The feeling of free will that contradicted my physicist’s worldview is now mostly gone. My beliefs and experiences are now aligned and therefore there is no more cognitive dissonance.
The feeling of open-endedness or choice about the future is only due to a lack of complete information. This view leads to a radical sort of acceptance, that of the unfolding of the universe, where everything that happens has to happen the way it does. As a practice, it is seeing the dynamic aspect of nonduality. Everything that is perceived, all the changes in those perceptions, are seen as following deterministic laws, like electromagnetic fields following the laws of physics. When everything is seen as unavoidable, how can there be any resistance to any of it? No resistance, therefore, no self-generated suffering, no dukkha.
The feeling corresponding to that view is like that of inhabiting a character in a virtual world that runs entirely automatically, and even the character’s thoughts, decisions, and emotions are generated according to the algorithm running the simulation. Since all decisions are made automatically on their own, why worry?
One day a poem arose out of that realization: Since Consciousness is a Ghost Inhabiting a Body Over whose Mind it has no Control Why blame the Actors for their Role? Of all the views and insights described in this document, I have found that this view is the most potent at dissolving feelings of resistance to what is or what could be, such as resentment, anger, anxiety, fear, hate, blame, etc.