Free will is one of those phrases we throw around with too much confidence, almost like we are sure what we’re saying even when we actually don’t. You stand in a supermarket aisle choosing between two brands of chocolate and you tell to yourself, “I am free. I can pick whichever one I want.” You imagine that the act of choosing is already the proof of your liberty. But if you look more close, the decision is kind of made somewhere behind your eyes already: your past experiences, your cravings, your fears, your conditioning, your habits, your mood in that day, even your blood sugar level is nudging your hand toward one of the options. You call it “my choice,” but your nervous system has filled the form and submitted it long before your sense of “I” even clears its throat.
If you replay your life like a movie, you will see the same pattern almost everywhere. You married the person you married because something in you was drawn to that particular flavor of comfort or thrill or security, some small adventure, some reflection of your wounds, or some confirmation of your fantasies. You chose your job, your hobbies, your city, even your favorite moral values because they was doing something for you. They gave you pleasure, or pride, or an identity, or the soothing feeling of being on “the right side.” We decorate our stories with romantic words like “duty” or “love” or “sacrifice,” but behind most of it there is a very simple engine: I do what I do because it feels better for me than the alternative.
This is why many traditional spiritual teachings insist that you cannot, on your own, stop being self centered. You can suppress impulses, you can redirect them, you can refine them, but you don’t suddenly wake up one morning and start wanting things purely for someone else. Even your “purest” acts carrying a hidden return. You buy your mother a gift and you say, “I’m doing this only for her.” But if an earthquake hits and the house collapses, the gift is the first thing you forget about. You rush toward survival. In the deep of danger, it becomes clear that what you really loved more wasn’t her joy in the gift, but your own existence that could enjoy her joy. That does not make you a monster. It is only making you human.
So we need to be honest: as long as you are operating inside that ordinary circuitry, your “free will” is mostly a sophisticated pattern of predictable reactions. Given your memories, your personality, your fears, and the options on the table, an intelligent observer could in principle predict what you will choose almost every time. Your preferences are coded into you like invisible scripts. You feel free because you are not aware about the script. A robot that loves its own programming will also feel free.
This is a brutal realization, because it shows a strange kind of prison: it is not that someone else is forcing you; it is that you are forced by what you enjoy. You are handcuffed to your own pleasure and comfort, and every “choice” you make is just a way of shaking the chains to find a position that hurts a bit less. Even your self denial can be a pleasure in disguise. You take pride in your discipline, in your spiritual practices, in your minimalism. You enjoy to see yourself as the kind of person who doesn’t “need much.” It still circles back to you.
If this is the whole story, then free will is just a nice slogan and nothing more. You might even say a river “chooses” the path it takes down the mountain. Yes, it can go left or right depending on the rocks and curves, but all of that is determined by gravity and terrain, so nothing surprising is there. In the same way, your brain flows toward the option that gives the most relief or pleasure according to its current map of reality. You do not have a problem with free will. You have a problem with automatic desire.
But there is one place where something different can appear. There is one narrow door where true free will becomes possible at first. It opens in the exact moment when you see a pleasure, you know it is a pleasure, you want it, and still you don’t take it for yourself. Not because you’re afraid, not because you feel shame, not because you fear punishment, not because you want to look noble, but because you truly prefer that this pleasure serves something beyond you.
This is subtle and easy to fake, but when it happens in real way, it feels like a crack inside the walls of your universe.
To understand this, you need to shift the way you see giving and receiving. We grow up believing we are givers when we “sacrifice” something and that we are takers when we receive. If you give someone a gift, you feel generous. If someone gives you a gift, you feel like you’re taking something that belonged to them. But look more careful at what happens inside you when you give. You feel warm, proud, significant, loving. You feel like a “good person.” You enjoy the image of yourself reflected in their grateful eyes. Even in your most altruistic gesture, you are also feeding yourself. You take that inner pleasure.
This is why you can spend years giving and still somehow feel strange empty. Your “giving” was just another style of taking.
