Master Rhyan Hyroc answering a question about free will from student Daniel
Daniel, sit down with me for a moment, because your question is the kind that tempts a teacher to dramatically dim the lights and speak in a mysterious whisper—but you know I’m allergic to theatrics, so I’ll just stick with my usual half-sarcastic clarity.
Let me start with a parable.
I once watched my friend Lucas stare at a menu for twenty-two minutes trying to decide between pancakes and waffles. He squinted at the syrup options like a man choosing between destinies. Finally, with a deep, heroic breath, he said, “I choose pancakes.” The waiter nodded, walked away, and Lucas whispered to me, “That was the universe choosing through me.”
Five minutes later, the pancakes arrived, and Lucas took one bite, frowned, and said, “I should have gone with waffles.”
I stared at him and said, “So the universe made a mistake?”
“No, no,” he replied. “My ego interfered.”
Daniel, this man blamed both God and the ego for a breakfast decision.
And yet—under the humor—there’s a fascinating truth. Most people live exactly like Lucas. Every choice feels like a tug-of-war between destiny, impulse, fear, instinct, ego, intuition, whatever TikTok spirituality has taught them that week… and somewhere in that mess, they hope free will is hiding like a shy cat under a couch.
Now let’s talk honestly, just you and me, without philosophical armor.
Daniel, when you ask me if free will is real or just an illusion created by the ego, what you’re really asking is: How much of my life am I truly responsible for?
And that’s a question most people avoid until they’re forced into it by heartbreak, crisis, or, in Lucas’s case, disappointing pancakes.
Let me walk you through this, not as a metaphysician but as someone who has watched countless humans wrestle with themselves.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: free will exists—but it’s not nearly as free as you think.
Most of what you call “choice” is actually momentum. Habit dressed up in a cape. Conditioning pretending to be intuition. Trauma influencing action. Fear masquerading as practicality. And the ego—our favorite internal troublemaker—slapping labels on everything like a drunk librarian.
Free will, real free will, is quiet. Subtle. Rare. It shows up in the moments between impulses, not inside them. It is what remains when you stop obeying your automatic patterns.
The ego absolutely wants you to believe it is the grand decision-maker.
It loves to puff out its chest and roar, “I am in control!”
But if you look closely, most of the ego’s decisions are reactive, defensive, or compensatory. They are not choices—they are responses.
Let me put it this way:
If you always choose based on avoiding fear, avoiding discomfort, avoiding judgment—that’s not free will. That’s survival strategy.
If you choose based on pleasing others, that’s programming.
If you choose based on anger, that’s wounding.
If you choose automatically, that’s conditioning.
And here’s the twist that catches most people off guard:
Your ego isn’t trying to deceive you out of malice. It simply wants to keep you consistent. Predictable. Safe.
Free will threatens that. Free will is unpredictable, and the ego hates unpredictability almost as much as Lucas hates dry pancakes.
Daniel, imagine your mind as a house.
Most people live entirely on the ground floor—where the habits live, the impulses live, the opinions of others live, the ego lounges around in a robe with sunglasses. And they walk around saying, “Look at me making choices!” when really they’re just following the grooves worn into the carpet by years of repetition.
But upstairs—behind a door that most people never open—is the room where genuine free will lives.
Not the loud kind.
Not the kind that needs applause.
The kind of free will that whispers. The kind that tells you, “You do not have to repeat this pattern. You do not have to be who you were yesterday. You can choose differently right now.”
Real free will doesn’t shout.
It invites.
But most humans don’t hear that invitation because the ego is too busy narrating every moment like it’s auditioning for a documentary.
Now, let’s dig into this deeper—because I want you to walk away with more than poetic metaphors.
Some philosophers say free will is an illusion and everything is predetermined. Others claim free will is absolute, that every decision springs from an independent self. Both extremes miss something essential: awareness is the hinge.
Without awareness, your choices aren’t really choices—they’re reactions.
With awareness, your reactions stop being masters and become tools.
So is free will real?
Yes—but only in the moments you’re actually awake.
Daniel, think of how many times you’ve made a decision out of fear.
