We perceive ourselves to be choosing, but the choices was made before we made them. There are actually brain scans that show this. The brain decides before you consciously become aware of having chosen. After the fact, the ego goes "I chose that!". But it never did. It's just a story the inner narrator claims, to maintain coherence.

Observe your arm. Not obsessively, but just notice it. How many times does it move as part of a conscious choice. It just moves. Then you go "I did that". Just be aware of it. Don't move it. Just watch it. But it will move eventually, and it won't be you that chose to do it. It just happened.

Reality is like a movie. Imagine the most immersive entertainment experience you could ever have. This movie allows you to feel like, to inhabit the role of the main protagonist. It is every genre of movie, music and game combined into one. That's reality. A highly immersive entertainment experience.

But the movie is already made. It is just playing. There are no true choices in it. Just the perception of. That's the immersive part. The sense of “I chose” is a post-hoc narrative that preserves coherence. That enhances immersion.

Freedom is in recognising this fact, and relaxing within your own experience. Free will on the other hand, causes you to become weighed down by the burden of choice. It's not freedom at all. The burden of authorship is heavier than people realise. The belief in absolute free will creates guilt, pride, judgment, and relief from that comes from seeing the flow rather than fighting it. That relief is what I call freedom.

Pride.. judgement.. guilt.. what use have I for these emotions, when I do not ultimately believe "me" to have any agency at all? There's nothing to be proud of. Nothing to judge in another. Nothing to be ashamed of. You'd think, understanding this, you would go out and do some nasty shit. But that's not what happens at all. You just go on, being yourself. Making the "choices" you always were going to do anyway. Only with a new lightness to your being. Every day normal experience, except 2 inches of the ground, as that one enlightened person said. Shunryu Suzuki?

People who claim that God gave us free will, do not understand this. "God's plan" is the highest form of freedom we can ever have within existence. Instinctively we recoil from that, because it sounds like surrendering something important. But if you are a part of God.. then to whom do you surrender agency? Free will is the worst thing that could ever happen to us.

If there is a problem with surrender, it only exists if there is a separate surrenderer.

And there isn't.

I think this realisation is what they used to call "liberation" or moksha before they had the word "Determinism". The word determinism just updates modern language with something the contemplatives of the past noticed by watching their own minds very carefully. The word determinism translates an old realization into contemporary terms.

Misplaced authorship.

Liberation feels like annihilation to the ego. To everything else, it feels like relief.