Does free will exist?

by Martijn
Does free will exist

What you will find in this article

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The other day I was hanging out with my friend and as usual, we got caught up talking about our passions, making jokes only we understand and find hilarious, and also discussing deep, mystical topics. This week we asked ourselves “does free will exist?” After sharing our points of view we came to the firm conclusion that free will cannot exist under any circumstances.

Does free will exist?

Free will does not exist. Only the perception of free will appears to exist, which makes it look like we have freedom of choice. But when you understand that the perception we have, that makes it feel like we have free will, was already determined, you come to see that we are not free. We’re all slaves to our destiny that was set in stone even before we can remember. Let’s have a look at how to exactly interpret this bold statement and how to use it to your advantage.

The false appearance of free will through the freedom of choice

To be able to explain the non-existence of free will I think it’s probably best to start from where we are with the perception that we have and how we experience life in our human reality. From there on I will break it down step by step and end with the final explanation of what determines our destiny.

In our human experience, we can all agree that we have freedom of choice. Sometimes these choices might seem limited or even imposed by other people, groups, society, or governments. However, we also know that even in those situations we still have the freedom of choice to think what we want to think. We always have a choice and we can decide how to perceive a certain situation. All circumstances can be perceived from different standpoints. And every point of view can guide you towards a decision to feel and think a certain way.

But what if this apparent freedom of choice was also already predetermined before you were even born? You might think that free will needs to exist because when you choose to do something different at any given moment your entire life and that of others might look completely different from that moment on. The entire human history would look very different if Hitler would have taken a different choice before starting the war. So, how come it appears that we can influence our future and that of our fellow human beings while in reality choice is an illusion.

The choice for a different reality

This is where different realities, dimensions, or parallel universes come into play. To understand this you first need to step out of your normal physical human state of perception. The existence of different dimensions or parallel universes does not mean they exist physically. That even means that also the universe that we believe to live in is not physical.

To understand this concept you need to step into the realization of the power of your mind and the incredible capacity of imagination and conceiving different realities in your mind. Everything that you believed to be happening in your physical reality is just an imagination of your mind and can therefore easily be swapped with another one. All Dimensions, parallel universes, and alternate realities happen simultaneously in your mind. None of them occur physically.

When you understand this it makes it so much easier to grasp how you can switch from one reality to another by making a certain choice for one thing or another. Your choice does not create a new situation. It merely was a choice between the different possibilities that already existed in your mind.

All possibilities were already played out and were simply waiting for you to be selected and experienced on a human level. That means that also the choices you make were not random and also already projected by the mind into a world perceived by the brain that was also the result of the imagination of the mind. Your choices just resemble a different part of the script.

Dualistic perceptions in our non-physical state

So what causes us to not have free will? Many people believe that when we leave our bodies we move to a spiritual world in which we continue to exist as a soul where we can meet our guides, masters, loved ones who passed away, and other entities. And often these people believe that this is the world where we unite and where duality disappears.

However, this of course cannot be the case. Because if you continue to exist as a soul and someone else continues to exist as another soul there still is duality. There just is not physical duality anymore. But that doesn’t mean duality is gone. Many belief systems teach that on this level soul contracts are made between souls and different groups of souls to live certain experiences when being reincarnated on the physical level. I also believe this is true in a dualistic perception. 

But to stop on this level and say that our destiny was determined by the agreements and decisions that we took on this level, is not bringing us to the root cause of us not having free will in this world. Duality will remain everywhere where some sort of separation can be perceived. So, what happens here is that we have the same situation as in a physical state.

The experiences that we seem to be having and that we seem to be having control over just are an illusion of choice. The agreements that we make between different souls on a spiritual level were all set out beforehand and our destiny as souls was known long before we got to live that experience as a soul.

Remember this very clearly, duality continues to exist everywhere where separation can be perceived. So what determines our destiny if it’s not our free will?

What determines our destiny if it’s not our free will?

If on a physical level we do not make our own choices, neither do we make our own choices on a spiritual level, where are these choices made for us and who or what did that?

To get to the answer to this question we need to talk about nondualism. The belief system of non-duality says that this world is an illusion, that it only happens in our mind, and that everything that can be perceived separate from something else must be unreal. It says that we are all united not as separate entities, not as human beings, not as souls, not even as enlightened masters. But simply as one, as God, which equates to love. There is no change, there is no start, no beginning, it is eternal. That is our original state. If this state cannot change then all other states that we believe to perceive with our senses must be an illusion.

And this is the big paradox. How can we be here, thinking about our free will and nondualism, while it’s impossible to be here?

It was one thought of separation that projected the entire illusion. So, it is the thought of separation that is the cause of us not having free will. Time started and ended with this thought of separation. And within this same thought, it was all over. Within that time frame, everything that we know as our history and that will occur in our future happened at once.

But since our original state is changeless and eternal a thought of separation is impossible. Which makes the entire discussion of us having free will or not completely useless. Because it’s all an illusion. It all happened in our mind, it never left our mind. This is also why studies of quantum physics have proven that particles being separated by enormous distances are still connected. They appear to be separated, just like we appear to be separated. But they only exist and live in the mind that made them up and therefore are eternally linked to each other. Just like we are.

How to use our destiny in our favor before reaching it?

Knowing all of this seems to be useless at first. It might be demotivating to know that you don’t have control over your life, that you do not have free will. But this does not mean that you cannot influence the quality of your life directly by your decisions. Remember that you have the illusion of freedom of choice.

The fact that you only appear to have the freedom of choice does not take away how you experience it. You can see it as a video game. All storylines are already known in the game, but you still need to play it and pass all the levels to complete the game. And it depends on your choices and skills that you acquire throughout the game whether you will complete all levels successfully quickly or whether you need to start over again and again and again.

To me knowing that all storylines of my life have already been played out gives a lot of peace of mind. Because it means that I’m not responsible for creating anything. I am just responsible for making the right choices and learning the correct lessons. So if I see that I continue to repeat certain circumstances in my life over and over again I can think of it as a video game. And that I did not pass to the next level, so I need to learn something that I did not manage to learn before.

Another thing that is very helpful for me is knowing that everything occurs in the mind. So the closer I get to the mind, the more control I get over the choices that I make between the different options that are available to me at any given moment. And although all these choices were already projected I can still choose the one that shortens my path towards the completion of all levels.

View the video here.

Find more articles about spirituality here.

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