The answer is both yes and no, and which answer is true depends entirely on the level from which the question is being asked.
Here is the short version before we go deeper: ultimately, yes, we have complete free will. But there is no free will within a state. That second sentence is not the full teaching on its own. The full teaching is this: there is no free will within a state. Not that free will does not exist at all.
What Is a State?
I began to question the validity of my own thinking mind when I noticed something I could not ignore. My life was genuinely abundant, and yet the mind was relentlessly sending me the message that I did not have enough. The evidence was right in front of me. The mind was telling a completely different story. I was looking at abundance through the red lens of scarcity, and calling it reality. That contradiction was the crack that opened everything.
A state is like a pair of tinted glasses worn over awareness. Whatever colour the lenses are, that is the colour everything appears to be. You cannot simply decide to see blue while red glasses are still on your face. The glasses determine what you perceive, how you think, how you feel, how you interpret everything you encounter, what you expect, and how you react.
When you are inside a state, you are bound to it. The state runs itself through you. It selects the version of reality that confirms it. It interprets every experience through its own lens. And you cannot choose differently from within it, for the same reason that thinking about blue does not change what you see through a red lens.
The State Is a Reflection of Who You Believe You Are
From a purely psychological perspective, a state is always a reflection of self-identification, of who you believe yourself to be at the level of the person, the character.
And what is that character? It is a collection of memories, future projections, opinions, preferences, desires, judgments, and unresolved experiences, all of it conditioned from an early age by the stories we accepted about what our experiences meant.
If, as a child, you experienced something painful and concluded that you must be unworthy or unlovable, that conclusion becomes part of your identification. And through that identification, you see a world that confirms it. You are not seeing reality. You are seeing the world through the lens of a story you once decided was true.
So here is the honest question: if every thought, every reaction, every preference, every perception is arising from a constructed identity built on stories that were never really true, can any of that be called free will? Or is it simply the automatic output of a misidentification?
This is what it means that there is no free will within a state.
The Prison of States
Most people move through life as prisoners of their states, shifting from one to another, hoping that arriving at a better state will finally produce the outer life they want. But moving from one state to another without recognising what states actually are is like moving from one cell to a slightly nicer one. You may prefer the new cell. You are still in prison.
The imprisonment is not the state itself. The imprisonment is the belief that you are the person experiencing the state, that you are the one who should not be in this state and needs to get to that one. From that position, you will spend enormous energy trying to change the dream from within the dream. And it will not work. Because the self, the character, has no real power to manifest anything. It is not the one doing the creating. It is itself a creation.
Where True Free Will Lives
Real free will, what could be called divine will, arises the moment you recognise what you actually are.
You are not the state. You are the awareness within which states appear. The state is not happening to you. It is happening within you. You are the consciousness that is aware of the state, aware of the character, aware of the story. And the moment you recognise that, the moment you stop identifying as the person inside the state and recognise yourself as the awareness that contains it, you are no longer imprisoned by it.
From that recognition, choosing becomes effortless. Not controlling. Not forcing. Simply selecting love or fear, expansion or contraction, spiritual clarity or the distorted lens of old belief. That is divine will. Not a God outside of you making decisions on your behalf. Your own will, operating from its truest level.
Desires Become Decisions
This recognition changes everything about the nature of desire.
When you are trapped in a state, desire is laced with longing, with striving, with the exhausting effort of trying to make something happen from a self that does not actually have the power to make it happen. The teachings “it is already done”, “just make the decision”, “assume it is yours”, fall completely flat when you are identified as the character. They are not accessible from that level.
But when you know yourself as consciousness, those teachings become literal. To consciousness, it is just a decision. There is no self to fix, no conditioning to overcome, no limitation standing between you and what you are choosing. Desire stops being longing and becomes creative decisions. Manifestation stops being effort and becomes the natural result of what consciousness has already selected.
Impersonal desire, divine will, always materialises. Personal will, rooted in the belief of being a separate self, does not. Not because you are doing something wrong. Because the self was never the one with the power.
And from there, the fun really begins. Because you can amend the character. You can choose new attributes for it, just like you would for an avatar in a video game. Suddenly, your character can be more outrageous, more assertive. If your character has been too soft or too people-pleasing, you can simply give it the attribute of assertiveness. And none of this is done to hurt anyone, because you know that everyone around you is also infinite consciousness, playing with itself in the form of what appears to be many separate selves.
Freedom Is Your Nature
You are not meant to be imprisoned by states. Suffering is not your natural condition. Your true nature is consciousness itself, free, unlimited, and already whole.
Understanding that you have complete free will, and simultaneously that there is no free will within a state, is the key that unlocks everything. You stop fighting states. You stop trying to fix the self. You stop chasing a freedom that was never actually missing.
You simply recognise what you are. And from there, you choose.