Agency (Part 5 of 8)

Seeing Through the Illusion to the Dance

Rope or snake? One or two?

If you’ve made it this far in this series, welcome back. This has become more than just an essay. It’s become a journey. And thank you for joining me down this path.

In Part 1, we explored a question: What is agency, really? And why do we seem to be losing it? In Part 2, we traced a brief history of agency, from ancient Greek philosophy to modern neuroscience, seeing how thinkers from Aristotle to Sapolsky wrestled with whether agency exists at all. In Part 3, we followed the logic of determinism to its endpoint, and stared into the consequences of a mechanistic worldview that leaves no room for choice. And in Part 4, we went through an overview of quantum mechanics, emergence, and process philosophy, uncovering that even the materialist worldview might not be as predetermined as positivists would like us to believe. We cracked open the old machine metaphor and glimpsed a universe that might not be fixed, but fluid and participatory.

None of this has proven the existence of agency. But nor has it ruled it out. So far, the materialist worldview seems to suggest that the universe is not a locked box. Instead, it might be something more like a dance. One that’s already in motion, and we are already part of, whether we realize it or not. And if that’s true, it doesn’t mean that we are free to do whatever we choose. The causes and conditions that make up this dance are very real, and they influence the rhythm and beat in ways that we likely have no say in. However, perhaps it does mean that we have a part to play in this relational unfolding of where the dance might lead. And that means the door to agency doesn’t slam shut. It cracks open, just enough.

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Learning to Feel

There’s still so much we have to learn, and maybe that’s the point. As David Chalmers reminds us, the “hard problem of consciousness” is not about how the brain works, but why we feel anything at all. And maybe agency, like consciousness, isn’t something to understand in theory, but rather something that must be felt.

Language and cognition are tools the mind relies on, but they’re often built for fixed things, not flowing experiences. When it comes to something like agency, we instinctively reach for spatial metaphors: before and after, inside and outside, higher and lower. But these forms of description subtly distort what they try to hold. We simply can’t locate something like agency in the same way we can locate, say… a chair. The frame breaks the form. It’s like asking for the diameter of freedom. The question reveals its own mismatch.

Henri Bergson, in Time and Free Will, states that:

“The insurmountable difficulties presented by certain philosophical problems may arise from our placing side by side in space phenomena which do not occupy space. And whether by merely getting rid of the clumsy symbols round which we are fighting, we might not bring the fight to an end.”

Perhaps, agency doesn’t reside in space, nor belong to a self in the usual sense. Instead, it might arise in relation – as movement, as tension, as a feeling. And when we search for it as if it were an object, we risk missing its essence entirely. But perhaps, with attention, we can feel its texture or glimpse it in practice.

This kind of relational, felt sense is what Federico Faggin explains in his book, Irreducible, as what many philosophers call “qualia”. He states that, “symbols are the carriers of qualia and qualia are the carriers of meaning.” In this context, qualia is the subjective “sensations and feelings we experience in our consciousness,” or “what it feels like in our inner experience after the automatic recognition of a symbol.” This distinction from quanta (abstract representation through language or symbols) is crucial, because it helps us see that symbolic meaning can only take us so far. The rest must be felt: directly, relationally, in the living moment.

My favorite reminder of this comes from Rainer Maria Rilke, in a famous 1903 letter to his protégé:

“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

So let’s live the question of agency now. And to do this, we might ask ourselves what it feels like to have a sense of agency. But here’s the catch: asking what it feels like to “have” agency might already be the wrong question. Because the moment we treat agency as something we “own,” we’ve already accepted a model of selfhood that might be too small. Maybe the problem isn’t that we haven’t found agency yet. Maybe the problem is that we’ve been looking for it in the wrong place. To look in the right place, we may need to take a hard look at what we mean by the "self."

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The Illusion of the Separate Self

So far, we’ve been referring to agency as if it belongs to an individual. But that assumes a stable, bounded “self” to begin with. What if that, too, is a construct that begins to blur under closer inspection?

If we accept the materialist view that the self is a biological system, we must also admit that that biological system doesn’t exist in isolation. It exists in an environment. And that environment brings its own causes and conditions. The ‘self’ is shaped by context, by temperature, by sound, by social dynamics, by history. So where does the boundary of the ‘self’ really lie?

