Free Will

Choiceless Action

May 24, 2026

I’ve read and listened to many great minds talk about free will. The books I’ve read have been largely inconsequential, not memorable, and even the books on consciousness didn’t leave me with much to think about on the subject.

I read books about free will at university in philosophy classes. All I took away of any value had to do with ethics. The free will arguments are hard to follow, don’t make much sense in reality, and miss the point, in my view. The two main points and the hybrid in between leave much to be desired. That’s my opinion.

Freedom & choice

You have no choice

The most clear way that I’ve heard it put, since I’ve come to understand what free will is, and what it’s not, is a very short section of a conversation between Jiddu Krishnamurti and Alain Naude in 1974. K says, “we think we are free because we choose”. He’s right.

This sounds logical, and religion uses the same tactic. Whether religion says you have free will or there’s God’s will and you also have free will, it’s the same. JK goes on to say that a mind that doesn’t see clearly is confused, and that choice exists only when there is confusion.

All suffering is caused by confusion.
- Byron Katie

This is really something to wrap your head around, because choiceless action is the result of a lack of free will. If we act and have no choice, then we are not free to choose. There is a clear path, a clear action. And when there is no impediment to action, then the action happens on its own. This is clear.

Listen to what JK says so you can follow along:

K: We think we are free because we choose. We can choose, right?

A: Yes.

K: Is a mind free that is capable of choice? Or is a mind that is not free, that chooses? The choice implies between this and that, obviously. Which means the mind doesn’t see clearly, and therefore there is confusion. The choice exists when there is confusion.

A: Yes, yes, yes.

K: With a mind that sees clearly, there is no choice. It is doing. I think this is where we have gotten into trouble when we say we are free to choose.

I don’t think it gets any more clear than that. A mind that thinks it has a choice is confused, and a mind that sees clearly has no choice, it acts. There is no choice, there is only action. Or there is a choice, which means there is confusion, and then possibly there is no action, or we might say there is no right action.

Either way, the result is the same - there is no free will, however we have the choice to go against it.

The illusion of choice

Can we choose? Of course we can. He said it himself, not that you need to hear JK affirm that fact for you. You can verify it for yourself. You can choose. But what are you choosing?

Are you choosing to ignore information that you don’t agree with? Are you pushing back on an inconvenient truth? Or do you find yourself torn - you feel you know the right thing to do, but something is stopping you, something is giving you pause and you can’t make up your mind.

Let’s be clear that this isn’t about standing in the chocolate aisle at Whole Foods with too many choices. That’s the problem of too many choices.

You’re weighing one thing against the other, you’re comparing the cost of chocolate bars, and quality, and ingredients, and the preference of who you’re going to share it with, and so on. That’s decision fatigue. You’d need a spreadsheet to help you narrow down the parameters and make up your mind.

Altruism

If you are standing on a train platform and a man falls onto the track, do you have a choice about what to do? I’m not talking about your beliefs or your values, if you’re racist - is he white or black or Chinese or Korean . . . if a man falls onto the tracks and you’re standing there, you act. Someone acts.

The person who doesn’t act doesn’t see clearly. They hear the voice, the urge to help in their mind, and something stops them. There’s a voice that says, “someone else will help him” or something similar, some excuse or fear or rationalization. Then there’s the regret of not doing anything, standing by while someone else took action. All of that mental activity is suffering. That’s part of the confusion.

Clarity

When the person who took action in that circumstance, jumping off that train platform, when that person is commended for their bravery and called a hero, they all say the same thing: “I just did what anyone else would’ve done”. That is the definition of clarity.

There is no choice. Because there is clarity. Someone is getting tossed about in the waves, you’ve just come out with your surfboard, you see them struggle, and what do you do? You’re a local, and you know the water. They’re a tourist, and they don’t look confident, they look scared, the conditions are not good for swimming, and they need help. There is no choice, is there?

The paradox

Man is always seeking freedom

I won’t go into this too much, because I want to keep the notion concise - there is choice and there is freedom (or there isn’t freedom, there isn’t choice). But there are these two components - freedom and choice. It’s very simple.

We look for outward freedom, but we have control over inward freedom.
- JK

Society doesn’t want man to be free, says K. He says that according to society, freedom means disorder. This is clear when you consider what would happen if anyone could do whatever they wanted at any time. Louis CK has a bit about this - he says if murder was legal, I bet a lot more people would commit murder.

It’s a joke, obviously, because he’s a comedian. He goes on to say that mostly it would be parents murdering their own children. It’s a horrible idea if you don’t consider that it’s a joke, and to hear the delivery and understand the premise, but it makes the point.

Society

Society doesn’t want lawlessness, and rampant theft, and murder. That’s why we’re told there are laws, jails, the death penalty, etc. And the free will philosophical arguments spend a lot of energy talking about managing these people, the dangerous people, the people who rob and steal and commit violence. They go into morality and a world without free will - go read about it if you like.

It happens, of course it does (violence). We won’t get into why. And there are the people who aren’t serial killers, I’m talking about people who suffer from disorders like psychopathy and dangerous behaviors. Of course, society wants them separated, it’s obvious. I’m not saying anything one way or the other about that.

Man is always seeking freedom. But freedom merely outwardly in relation to the social structure. Therefore he is in revolt against society but not revolt against the inner psychological structure which has created the society.
- JK

Society sees revolution as a lack of order. Society wants order. The police are there to protect and serve, aren’t they? We want freedom from something, but freedom is inward freedom - it’s freedom in having something. Freedom in equanimity, freedom in form, freedom in your life.

Freedom

I often feel like I’m not ready, and I seek more information or training or tools or experiences. Ram Dass says that freedom is the freedom to be in form without railing against it. There’s a place in me where I’m ready now. That’s what JK meant when he talked about freedom inwardly.

There is no free will in the human plane. But when you realize you’re an embodiment of God, you have all the free will in the world.
- Ram Dass

Ram Dass said that you begin to see that you don’t need to keep collecting experiences, and that it’s enough. What you have is enough, what you are is enough. When you can see that, you are free. That’s clarity. And when you have clarity, you act, because there’s nothing in the way, there’s no decision to be made.

There’s much more that could be said on the matter, for the mind that has not put the all pieces together, which actually has to do with removing unnecessary pieces. More to come.