We experience life through how it makes us feel; in turn, we create a story that actualizes the feelings (through what we term knowing and understanding) towards a utilization or expression of identity (eg. we might create a story that says "I decided to walk across the street) that perpetuates and creates an expressive existence back into the environment. More simply, we experience and feel action upon us which is considered to be outside of ourselves, develop a story about the action which in turn guides or narrates the re-action or response. We are a perpetual feedback system of narrative identity. Our narration provides a sense of choice. Because the narration is real and taken to be reality (it's how we make sense of sense), it becomes our explanation of will.
Free will only exists as the story we make up about the expression of what we are.
It is the feeling of our actualization interpreted as a story of
identity, ie. it is literally our narration of what we are (the story is one of "I am..."). The dichotomy arrives because the actualization and creation of who we are is impressed upon by what we perceive from the story as being outside of us while at the same time we feel and experience the process of creation from within that process. Because our stories are ones of identity, the interpretations of experience relate the experiences as orienting from the place of "I"; the point of reference.
Ultimately, the story is just a reference point for what is happening everywhere, experiential life. Because our identities and ultimately what we consider ourselves to be are just a story of reference (real in its own small relative existence), the experience of will is the actualizing of that which is in the process of happening. The actualization, which is an actualization of existence and ultimately identity, is what existence is, the feeling of being and existing as something. Will is the feeling of being and existing as something is what we term will, while the story relates that feeling to an identity or aspect of existence (the point of existential reference). So "we" (the identities) aren't doing the willing, but what we are or consider ourselves to be is literally the narrative experience of will. Because we experience the story as a reference (referring to the identity or I) to identity as our identity and existence, the story maintains a referential reality in itself. So at the level of the story, because of its relative and referential reality, will does exist because it is experienced from that position. Will isn't free. We are absolutely dependent upon the rest of the world and the story of the world to assist in the creation of our own experience of will, but we are simultaneously experiencing will and an actualization of what we are as the feeling of will.
It can be argued that just as our physical realities are naturally occurring, the stories about the experience naturally arise as well. Therefore we are only sensing and experiencing what is naturally happening. Life is happening, and because we are life, we are happening. The idea or narrative about the happening is just as real as the happening because it is a part of the happening, ie. it is not separate from the happening; it is an element of the entire experience of life. The issue comes about through an identification (the feeling of being or existing as something) with the story, as that is naturally where identity arises (from the story).
The story and interpretation (the reflecting inward) is willed back
outward as the expression of actuality. The will exist in the creation
of the story/interpretation. It is the freedom to orient and be
oriented by the story (the freedom to exists). I'm free to be oriented by my surroundings unconsciously, and I'm free to exact and interject my story of
existence into the larger story that is being communicated. This is
will. It is the how and meaning that further propels existence.
Meaning is how something feels, how that something is perceived or shows up in
existence. Language connects us to and refers back to the feeling of
how whatever shows up in existence.
Shared history is culture. The interpretation of ourselves
historically through what we are experiencing in the moment manifests
as our way of life (culture).
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