We often imagine our skin as that boundary. That’s where our control supposedly begins and ends. But is that boundary as solid as it seems? If a loud sound occurs outside your body, can you choose not to hear it? If a child cries in front of you, can you prevent your nervous system from responding? If a friend enters a room full of rage or grief, can you shield yourself from the emotional gravity they carry? You might buffer the response, but can you really say it’s yours? Language has a way of tricking us into thinking we own our experience: “my thoughts,” “my actions,” “my feelings.” But what if those, too, are just what arises in relationship?

Alan Watts, in The Book, famously called this assumption of a bounded, sovereign identity “the skin-encapsulated ego.” In other words, the idea that “I” am an entity sealed off from the rest of the universe, observing it from within the capsule of my body. But Watts challenged this view. And it wasn’t about mystical escapism, but from a standpoint of practical philosophy. He argued that we are not separate beings within the world, but expressions of the world.

This distinction also applies to our biology and psychology. In The Myth of Normal, Gabor Maté writes that identity is formed in relationship. Our nervous systems learn what’s safe and unsafe based on early interactions. Our personalities are, in many ways, adaptations. They are survival strategies etched into us by history, trauma, and the patterns of those we’ve feared and loved. What we call “selfhood” is often the sum of those adaptations – who we are in relationship to who we had to be.

Neurology echos this as well. Mirror neurons, discovered in the early 1990s, indicate neurological responses to the actions of others. They help explain empathy, imitation, and the subtle transmission of emotion we call emotional contagion. More recently, the science of co-regulation has shown that nervous systems sync in shared presence. My breath slows when yours does. My heart races when yours does.

What if the same is true for selfhood? What if ‘you’ aren’t a thing that has experiences, but rather, you’re a pattern of experience arising in relationship? What if agency, too, doesn’t reside in you, but moves through you – as a function of the larger field you’re part of?

These questions may sound strange, even disorienting. For many of us, the self feels like the one stable thing we can rely on. To question it can feel like questioning the ground beneath our feet. And yet, if agency is truly relational, maybe the “self” we’ve been taught to locate it in was never the right container to begin with.

It also might require us to rethink what agency is in the first place. And to grasp that, we might first need to let go of the self we thought was holding it.

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The Wisdom of No-Self

This idea, that the self may be an illusion, is not a new one. While it might sound radical from a Western perspective, it’s long been familiar terrain in Eastern traditions. For thousands of years, contemplative practices across Asia have invited practitioners to look deeply into the nature of identity as a lived inquiry.

One such tradition is Advaita Vedānta, an ancient school of Indian philosophy that proposes a single, unbroken reality. “Advaita” means non-dual. Not two. Only one. In this view, what we perceive as “self” and “world,” or “subject” and “object,” are not truly separate – only divided by the habits of perception. What we might call the felt sense of consciousness, or “ātman,” is not a fragment cut off from reality. It is reality. It is the whole, or “Brahman.” This isn’t quite pantheism, but rather a view in which all of reality is an expression of a single, undivided awareness – appearing in different forms, yet never truly separate. In this view, consciousness isn’t in the self. Instead, the self is an expression in consciousness.

To illustrate this illusion, Advaita uses a simple but profound metaphor: the rope and the snake. A coiled rope lies on the ground at dusk, and in the fading light, we mistake it for a snake. We jump back in fear. But the snake was never there. The fear was real, but it was based on a misperception. We saw danger where there was only form. We projected fear (our sense of separation) onto something inherently whole: a rope. In this metaphor, the rope represents Brahman, or undivided reality. The snake is the illusion of separateness: the mistaken self we believe ourselves to be. Just as fear dissolves when we see the rope for what it truly is, so too does suffering lessen when we begin to see through the illusion of the separate self. To clarify: the illusion isn’t that existence is false, but that we see it as divided.

This isn’t so far from what Buddhism proposed centuries earlier with the doctrine of anattā: the insight that, when examined, no permanent, independent self can be found. What we take to represent “I” is rather a bundle of shifting processes: sensations, perceptions, thoughts – arising and then passing away. There is continuity, but no core; movement, but no unchanging mover.

These traditions don’t deny experience, they simply refuse to localize it. And that distinction is important, because we should be careful of any interpretation that denies of vilifies the beauty of this one precious life. Instead, we can consider our experience of the “self” more like a convergence – a coming-together of relationships, impressions, and awareness that shift moment by moment.

