Introduction
The human struggle with faith, purpose, and freedom often begins with questions that cannot be easily answered. Do we have free will, or is life determined by forces beyond our control? Are our choices truly ours, or are they illusions shaped by circumstance, upbringing, and systems larger than ourselves? My journey through religion, disappointment, death, and discovery has led me to confront these questions head-on. What I found is that the real battle is not between fate and freedom, but between unconscious drifting and conscious alignment.
A Crisis of Faith
I was raised a Coptic Orthodox Christian, taught to believe that Heaven and Hell depended on my actions and faith. Yet even as a child, I struggled with the idea of eternal punishment for a baby born outside Christianity, or in a place where baptism was impossible. Could a just God condemn innocence?
Years later, I rejected the Church’s central claim—that Jesus was God or the Son of God—because Christians themselves could not agree on who he truly was. Was salvation achieved by belief alone? By belief and commandments? By rituals and confessions? Every answer contradicted the next. The Bible itself seemed less like a divine revelation than a political document—translated, edited, re-edited, and compiled to suit different agendas.
That disillusionment marked the beginning of my departure from Christianity. I came to see truth not in doctrine, but in alignment: aligning my life with The Life itself, living with purpose, focus, and acceptance. Pain, I realized, was not the problem. Death was not the problem. The true danger was being struck by life’s blows without embracing them, without alignment.
Dreams Deferred
Like many young people, I once asked the wrong questions: What is my purpose? What do I want to be? I thought I wanted to be a doctor, drawn to the idea of easing suffering. When I fell short of the required exam scores, I turned to farming—feeding people, sustaining life. But my family resisted. Farming was shameful. My academic scores were too high for agriculture school, too low for medicine. I was pushed instead into English literature.
I excelled academically, graduated in the top 10%, and began teaching. Students loved me; colleagues resented me. I believed in giving my best to every student, not just those who could afford private tutoring. That idealism threatened the system. The school’s reputation depended on attracting students, but its profits depended on private lessons. On payday, there was no salary. The system had made its point. I left, heartbroken, and never returned. To this day, I still miss my students.
Not long after, my father died of a sudden heart attack. He was young, still working, still waiting for retirement to finally live his life. That day never came. His death seared me with a truth I could not ignore: a life postponed is a life wasted.
The Allure of Money
Wounded by disappointment, I convinced myself that money was the only path to meaning. I joined an international bank, where I imagined I could help people manage their finances. But soon I discovered the truth: banks do not serve clients—they serve sales targets. Colleagues tricked clients into unnecessary debt, manipulated accounts, blurred lines between credit and savings. My conscience could not follow. I quit.
On the way out of a failed interview at another bank, I left my résumé at a random company in the same building. By chance, they called me back and offered me a job as an editor. For three years, I found modest satisfaction there. It was not glamorous, but it was honest.
A New World
Eventually, I immigrated to Canada. Unlike my friend who first suggested it, I went through with the move. In Canada I encountered a mosaic of religions, cultures, and ideas. For fifteen years I explored them all, convinced all the while that free will was an illusion. My life seemed driven by circumstances, by other people’s decisions, by forces far beyond my control.
Until something shifted.
Consciousness and the Return of Choice
The shift began with a scholarship from my Transcendental Meditation teacher to study advanced techniques. He gave me a book: Consciousness Is All There Is by Tony Nader. It described the stages of consciousness—dreaming, sleeping, awakening, cosmic, God, and unity—and how meditation expands awareness, revealing new possibilities.
Around the same time, I met with my mentor. I told her I had lost faith in personal growth. The endless talk of purpose and life design seemed only to enrich the teachers, not the seekers. But instead of defending her work, she asked: What do you truly want?
I confessed: what I missed was the calling. For much of my life, one path always led to another. A teacher, a stranger, a course—something or someone always appeared to guide me. But recently the river felt dry. No muse, no light, no guidance. I had become aimless, starting projects without purpose, studying without direction, hoping something would stick.
She listened, then said: “Don’t pursue anything at random. Wait for the calling. Observe. Listen. If you cannot, you must. If you must, you will.”
That night, something shifted. A voice—like an angel—spoke, The calling I have been waiting for: You saw it all wrong. You thought you were flowing, but you were blind. You believed everything predetermined, but you ignored your own attention.
I thought life was predetermined by cause and effect, but I had ignored my own attention. Awareness itself was the missing key.
Awareness itself is choice.
A distracted driver has no choice; the exit comes and goes unseen. But a driver who pays attention has options. Consciousness creates choices.
With simple awareness, we have free choice. With expanded awareness, we gain more choices. With higher consciousness, we approach free will itself.
Closing Reflection
Life taught me that neither pain nor death is the real enemy. The true danger is drifting without awareness, mistaking blindness for fate. Free will is not absolute—it grows with consciousness. The more we expand our awareness, the more choices we see, and the more freedom we gain.
We begin with the illusion of determinism, but through conscious alignment we move toward freedom. And perhaps, at the highest stage—unity consciousness—we find not only free choice, but true free will.