THE CREATOR AND THE CHARACTER (Part 1)

FREE WILL

Free will?

This morning, when I woke up, I didn’t wake up into thoughts right away.

I woke up into an understanding that was already present, as if something had been moving long before I became conscious of it.

I was still resting in that quiet space where the mind hasn’t fully organized reality yet.

From there, something began to reveal itself gently.

What I saw came first as drawings.

Simple lines, like sketches appearing on a page.

Those lines slowly formed a character.

The character moved, walked, reacted, felt.

It experienced situations, emotions, questions.

And at the same time, it was clear that the entire scene was being created — not only the events, but also what was happening inside the character.

The thoughts appeared.

The emotions appeared.

The sense of choosing appeared.

The feeling of being someone appeared.

All of it arose together, as one single movement.

As I stayed with this, it became clear that this wasn’t just an inner image or a dreamlike moment.

It was showing me something very precise about how life itself unfolds.

What I was seeing in that character was the way we experience our own lives — the way thinking, choosing, understanding, and reacting seem to happen from inside the story.

What became obvious is that even when the character realizes something, even when insight appears, that realization is also part of the unfolding.

Understanding arises in the same way confusion arises.

In the same way curiosity arises.

In the same way resistance or openness arises.

From inside the experience, it feels like “I am thinking” or “I am understanding.”

From a deeper view, even those movements are part of what is being created.

Seeing this shifted how I understand effort and awakening.

When ideas like this are heard, the mind often turns them into a project.

If I understand this, something will change.

If I get this right, I will expand.

But this seeing showed me that understanding itself is not something the character produces.

Understanding appears when it appears.

It unfolds as part of the story, in the same way misunderstanding does.

The character doesn’t decide how the story moves.

Expansion happens in the character, not by the character.

And the character then experiences that as realizing, opening, resisting, or pulling away.

All of those experiences belong.

All of them are expressions of the same movement.

What I could feel very clearly is that the creator and the character are not separate.

I’m not using the word “creator” to point to something outside, above, or other.

I’m pointing to the movement through which the entire experience arises.

The character is born from that movement and lives as that movement, just as the movement experiences itself as a character.

The reader and the story are not two.

The experience and the one experiencing are not two.

It’s like reading a book and becoming completely absorbed in it.

You feel everything that happens.

You forget yourself in the story.

And yet, you are also the one through whom the story is being lived.

Both are true at the same time.

There is something here that feels like grief.

A duelo, as we say in Spanish.

A mourning.

Because when this is seen, the sense of being a separate doer softens.

It doesn’t collapse.

It doesn’t disappear dramatically.

It simply loses its solidity.

And that can feel like something is being lost.

The character wonders, If I’m not the one in control, what am I?

This grief is not an idea.

It’s felt in the body.

This is where the language of “ego death” starts to make sense to me, though not in the way it’s often imagined.

Nothing needs to be destroyed.

Nothing needs to be removed.

What changes is the recognition of what the ego actually is.

A function.

A narrative center inside the story.

It plays a role.

It allows experience to be lived.

It doesn’t need to disappear for clarity to arise.

This is also where the mind struggles most.

The mind wants clear divisions:

control or no control,

choice or no choice,

existence or non-existence.

Lived experience doesn’t follow those lines.

There is choosing inside the story.

And at the same time, the choosing arises.

Both are true, depending on where the looking happens.

There are moments when this feels difficult to take in.

A thought may appear:

If I’m not doing this, then I’m nothing.

Fear can arise around passivity or paralysis.

But life keeps moving.

Actions keep happening.

Anxiety may appear in the body, and with it, the impulse to relax.

The impulse arises.

The body responds.

No one needs to manage that movement for it to occur.

This is often where frustration shows up.

The character wants to choose ease.

Choose peace.

Choose understanding.

Sometimes those states arise.

Sometimes something else arises.

Acceptance may appear.

Tension may appear.

All of it unfolds in the same way, without being personal in the way we usually believe it is.

And yet, something soft happens when there is no longer a fight with the unfolding.

When the effort to control the story relaxes, there is a sense of moving with what is already happening.

Not as a belief.

As a felt experience.

Like letting a movie play without trying to predict the next scene.

From there, trust can arise naturally.

Not forced trust.

Not a rule or an attitude.

Just a quiet openness to how the story moves.

Gratitude sometimes follows.

Gratitude for being in the story at all.

For experiencing life from this particular point of view.

And even that gratitude arises on its own.

I don’t live this continuously.

There are moments of forgetting.

Moments of tightening.

Moments of trying to manage life as if I were separate from it.

And then, sometimes, remembering happens.

Not because I decide to remember.

Because remembering appears.

When it does, there is relief.

Not because life becomes easy.

Because the weight of separation softens.

This isn’t something to apply or practice.

It’s something to notice.

And that noticing doesn’t stay.

It comes and goes.

It unfolds in its own rhythm.

This doesn’t feel like something that needs a conclusion.

It feels like an ongoing movement — being forgotten and remembered, again and again.

Perhaps that, too, is part of the story.

Just this experience of being lived,

with occasional moments of recognizing

that we are both the character

and the movement through which the character appears.

Katiana