This also changes how we understand agency. If there is no solid “self” inside the skull making choices like a captain at the helm, then maybe agency doesn’t originate in us at all. Perhaps it moves through us, arising from shared motion, each shift a shared intention, inseparable from the whole. Maybe it arises when we stop resisting or grasping for control. Like a jazz ensemble improvising in real time, each note played is shaped by the music already in motion. And freedom comes from listening, responding, and finding the note that makes sense in the moment. The melody unfolds, and we get to contribute to its shape. And if awareness, action, and meaning arise within relationship, then perhaps our greatest freedom lies in learning how to harmonize – and dance.

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The Dance of Forgetting and Remembering

When we consider agency as something more like participation in a dance, we start to notice it in subtle moments of attunement. A felt sense of presence – simple, but profound. It’s a movement that feels connected to something just beyond our edge, and still somehow entirely our own.

This kind of agency is small. It’s subtle. Elusive. It doesn’t overpower cause and effect. And that’s what makes it so hard to find. Some brilliant thinkers on this topic, like Sam Harris, argue that even the illusion of free will is itself an illusion. He argues that if we rewound the universe to the exact same causes and conditions, we would make the same choice every time. But this argument also assumes that agency and the self are just two sides of the same coin.

What if agency is not what we think it is? What if it’s not tethered to the subjective sense of self at all? If agency is more about presence than control, then perhaps it doesn’t show up in what we choose, but how we move with what arrises – as the relational moment before the mind locks in its story. This might seem like a leap in logic, but before we jump back into cognitive analysis, let’s stay with how it might feel.

When I’m attuned, the world feels rhythmic. There’s give and take. Adjustment. Grace. I notice things as they happen. I have just enough space to respond instead of react. And, to me, that’s what agency feels like. It’s not what we so often associate with things like willpower or certainty. Rather, it’s embodying the present moment as it arrives and adjusting subtly.

And then, of course… I forget. I forget all of this. I fall back into reactivity. I lean more on the materialist mindset and dismiss all of this as spiritual mumbo-jumbo. I push, I grasp, I rush. I believe again that it’s all up to me. My body tightens. My breath shortens. The rhythm slips into noise, into static, into strain. I stop dancing and start driving, grasping for control, hoping to seize order from chaos. I’ve come to call these my moments of forgetting.

But, forgetting doesn’t need to be shamed. That’s part of the rhythm, too. Because forgetting is built into the pace of modern life. We forget because we’re asked to do more than any single mind can hold. We forget in the rush to respond, to perform, to optimize. We forget in the ping of emails, the pull of push notifications, the endless scroll of other people’s opinions. And sometimes, we even forget in the name of doing something “good.”

For me, the forgetting shows up most often in parenthood. In the simple, everyday gauntlet of trying to get out the door on time. Shoes, snacks, backpacks, socks that feel weird. I forget to be present. I forget to attend to my own emotional state, let alone my kids’. I transform into “efficient dad” – a not-so-superhero with a singular mission: get them to school on time, no matter what it takes. And I “succeed,” but rarely with grace. I leave the moment behind in the name of managing it. That moment… that’s what relinquishing agency feels like. And what gets lost is connection, attunement, and presence – ironically, the very things I value most.

But sometimes, I remember. Not always in time to change the moment. But in time to notice it. In time to feel the dissonance. And that noticing – that’s the rhythm returning. It’s the beat I return to, gently. A breath. A shift. An opening. Because when we are attuned, agency doesn’t feel like effort. It feels like ease. And that is the dance. Not mastery. Not control. But a rhythm we learn to rejoin, again, and again, and again. Until one day, we don’t even notice we’ve remembered. We’re just… dancing.

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Where Do We Step In?

So, if we don’t own agency, and it’s not about freedom in the absolute sense, then what role do each of us have to play when it comes to agency? Clearly, we can’t expect to override the flow of causes and conditions. That type of freedom is a myth. It’s the wrong expectation entirely to consider agency as a form of domination. Rather, we might think of it as a form of discernment.

In the flow of everyday life, we rarely know where a decision truly comes from. Was that choice a product of reflection… or just momentum? Was it intention… or instinct? At what point does agency become distinguishable from the deterministic set of “my hormones, my habits, and my social conditioning acted through me”?

We might never be able to draw that line precisely. But rather than defaulting back to a purely deterministic lens, we can begin to notice the texture of agency. It’s about sensing subtle shifts in how experience unfolds during the micro-moments of everyday life.

Okay, wait a minute… You might be asking, what is a “micro-moment?” And how would I notice it?

It might seem unexpected, but one of the most practical frameworks for identifying agency comes from early Buddhist psychology. Long before the term existed, the Buddha was a phenomenologist. He offered a remarkably accurate model of how experience unfolds. This was not meant as dogma, but as something to be explored and tested in one’s own direct observation.

