Free Agency
The other day somebody was heard to say, “We all have free agency”. Let’s enquire into this statement. Why? Because this idea seems to be generally accepted as true by most people, yet most people have not enquired into the possibility that this statement may or may not be true. Just because something is heard or something is written does not make it true or real. Falsehoods, lies and some dogmas become acceptable to those who fear truth, or to those who find solace in falsehood, having done no critical reasoning for themselves. So let’s do a little critical thinking about this “we all have free agency” idea to be sure we are beyond any absorption in a deluded state of mind.
Absorption in compulsive delusion generates conflict. When patterned habitual mental sets become so deeply ingrained that the majority of thinking and conduct fall below the level of attentive awareness and into subconscious automatism, the individual becomes regularly absorbed in the compulsive and reactive levels of physical, emotional, and mental experience. Absorption means being engrossed, captivated, and perpetually locked into inattentive modes of passivity and distraction. Absorption is the deluded state of passivity of attention in which one is almost continually lost in dichotomous identity fixation and the activities of mechanistic automatism. Human beings, when thinking of themselves as their imaginary conceptual counterfeit, the ego, then believe their thoughts and subsequent actions are acts of a decided volition, or free will. But this cannot be true because individuals only react through the mechanics of stimulus within the limitations of conditional phenomena and the psychosomatic organism, and all completely within the chain of metamorphic cause and effect sequentiality.
Volition, or free will, that an individual may suppose he possesses as uncaused, unlimited, unbound, unconditioned, and free power of choice, cannot be and does not exist as such. The notion of volition unbound is an errant judgement and not true because every object and event within the various aspects of environments are factors of relative mechanical causality and result in the development of tendencies, propensities, and traits of personality and character. Any decision or supposed willful choice is inevitably linked to the multitude of conditions within the chain of causality. Choice-making which is totally and completely separate from conditions of the causal nexus cannot exist. The notion of free will rests upon the antecedent errant notion of ego, the base propensity. The deluded notion of having free will is another fundamental hindrance to the recognition of the true and the real. All volitional acts are always linked with accumulated mental propensities such as preference or prejudice, for-and-against attitudes of attraction and repulsion. However, a spontaneous act of free volition might be possible by beings who are not self-identified as egos, but this is an extreme rarity as there can be spontaneity only in the absence of compulsive absorption.
