Free will is said to be the gift of God, of consciousness to us. It goes without saying that when we turn our backs on the God within us, on the Creator that we are, on our consciousness, we lose this blessing bestowed upon each of us.
We thus end up living repetitively, as victims of our patterns of thoughts and emotions. Finding ourselves living in this echo chamber, we most often react in 1 of 3 ways.
THAT'S JUST THE WAY I AM
Some delve deeper into their inability to get off the rails of these mental-emotional patterns, surrender to them, under the banner of "That's who I am, there is nothing I can do about it...I'm a melancholic...I'm Aries...I'm the archetype of the goddess Kali." They abandon themselves in self-sufficiency, in a resignation sometimes disguised as acceptance or authenticity, giving up the willingness to imagine themselves differently and often investing a lot of energy in justifying this belief to the people who pass through their lives.
CONTROL
Another reaction is to fight, control, manipulate, and overprocess one's own emotions and thoughts in all sorts of forms, only apparently different from one another. This includes the permanent seekers, devourers of personal, spiritual development, who consume 5 theories a week about the true source of their problems. Many new understandings roll in, insights that often come with fireworks and tears of relief that "it finally makes sense" what's happening to them, revelations that inevitably sink in with zero real change.
ZOMBIES
The third is to completely leave one's life in the hands of these functioning patterns, to give up self-awareness, in favor of a mechanical automatism, a numbness, a constant apathy - the non-fantasy version of zombies. We see more and more often when we walk down the street the blank stares that signal to us that no one is home. Often those who walk this path are more sensitive people who have not coped, could not adapt to the miseries in themselves and others, to the harshness of existence on this planet, and withdraw even from within themselves.
Passing through different seasons of life we come to experience at least partially all these reactions and each of them serves us for a time, but every pattern seeks its resolution and release. It's a universal law, nothing can stay in the same form forever, which applies to humans as well. Without expansion, new experiences, flow, and flexibility we wither or explode (depending on the kind of resistance we put up).
It's not natural to get cemented in small ideas and identities that we've created/adopted for survival during difficult times. They are useful for a while, but if we want to live, not just survive, we have to start releasing them.
No matter how much we're fooling ourselves, at some point, the bill comes due, and the consequences of how we live, both within ourselves and in the world, become unavoidably real. For a short time, the human being can endure almost anything, we are frighteningly adaptable, and resilient. Coming to terms with what you have endured, unburdening your soul, mind, body of pain, hate, anger, fear, and soaring again in life with trust and courage is an entirely different process to surviving.
This evolution can only be a conscious one.
It asks of us, first of all, the firmness to say 'Stop. No more. I don't know how to get from where I am to where I sense I want to be, I could be, but I'm done with scraping by.'
Then, the willingness to open our senses to imagine ourselves being free, light, bright, clear, alive, vibrant humans.
It requires honesty, and the determination to feel the truth within us - often and infinitely deeper than we imagine at the beginning of the journey.
Lastly, we need boldness - the boldness to step into the unknown with total confidence that a part of us will sustain us, that we will have enough wisdom, enough courage, and enough clarity to create a beautifully human life lit by the consciousness of the divine spark in each of us, which always gift us the ability to choose and create AGAIN.