Now imagine this: there is a Reality beyond you that is always giving. Call it God, call it the Source, call it the Giver. The name doesn’t matter. What matters is that everything you call “your life” is already donation: your lungs, the air, the sunlight on your skin, the nervous system that lets you read these words, the paths that brought you here. You are not the original author of any of it. You are the receiver. This means that, in the deepest sense, you actually have nothing of your own to give back. Even the energy you use to help another person is borrowed.
So what could such a Giver possibly want from you? If this Giver doesn’t lack anything, if it is not insecure, needy, or desperate for your praise, what could you ever offer that is truly real?
There is only one thing: your consent.
You have been given the strange, dangerous ability to say “no.” You can refuse gifts. You can try to live as if the breath in your lungs is your own possession, as if your talents and opportunities came from nowhere, as if you were self made. You can decide that whatever appears in your life is there only for your private consumption, and you chase it that way. That is one use of your will. It is not very free, but it is allowed.
Or you can start to say “yes” in a different way. You can receive what comes to you not as a hungry consumer but as someone entrusted with a gift that belongs, in a mysterious way, to the Giver. You cannot create the gift, but you can decide why you are accepting it. And that why is where real freedom is born.
Imagine a simple example: someone offers you a delicious meal. You are hungry. You want it. On the surface, eating is just eating. But inside, there are at least two different worlds. In the first world, you grab the plate mentally and emotionally. You say, “This is for me. My pleasure, my right.” You attach your identity to the enjoyment. A moment later, the pleasure fades as physical pleasures usually do, and you feel a bit flatter than before. You have “taken,” and you have fallen.
In the second world, something else happens. You still eat. You still taste. You don’t pretend the food is cardboard. But your inner movement is different. You accept the meal because the Giver has placed it in front of you and, in some quiet way, asked you to receive it. You see your enjoyment not as the goal but as the side effect of saying yes to what the Giver wishes to do through you. You eat as a caretaker of a body that does not truly belong to you. You don’t cling to the pleasure, you don’t make an idol from it, you don’t use it to inflate your sense of importance. In that moment, receiving becomes also a kind of giving.
Notice something crucial: from the outside, the two versions look almost the same. The same mouth opens, the same jaw chews. The difference is invisible for everyone except you and the One who gave you the food. The difference is in the intention. In one, you are the center of the universe. In the other, you are participating in something larger than yourself.
This is where many spiritual traditions get misunderstood. Some teachers saw clearly that desire creates suffering and concluded, “You must want nothing.” So they turned life into a war against wanting. They tried to quit the game: leaving society, rejecting the world, crushing the impulses of the body. And yes, such efforts can produce impressive powers and altered states. But as long as the hidden motive is still “my enlightenment,” “my purity,” “my spiritual status,” it stays the same old orbit around the self. You only replaced physical pleasures with subtler, more intoxicating ones.
The deeper solution is not to want nothing. It is to want for someone else. Not for another human being in the usual sense, but for the One who is always giving. When you want a joy, a success, a relationship, a piece of beauty because that One wants you to have it, because your receiving it fits into a larger harmony that you respect more than your private cravings then your enjoyment stops being a black hole and becomes instead a window.
From this angle, you don’t need to run away from the world. You don’t need to escape to a cave and punish your body. You can live an ordinary life with work, relationships, entertainment, responsibilities, and still train your will to turn outward. You can walk through the same city, eat at the same restaurants, sleep in the same bed, and yet slowly shift the center of gravity of your intention. The territory of your life doesn’t have to change. The sovereignty over it does.
And here is where the idea of a “devil” becomes psychologically useful. Imagine there is a voice in you whose only job is to keep everything focused on your personal gratification. It doesn’t care if you are “good” or “bad” in social terms. It is perfectly happy for you to be kind, generous, and moral as long as you secretly enjoy being the hero. Its only concern is that, in every situation, you end up as the sun and everything else revolves around you. That voice, that pattern, is what we might call the devil or the adversary.
