What if your existence is narrative? You may decide to be empty, but then your preconceived notion of emptiness would be consuming the majority of your presence. It’s like transitioning attention from content of thought to context of thought. Your directive is to observe thought in a manner which is unmoved by its content. That’s not empty. It’s a slowing of volatility. It’s an increase in observation at the expense of reaction. But what are you observing? Are you the observer, the reactor, the content being observed, or the pattern of reactions that other people recognize as you? Which is it? Are you a different person if you change any one of those? What if you change all of them — are you now a different person?

If you are always reacting, you are not in control of yourself.

If you are choosing not to react, isn’t that a reaction in itself? Aren’t you being controlled by the principal that non-reaction leads to a more fruitful experience?

Free will is a skill.

My will isn’t free. For my employer, they must pay me in order for my will to be aligned with their interests. For my wife, she had to bond with me in order for my will to align with hers. For me, I had to spend countless hours bashing my fucking head into walls before I began to will myself into proper etiquettes. I had to purchase college courses, to coerce my will into lower level thresholds where it could exact its interests. I had to suffer at the privilege of my narcissistic mother, to appreciate honesty in people as deeply as I do. None of that is free. Even if I do phenomenologically experience my will as free, I know that it is derivative and encapsulated in a shrine of personal experience. I can not will into existence that which I have no conception of.

My existence is all of this. A flood of narratives, some of which I selfishly claim as my own. But I do not own these narratives, nor did I create them. I simply believe them to be mine. When I choose to instead not attach myself to them, what am I left with exactly? Peace — ?