Of course not, that is what we would like to believe, but it’s not true.

The process is more like one of enquiring what we should do in a given situation, and the answer comes from our unconscious. What governs the weighting that makes us do this rather than that, occurs on levels of mind that are normally inaccessible to people. The great decisions of history, made by characters designated to make that history, all come from the same source.

We do not know, or at least the vast majority of people don’t know. If we don’t know where our thoughts come from, we have no real control over our actions, we are living in a dream. Its apparent coherence is an agreed phenomenon derived from such anchors as Science and Religion, but in truth nothing ultimately can be said to be true about anything. Newtonian physics is contradicted by Einsteinian physics which is contradicted by Quantum physics, and so it will go on. Just as we think that we have some coherent explanation of how things work – a new kid appears on the block to contradict everything that went before.

Our thoughts come from we know not where, our decisions are made by access to the same unknown process, our whole lives are governed by these processes, the origin of which we have no consciousness of whatsoever. The one thing we do know is that it works, more often than less, and we all agree the norms, however absurd.

Nature informs man through the collective unconscious to the personal unconscious of each individual. Man thinks that he is an independent entity divorced from the universe having free will - whatever that might be. Man is an integral integrated part of the universe, he has no choices, he must always play his part in the scheme of things.

Examine your own process of mentation.

Where do your thoughts come from?

Do you come to conclusions through a logical process of mentation or do your thoughts arise as if from nowhere?

Do you actually wait for thoughts to arise to the brink of consciousness from a source you are not aware of, and having received these thoughts do you merely order them and return them to that unknown source: only to have them return again with ready made weighting - making the decision or course of action you are about to take dependent on the amount of emotional or instinctive emphasis given to it by the unconscious mind?

The illusion of free will comes in at this point, you think you make a decision based on the relative value of information received when in fact your decisions are arrived at by the weighting given to it by the unconscious mind.

The unconscious will give a concept emotional weighting or make a process seem to have more magical value, due to the powerful archetypes it has created to direct you in the way it wants you to go. Freud, Jung, and the rest have said that man is consciously masculine and unconsciously feminine. Is not the feminine side of us that aspect which brings to birth, nourishes and sustains the status quo?