How do you defeat such an adversary? Not by chasing miracles or magic, not by collecting spiritual toys, not by trying to become some luminous figure for others to admire. You defeat it in the most ordinary and even humiliating way: by choosing against yourself for the sake of the Giver. By saying, “I want this, but if accepting it in this spirit would turn me inward, I refuse it. And if accepting it as a service to You would turn me outward, then I accept.”
This is the paradox: the only place where free will is truly free is the place where you are willing to go against your own immediate pleasure. As long as you always pick the sweeter fruit, your will is bound by sweetness. The first real act of freedom is the ability to say, “I see the sweetness, I feel its pull, and I choose based on something higher than it.” In that moment, for the first time, your will is not a slave.
Of course, you cannot live in this state perfectly from one day to another. You will see yourself grabbing pleasures for yourself again and again. You will notice how even your “holy” actions have a bit of vanity taste. That is not a failure; it is the beginning of honesty. Every time you catch yourself, you get another chance to shift your intention. You can say, “Fine. I admit it. I wanted this only for me. But now I want something else: I want to hand this enjoyment back to its Source and receive it as a steward, not as an owner.” The external act might be already over. The inner act is still possible.
There is a beautiful subtlety in the way this Giver relates to you. Human beings, when they offer something and we refuse, often get offended quickly. “You don’t want it? Fine. I’ll give it to someone else.” Their giving was tied to their fragile sense of worth. They wanted to feel generous, and your refusal ruins their scene. Their pride walks away with the gift. But a true Giver is not like this. When such a Giver wants to pour something into you, it is not a casual whim. It is aligned with who you are capable of becoming. You were chosen as the proper vessel for that specific wine.
So when you resist out of fear or confusion, the Giver does not say, “Whatever, I’ll find someone else who deserves it more.” There is no “other person” who fits that exact shape. Instead, the offer comes again and again, sometimes through circumstances, sometimes through other people, sometimes as a quiet insistence in your conscience. That persistence is not manipulation. It is the stubborn compassion of a Source that refuses to waste its gifts. In a strange way, the Giver “needs” you to accept them, not out of lack, but because the harmony of the whole picture depends on your yes.
This is where the art of receiving becomes sacred. At first, out of humility or fear, you might say, “No, I do not deserve this.” You see the gift clearly, you want it, but you don’t trust your motives. You know how easily you can turn it into a toy for your ego. So you push it away and say, “I’m fine without it.” This refusal can be a needed step. It is the moment of seeing how powerful your desire is and not wanting to be ruled by it.
But if you stay there, you turn your refusal into another style of pride. “Look how detached I am; I even turn away from joy.” The Giver then whispers, “If you keep rejecting what I send, My system is disrupted. These gifts are part of a design. I want you to receive, not because you are flawless, but because I say so. Your refusal now hurts you and others. Accepting is how you cooperate with Me.” At that point, your second answer may be, “All right. I will receive, not to satisfy myself, but to please You.”
In that small inner movement, you finally manage to do something for the Giver. You cannot add anything to its essence, but you can relieve its “sorrow” of an unopened gift. You can ease the tension of a generosity that has nowhere to land. That easing is the first pure act of love you ever direct upward instead of outward or inward. And it is made entirely of your will.
Attaining true free will, then, is not about having unlimited options or total autonomy. It is not about becoming so powerful that you can bend reality to your private wishes. It is almost the opposite. It is about discovering, in the middle of a fixed and finite life, the one place that is not predetermined: your intention toward the Giver. You do not control most of what appears in front of you. You do not control most of your thoughts or feelings. But you are invited to choose why you pick up what you pick up.
When you start wanting what you want because Someone else wants it for you, when you receive pleasures and successes as assignments rather than trophies, when you are able, at least sometimes, to resist a sweetness that would trap you inside yourself, something astonishing happens. The predictable script breaks. Your actions stop being fully explainable by psychology and habit. A third factor comes into the equation: your love for the Giver. And that love is spoken in the language of choices that cost you something.
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