[shellbackground]

I've been thinking on that topic for about a year now to justify my own behavior and actions.

Free will implies, that there should be genuine "actor", that's behind all one's choices and actions. If you will try to dig down and find your own actor, you soon will discover, that all choices produced by that actor are actually based on your previous experience, so all actions are actually predefined by your own experience.

The presence of genuine actor essentially leads to question "who is behind actor's actions?", which inevitably leads to infinite regress that can't be resolved.

I like to see how modern science there comes close to various teachings like Buddhism, moving from external world (non-self) to internal (self).

[eternalban]

> [A]ll actions are actually predefined by your own experience.

Your past actions and deterministic plumbings of material body constrain the future possibilities but they do not remove the possibility of further choice, in the general case.

Rumi's father -- both father and son were Muslim mystics -- tells an amusing tale of how the question of predeterminism and free-will was settled in their day in his spiritual diary:

   In Khwarazm the great majority [are] Mu'tazilis. No one there ever
   claims to have had a 'vision of God'. The people think of themselves
   as freely acting makers of their own lives. If they meet up with
   Jabriya, one who believes everything is predestined, they cuff him
   about the head and say "It's God's plan that I do this."

   Khwarazm is tough on the predestined people. Their houses are plundered
   and as they walk about in poverty they are clubbed and beaten. Mu'tazilis,
   on the other hand, enjoy the wealth they seize from the Jabriyas, these
   lazy ones who never initiate anything. "That is God's business" they say.

   Theirs, evidently, is to suffer in both worlds.

As for the faculty of 'Choice' in the Human being, he wrote:

   "By the One who sets the Earth with rivers pouring through in mist
    below mountains, and two oceans with a strip of land in between" (27.61),
    we move the elements into various shapes without their consent, but
    Human beings, unlike water and trees, have a choice. They are given dignity,
    discernment, and the evolutionary wisdom that can move from death to new
    life, again to die and be restored on another level of Existence.

    You have many choices about the ways you live and work and change and survive.
    Say you fall into an ocean. You may give up and sink, or you may try to
    swim to the shore.

    Salvation is your decision.

[samhain]

Honestly that guy sounds like he's spouting a bunch of nonsense, trying to act philosophically only to provide nothing useful.

[eternalban]

He directly addressed the perplexity (and expected life quality) of those who claim access to the "inner self" -- 'vision of God' -- and further elucidates that the successful -- "salvation" -- progressive process of 'reincarnation' is dependent on the "evolutionary wisdom" that is gained by making choices.

> nonsense

It is perfectly reasonable that one would hold such a view. We the present are co-local in time and space but not necessarily in attainment.