How many times you’ve said yes because saying no felt uncomfortable.
How many times you’ve held back because risking vulnerability felt dangerous.
How many times you stayed quiet because your ego feared looking foolish.
In those moments, who was choosing?
You?
Or the part of you programmed to avoid discomfort?
The ego doesn’t create the illusion of free will out of malice—it creates it out of self-preservation. If you realized how much of your life is driven by old wounds, old stories, and inherited beliefs, you might decide to change. And change terrifies the ego.
Here’s the real irony:
The ego tries to protect you from the discomfort of growth, but true growth is the only thing that reduces the ego’s suffering.
Let me tell you something I’ve learned watching students over the years:
Most people don’t actually want free will.
They want comforting destiny when things go badly and congratulatory authorship when things go well.
But freedom is heavier than that.
Freedom means accountability.
Freedom means ownership.
Freedom means you can’t always blame your parents or astrology or the universe or childhood conditioning or your ex or the alignment of Saturn for your choices.
Freedom is not always pleasant, Daniel. But it is always honest.
Let me show you where the ego truly tricks you.
The ego tells you that free will means doing whatever you want.
But real free will is the ability to choose the right thing even when you don’t want to.
Real free will is choosing awareness over impulse.
Real free will is choosing growth over comfort.
Real free will is choosing alignment over applause.
When you choose with consciousness, not reactivity, that’s when you break the illusion.
That’s when you touch the deeper layer of self where the ego has no authority.
And let me be clear:
I’m not telling you to kill the ego. The ego is not the enemy.
It’s a guard dog. Not particularly bright, but fiercely loyal.
It barks at anything unfamiliar because it assumes unfamiliar equals dangerous.
When you teach it to relax, it becomes helpful. When you let it run the show, it becomes tyrannical.
Free will emerges when you stop letting the guard dog choose your destiny.
Daniel, you’ve asked me many complex questions before, but this one cuts straight into the nature of what it means to be human. You want to know whether your choices are truly yours, or whether you’re being puppeteered by your own psychological machinery.
Here is my answer, in the clearest way I can give it to you:
Free will is real,
but only when you step outside your programming long enough to access it.
Everything else is autopilot wearing a crown.
You are not powerless.
You are not predetermined.
You are not a slave to instinct or fear or ego or history.
But you do have to wrestle with yourself to reach the throne room where choice becomes clean and true.
Some people never reach it.
Some reach it once and spend years trying to return.
Some visit it regularly because they’ve trained themselves to pause before reacting, to question their impulses, to ask, “Who is choosing right now—my higher self or my fear?”
You want free will?
Practice pausing.
Practice questioning.
Practice discomfort.
Practice honesty, especially the kind that stings.
Practice choosing the path that serves your growth instead of your convenience.
That’s where free will strengthens, like a muscle.
And now, let me close this by returning to our dear friend Lucas and his doomed pancakes.
The truth is, it didn’t matter whether he chose pancakes or waffles.
What mattered was who inside him made the choice:
the part of him seeking comfort,
the part trying to impress me,
the part fearing regret,
or the part simply responding to a genuine desire.
That is the question behind every choice:
Which part of you is choosing?
If you can answer that with honesty, free will stops being a philosophical puzzle and becomes something you can feel—quietly, solidly—inside your own chest.
Now, you asked which spirits can help with clarity, self-mastery, and the unraveling of ego illusions. Here are five that stand at the crossroads of perception, consciousness, and higher decision-making:
Spirits Who Can Aid in Understanding Free Will and Ego:
Agares – Helps break inner stagnation and dissolve old mental patterns.
Camio – Sharpens perception, reveals hidden motives, and clarifies internal voices.
Hecate – Opens pathways to deeper awareness and helps navigate inner crossroads.
Metatron – Aligns the mind with higher reasoning and lifts consciousness beyond ego habits.
Apollo – Brings illumination, clarity, and lucid self-recognition, reducing ego fog.
Daniel, remember this:
If the ego creates illusions, you are still the one who can decide to see through them.
And that is free will enough to reshape a life.