What we call "free will" might simply be the result of a limited perspective.

If I knew all the choices I would ever make before I made them, I would not be free to choose. My life would simply follow a script, and I would be bound by that script. But I do not know "everything," and so I experience my choices as a result of free will.

In this way, everything can exist all at once, even my future, and I still experience the freedom to choose, as I do in my lived experience.

Determinism, then, is the existence and knowledge of all things - past, present, and future.

Free will arises from the fact that we do not know all things while we reside in a temporal form such as a human being. This perspective resolves the age-old question of determinism vs. free will in a - if I may say so myself - rather elegant fashion.

It also supports the notion that all things exist in the eternal, timeless "now." We experience life linearly, but in truth, it is not linear at all.

It all happens at once. It all happens now. My future self exists now, just as my 7-year-old self, who just started school, exists now. There is no time, only now. In a sense, we're just along for the ride - to experience it.

When I die, that 7-year-old me will still exist in the eternal now. This is the essence of the Akashic Records, described in multiple spiritual traditions as a cosmic library containing all information about all things.

The Akashic Records are the "Now," and the way to access them is by being fully present in the moment - in the now. So, when I die, I will still be me. All that I was, and all that I will become, exists in that record, which I also am.

Nothing is ever lost. Not even the ego, or the body.

We might in a sense be living memories. Already "saved" to the records of time by virtue of being.

Perhaps next time I live I will be Djengis Khan, who also exists and is accessible for experience in the "now". Or perhaps I will be a blade of grass on a field in a distant world.

Who knows.

It's all experience, a cosmic playground for consciousness itself.