At what point is Free Will expressed?

Free will is concomitant with but not identical to having a choice. Humans have both free will and the freedom to choose; cats have only the freedom to choose. If we look farther down the evolutionary time line, we encounter the point where the freedom to choose begins to separate itself from pure instinct. A cat has the freedom to choose; an ant responds to stimuli immediately without any question as to the pros or cons of an action. Farther still, and we are at the point where sentience and instinct separate themselves from plant life and other non-sentient forms of being. Before that spirit must have been inherent in a form I cannot conceive of.

I have drawn out this sequence of events because it suggests Free Will is the outcome of evolution, and has only manifested in this corner of the universe in very recent times, as measured on the evolutionary scale. Philosophically that opens a portal into a huge area of discussion, which must be left for another time. But there is one crucial point that I want to consider now: Is Free Will immanent from the earliest inception of life? In other words, is life a progression toward Free Will?

Extreme caution is needed here. I am not implying that life-manifestations which express Free Will are 'above' those that don't in some sort of evolutionary chain. Rather, I want to explore the notion that the role of humans is to embody and express Free Will as part of the unfolding wonder of spirit.

The unorthodox conclusion I have arrived at is that Free Will does not exist outside of manifest spirit. As I've said elsewhere, I don't believe spirit can exist without manifesting itself in some physical form. Further, Intelligent Desire - which is the process of spirit unfolding - progresses toward Free Will, just as it progressed toward life, sentience and choice. But Free Will cannot be said to exist before it is manifest. In short, the entity many religions refer to as God has evolved, manifesting himerself in the totality of spiritual forms that presently exist, and there has been a tendency from the outset for evolution to produce beings that express Free Will.

As I consider this admittedly convoluted analysis another notion is beginning to take hold. I believe what we call God, or the World Spirit, or the Unmoved Mover is a simple force of immense power and consequence. I call that force Love and the consequence of love is Intelligent Desire.

What, then, of Hatred? Where does the tendency to nihilism come from? An important precurser to thought on this conundrum is the understanding that Free Will is meaningless unless it encompasses the ability to succeed of fail - the ability to be anything conceivable. The ability to create or destroy.

Conscious Equilibrium

My state of mind at any given moment is an equilibrium determined by the gravities of the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual nodes of experience.

For example, if someone jabs me with a sharp object, I immediately feel pain and my state of mind zooms toward the physical. Instinctively I move away from the source of the pain, then look to see what caused it. Now my intellectual and emotional nodes engage. I hate pain, so right away I am angry. That anger might be quelled if my intellectual interpretation of the event contradicts the instinctive reaction. For example, if the person jabbing me happens to be an old lady, carelessly managing her umbrella in the lineup for a bus, I might laugh instead of commenting sharply. I will be even more inclined to 'forgive' if I have developed my spiritual capacity for placing individual instances into a larger context.

The weight of all these stimuli pull me towards an equilibrium different from my initial response to any event. The Tetrahedron helps me see that my conscious equilibrium can be shifted - that I can learn to respond differently to things that happen in my life, and to better understand the responses of those around me.