If the concept of free will has any meaning at all, it is as a psychological ideal, approached best as a phenomenon. We may find an experience of being compelled, of having made no real decision at all—the deficit of free will. More likely, though, the owl flies at night—one doesn’t know about the fog until the fog is lifted—a magical grace of consciousness. The phenomenon of free will is a taste of emergence.

The psychologists foraged and distilled a most fascinating phenomenon regarding freedom. To name the compelling—that which compels—dwindles her power. Simply find the source of your compulsion, the cause to your effect, and you are less likely to effect. Why? What witchcraft is this?

I don’t presume to know the source of this mystical power, but I do think we can wrap it in a neat, useful little mythology. Perhaps that’s all there is to it—perhaps the mythologizing itself is the power.

When we map out the causes to our effects, we enter into a world of new decisions. If someone says to me that I compulsively eat ice cream at nine o’clock every night because of some atrocious hidden thing in my infantile nine o’clock history, I suddenly know about forces in my world which I could never see before. The forces emerge from the darkness of unknowing into the known. The power of the atrocity and the force that it created may not reduce to nothing, but merely knowing how to replay the steps which get us from there to here transforms the step into a marker a map—a thing to be known and observed. A thing to be known is a thing to make decisions about—to use.

Of course the power of the compelling does not dissipate entirely simply with knowledge. In fact, the desire which compelled us might become something now of interest. Perhaps the most powerful moment is when we come to accept the desire, the movement within, as something given which might now be brought into the arena of free play in the deepest sense.

There is also some factor of time in this newfound freedom. Recognizing the cause as it emerges into our experience allows us, if we are lucky, to pause. That which compelled becomes that which is in the world—that which may be manipulated—that which might be for us an object of power. From the psychologist or the knowing friend, the right words are anti-incantations—spell-breakers. We suddenly see, and maybe for the first time. A new quadrant of the world is open to us. We taste freedom.

In many cases, this taste of freedom leaves a nearly unquenchable thirst for more. How can one not desire more world to exist? Yet there is also a burden to freedom. Every new bit of reality, every new decision, makes us culpable. We are no longer children who know not what they do. We now have the responsibility of vigilance. We are free to choose, but that freedom requires us to watch and wait for the moment of choosing. Each new emergence into freedom creates within us and around us a bigger and heavier world. The easiest response, sometimes, is to fall back into unknowing—to simply forget that part of the world exists—to forget we have a choice.

G.K. Chesterton mentioned once or twice that humans are born with the desire to ‘bend the knee’—a disturbingly accurate observation. One might even see it in the most grandiose visions, even in those rising from their dusty shoes onto the marble floors of modernity and beyond. Darwin gives us a magical dream of the stark, beautiful, ravenous forces of forever carrying us forward. Hegel saw the Spirit rising forth, almost of it’s own accord—some strange, majestic paragon sweeping us along through pendulum arcs of inadvertent reasons. Marx followed suit—the next stage must come. Even Foucault follows a similar vein, albeit giving it post-modern overtones—our collective spirit rising to bring forth the known. Some part of us wants to be compelled. Some deep part of us wants to see free will dethroned.

Perhaps we are simply creatures of habit. We may have emerged into self-consciousness by visualizing the idea of responsibility and placing it onto external, higher beings. Without freedom, we had to place it into the world somewhere around us to even recognize her; we may have simply mythologized freedom into existence, and by necessity, that existence was outside of ourselves. Who would not be reluctant to let go of such a wonderful and productive child? When the child moves away, we are left only to deal with ourselves.

We continue to strain against our freedom, our culpability. The story of modernity is the story of a hard retreat into mythologies of we-must-because. We break our boring mythologies and then strain to make new ones. Tired and lost, we create mythologies of solidarity or rights or atoms—and we barely have strength to erect their statues. No wonder the wild and dimwitted mythologies of the autocrats are so compelling for so many: they capture the essence of the desire itself—to fold back into the pleasant current of unwitting purpose.

Thus is the continual choice set before us: we have the choice to choose free will. We will likely stray once again away from freedom if we continue to erect freedom herself as a god in our mythology, but we might instead simply create a mythology in which creativity and culpability are good. We might instead find home in a place where we wish to see the world expand.