Theravāda Buddhist scholars identified seven universal mental factors, called sabbacittasādhāraṇa cetasikas, that accompany every moment of consciousness. Bhikkhu Bodhi, a leading scholar of Theravāda Buddhism, writes that:

"These factors perform the most rudimentary and essential cognitive functions, without which consciousness of an object would be utterly impossible."

That’s how essential these are considered.

While all seven are important, two, I believe, are especially relevant when it comes to understanding agency: cetanā and manasikāra. Volition and attention. One initiates. The other determines where that initiation goes.

Cetanā, or “volition,” doesn’t determine the act, but it tilts the moment toward becoming. In Buddhist psychology, cetanā is considered the forerunner to every thought, action, or inaction. It’s the hinge between reactivity and responsiveness.

The best description I have heard for identifying the moment of cetanā is when we are approaching a door. There is a moment as we walk toward it that we seem to decide to use the muscles in our arm to reach toward the door handle. Too soon, and we have our hand outstretched like an awkward looking automaton. Too late, and we bump our head into the door. Next time you’re walking toward a door, try to notice it. That subtle moment right before choice. That is cetanā. It’s the moment that calls you to decide how to act with what is unfolding in your experience. That’s the dance: the barely perceptible shift from impulse to intention.

To recognize it, though, something else must be present: manasikāra, or “attention.” Manasikāra is what turns the mind toward the object. It’s the directional force of awareness itself. Without attention, there is no field for intention to arise in. If cetanā is the initiation toward thought or action, manasikāra is the orientation that makes that initiation meaningful. It’s the subtle turn of the mind that brings something into focus.

Imagine walking through a crowded room and suddenly hearing your name spoken across the noise. Your awareness shifts. That movement of what you tune into, what you lean toward – that is manasikāra, attention. It’s the spotlight that makes a moment available to you. Without it, volition has nowhere to land.

I believe volition and attention form the microstructure of agency. These moments are fleeting. And almost all of the time, they likely happen without agency: as habit, as reaction. Probably occurring countless times per day. But they’re also where agency might be felt. And once you notice it, once you feel that slight space between stimulus and action… Suddenly, you’re in new territory. You’ve moved from automation to awareness. From reaction to relationship.

While we certainly don’t have the capacity to notice every single one of these micro-moments when they arise (that would be overwhelming and debilitating), perhaps we can notice one or two on any given day. Especially in the moments that count. When there is an opportunity to step back into the dance, and remember the rhythm. Because when we do, somewhere in the interplay between these factors, lies the felt structure of how we relate, and the opportunity to engage.

These moments won’t come with fanfare. But they’re sacred. Because when we pay attention to them, something changes. Not the world… not yet. But our relationship to it. And that shift matters. Because even the briefest moment of volition paired with attention can soften the edge between reactivity and response.

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The Humble Glimmer

What we’ve explored here may have gently unsettled some old assumptions. The self may not be what we thought. Perhaps it’s not a sealed unit of control, but a node in a living field. It’s one pattern among many. A convergence of conditions that breathes, relates, and changes. And in that view, agency isn’t something we hold. It’s something we meet. A rhythm we rejoin. A coherence we lean into.

And then… we forget this, of course. All the time.

In traffic, in deadlines, in the scramble to get the kids out the door… we forget. In the name of efficiency, safety, or simply because we’re tired… we forget. But forgetting is part of the dance, too. We forget so that we can remember. And when we remember, even for a moment, we start to hear the rhythm again.

We notice ourselves reaching for the phone… and pause. We hear the sharpness in our tone… and soften. We feel the impulse to explain… and instead, we stay quiet. These moments may not look like agency from the outside. But from the inside, they are unmistakable. And that feeling, however humble, is a doorway.

Because if agency lives anywhere, it’s here: in the micro-moments that arise before the story locks in. In the texture of experience that precedes the narrative we tend to overlay.

And maybe that’s all we need right now. Not certainty. Not mastery. Simply a willingness to notice the moments when something glimmers. And to treat those moments as sacred. To keep listening for what is always present. To stay close to what calls us back. And to let attention be its own kind of devotion.

Because something is happening here. And the more we notice it, the more we might glimpse what it means to move wisely within it. So, how do we do that? When the world is built to steal our attention, how do we participate in a field that doesn’t always flow?

… And that’s where we’ll go next time.

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