Fold your flag up, its not real.

It is amazing how a little vocal go around can really clear things up in your head.

I had this idea about how freedom, choice etc. are all human constructs and hold no place in Nature.  But I had no idea how to take all the random pieces of string in my head and tie them together to form an easy to follow idea...until I tried to explain my idea to someone.  Just by getting the words out with my mouth, I quickly figured out where their rightful place was.

This is the result of my efforts.

As long as we have "likes", "desires" in our lives, we will never be free.  And since desires are the instigators of all our actions, freedom and choice are in fact false ideas we created for reasons I shall try to examine later.

Lets dig deeper into this logic with some examples:

You have never decided to be hungry.  There was never a moment you were not hungry and then with the flick of your finger start hunger.  It is a desire at the whim of our body that is ushered in by habits formed over countless years of evolution.  You have no control over it.  Hunger controls you.  You are never free from its grasp.  If you ever eat because you are hungry, you are not CHOOSING to eat, you are just acting on the urge imposed from your desire to eat.

I like blueberries.  I never chose to LIKE them.  I just ate one and REALIZED I like them.  I then discovered the depth of this "like" more and more as I continued to eat them.  But there was never a moment I didn't like blueberries and then decide I liked them.  This means my liking of blueberries existed for a time unknown to me, and I just came to understand it when I ate them.  So now, every time I eat a blueberry, I am not CHOOSING to eat one, I am just letting this newly discovered desire manipulate me.

This goes for every desire we have, good or bad.

Since we never chose what our desires were and just realized them over the course of our lives, every action we take that can be connected to a desire is just an action born from the desire and therefore takes on all the characteristics of that desire, including not being a choice.

I am certain some people out there, upon hearing this, will instantly want to prove nature wrong and claim control over their lives.  The easiest way to do this I presume would be by doing exactly what you don't like to do.  Go against your desire.  That way your action cannot be connected to your natural desires and it breaks free from the "No choice" progeny.  But alas this is futile because the action of going against what you desire, regardless of how Buddhist it may sound, is in fact a desire.  You desire to have no desires so you do things against what you naturally desire.

I would venture to say that as a living organism, it is impossible to act without desire.  Desire is the stimulus to everything we do.  Desire is a requisite for life on this earth.  Therefore everything we do is connected to some desire, regardless to whether we are conscious of it or not, and therefore  it takes on all the characteristics of a desire.

In summary, because we did not choose to have our desires, we don't choose to carry them out.  we just react to their force.  Therefore we have never been, and will never be free in respect of able to make choices.

The concept of freedom of choice is not real.  I suspect we created ideas of choice and words like "choose", "decide" etc. to capsulize these ideas to somehow cope with our newly discovered conscious minds.  But in reality, us "choosing" to eat chocolate ice cream over strawberry because we like it more, is no different from a lion "choosing" to attack a zebra over of deer because it is slower.