Whether my gift would be passed down or hold its value is dubious. The most powerful mythologies have a way of slow decay in which their magic—their original usefulness—is forgotten but their burden lingers on. But for now, and in this hour of mankind’s spurious and ailing mythologies, this magic is for me potent—as all magic must be.

The mythology of the given, of givenness is simple but pervasive, if given room to breathe: it is the notion that all parts of experience are handed to us—received. Not that an experience is given by some one or some thing—that may be the part of many another mythology to say—but rather that we simply receive all that we are and do and be.

I stumbled upon this story young, but in time it strikes me in new and stranger ways. I was thinking recently of something long and laborious, hoping to get to the end, and my mind wandered off to catch something more exciting. When my mind came back to me, back to the task at hand, I wondered why it came back at all. We often speak of such serious, bullying ideas like discipline when it comes to our minds—but there is no such thing. When a mind wanders off we should be overjoyed at its return, for as far as I can tell, we seem to do nothing but lay down treats and goodies in the hopes of it’s return, and we lay them down before it leaves, in moments of collection and simple thoughts. How could one discipline such a free spirit? Do we scold it for the absence? Should we make the mind mad?

But that is the great fear, is it not? That we should just go mad and never return. We know to fear this because we know, deep down, that even the mind is not our own. Every moment we share with the mind might be a moment of gratitude.

That is the way with mythologies: they inspire—nearly command—us to change our behavior. A simple truth becomes in some way anthropomorphized. Even if there is nothing doing the giving, we know that we should at least be a little thankful to the nothing or we may dirty some sacred ground.

What else might we say is given aside from the presence of the mind? Our histories, to be certain. We emerge into every now believing that there was a before, but the before is always gone. Our memories are all that remain—memories from a past self who no longer lives and breathes—memories collected into some story which we now receive.

Our placement on the earth and each sweet scent and taste, also given. How did everything align to land me on the floor in this very moment, in this very place? Surely I did not conduct the universe to place me here and now.

The morals and ideals which feel so personal, also given. My body simmers and rages without my asking on behalf of thoughts someone had long ago—some mixture of me and old books which together I scarcely recognize. I am a parade of activities and responses for a story in which I barely took part—they pile upon me from some time and place beyond. Am I just the watcher?

But would I even have known to watch? Who bestowed this magical gift of watchfulness—this idea of the watcher? How did I grasp it—how did I find this calm other within the otherness of myself?

And all of these truths! Nietzsche said it better than I will:

I shall never tire of emphasizing a small, terse fact [. . .] namely, that a thought comes when “it” wishes, and not when “I” wish; so that it is a PERVERSION of the facts of the case to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” ONE thinks; but that this “one” is precisely the famous old “ego,” is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an “immediate certainty.” (Beyond Good and Evil)

Even our desires find us where we are—those majestic siren voices. On a lazy Sunday morning we are summoned from afar, overtaken by unwilled force to rise for breakfast—our stomach rumbles without permission, the smell of fried potatoes collapsing the will we thought we had.

And the will! What is this mysterious entity which we claim for our own? Something accomplished? Am I not always at the will of my will? I have never found him but a muse for a starving poet.

This story, this mythology of where I always find this thing I call myself, and find it as given, is the mythology I will not live without. For me, this mythology opens up countless doors of power and freedom and satiety. This story connects me infinitely to the magical wash of beings around me while yet opening between us the infinite chasm of being.

To me, this mythology of the given is almost the solid beginning—but it gives way—it laughs at beginnings. “Cogito, ergo sum”—no. We are. We think we think. We are free, and we are captive. We are riders on a wave; we are waves with riders.

I’m R.N. Shaw. I love to think about the stories and undercurrents that make us who we are. In fact, I just love to think in general, and I try to read things that inspire me to think a little harder. I am deeply passionate about philosophy, but academic discussions with no teeth frustrate me—I think philosophy should fundamentally change your reality or it’s pretty pointless.

I believe that we have barely begun to solve some of the most basic yet critical problems of humanity—how to exist in community, how to distribute our goods and our technology, how to love, how to produce food without destroying our ecosystem—and I get excited about searching for those solutions. I don’t believe those solutions can be found by letting history define us. We need to get creative as a species. We need to reinvent our value systems and take ownership of our choices.

I’m a software engineer with a degree in philosophy working from home on a five acre hobby farm in central Wisconsin. I’m working to build a life where technology and story and wisdom intersect to make something beautiful. This is where I think out loud about all of it.