arises - who are you?
If you do not grab onto a thought, do not chase a feeling - what remains?
This realization doesn't lead to fatalism or inaction.
Paradoxically, when the burden of being the controller falls away, life flows more naturally, more truthfully, and what you shall discover - more effectively.
Actions still happen.
Choices appear to be made.
Life continues unfolding.
But that heavy burdensome sense of "me" doing it all dissolves into the lightness of being.
Does this realization scare you?
Or does it set you free?
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