There is no true freewill in atheism, or Judaeo-Christian religions. Only in Buddhism, Hindu philosophy and other brands of free-thought with the concept of reincarnation can there be true freewill. Let me ask you these simple questions:
Did you choose your gender in this lifetime?
Did you choose who your parents were going to be, did they choose you?
Did you choose what environment you were born into, what your physical characteristics are, etc.?
Unless you can answer yes to these questions you do not believe in true freewill. For there is much you did not choose of your own will.
Only in reincarnation theory can you have true free will. For the soul pre-exists life on earth and so chooses a path of development that benefits the soul most, at its given stage in evolution. Of its own freewill the soul chooses a limited framework so that it can experience a given reality within it and thereby grow. The soul chooses temporary loss of total freewill power of its own freewill.
Now this leads into one of humanities greatest mysteries and possibly one of the most difficult things to rationalize given the atheist/Judeo-Christian framework most people are coming from. That mystery is: why are some people born sick while others healthy? Why are some people born rich while others poor? In Judaeo-Christian religions God chooses for you, overriding your freewill. In atheism this occurs by random probability and thus overriding your possible freewill.
Now in reincarnation theory people actually choose to be born poor, sick etc. Souls choose such a path so that they can learn from the experiences. They choose such a path because it benefits their overall spiritual evolution. Without anything to overcome the soul simply would not grow. Some of the most difficult lifetimes offer the greatest potential for growth.
The general purpose of incarnating on planet earth is to learn about emotion and sexuality. That’s right earth is a SCHOOL for sex and emotions. This is the unique experience that earth offers in that it enables souls to learn how to use these tools in order to create. Thus you can easily see why majority of souls who incarnate on this planet do not choose to incarnate into a mansion lifestyle and sit around and eat grapes and drink wine all day. It’s through life’s challenges specifically in relation to others where human souls individually stand to gain the greatest amount of spiritual growth knowledge and wisdom.
Individual soul characteristics are also important. Why would souls pick places like Darfur, or a mentally retarded body? Well they have their reasons. The greatest adversity also provides the greatest potential for growth. Some souls are rather gung-ho, and pick really challenging lives spiritually and others prefer to take it easier. But nonetheless souls can not grow unless they have something to overcome. And souls choose to incarnate into situations that best match their own personal stage of evolution. For everyone has their own highly personal and specialized growth pattern.
For a moment, temporarily suspend whatever beliefs you may have and attempt to figure out why YOU may have chosen the life you have right now in order to learn the things you have chosen. Remember this most likely has something to do with your emotions, ego and sexuality. See how this impacts your life knowing full well you were the ultimate chooser of virtually almost everything that has happened to you. Remember the soul’s intelligence and wisdom is far superior to that of your own current limited illusionary perceived self. The soul knows full well what it gets itself into and all possible things that may happen to it. Under such a framework it is pretty difficult to build a victim identity for yourself knowing how much you actually chose out of your own true freewill!
Now on a side note what is also important to the discussion of freewill is relativity and its apparent limitations. For example, you cannot at the current time morph into a bird fly and fly away. You can imagine this but you cannot actually do this within the current relative physical framework which you live in. People take this physical framework for granted often thinking that’s all there is. But you could be no further from the truth. There exist many other dimensions in which the physical limitations you experience here on planet earth don’t exist. In these other dimensions you are free to create and do whatever it is that you wish and imagine. Your only limitation being that of your own creativity! You could create planets, stars, people, places, things. You could morph into whatever shape or thing you wanted. Now because such a reality has so much freedom and true freewill it cannot interact with those of others unless you choose to, and the ‘other’ also chooses too.
Now you may be curious to see what ‘others’ are possible of creating and ‘others’ experience, so you may form a contractual type of relationship where you can experience each other’s self-created realities and thus learn more about others and they about you and so you BOTH expand your potential creative knowledge. You can see why it is to your mutual benefit to interact with other forms of creative identities for the overall purpose of gaining more experience and creativity thereby evolving on every possible level.
Now this is quite simplistic, and things get much more complex. Large groups of consciousness with likeminded creative goals coalesce and form ‘families’. They then choose to create set frameworks which offer experiences unique to that particular framework. Experiences are often limited by frameworks and this is something you must understand. In order for our current physical reality to have any kind of mutual coherence among other creative consciousness some self imposed limiting framework must exist! This is an undeniable fact of life, which makes physical life as you and me experience it possible.
Imagine the havoc that would be wrecked if everyone’s imagination manifested everything they thought of right on the spot! Physical reality would quickly lose its coherence and thus the physical experience in relation to others as you experience it now would simply not be possible and cease to exist thus undoing the very reason the framework was created for in the first place!
Under the reincarnational framework birth is usually a more painful process for the soul than death. Death is a letting go of a dense physical framework and embracing of the truer freer state of being, where thought manifestation happens much quicker. Birth on the other hand is an intensely limiting experience as the soul begins to limit and confine its avenues of creation and perception. The loss of power and control can be quite frightening initially, but is understood as a necessity to live in our framework. On the other hand people that choose to commit suicide and end their physical realm contract prematurely often do so in the hope of self-annihilation in order to easy their pain. But it is important to understand that thoughts and emotions in the next dimension up from the physical dimension is much more powerful. Such souls find themselves in even more pain, for that is what their thoughts are manifesting for them without the luxury of the physical dimension to act as a grounding force for that pain. There is no escape from the emotional and spiritual lessons one has chosen to learn, circumstances will often repeat themselves until the soul learns its lessons. It’s important to understand the soul wants this for itself, that YOU want this for yourself.
Thus the temporary suspension of true and utter freewill must be embraced, for it offers unique creative experiences that cannot be experienced in any other way, especially in that of relation to millions and billions of other conscious creative entities.
http://www.gestaltreality.com/articles/free-will-conscious-co-creation/
A Distinction
Within the karmic system, an individual Soul, while embodied mentally, emotionally and physically is definitely limited. It however has no option to choose any situation of life in the Physical Plane without first having earned that ability to choose. Each Soul is given Primal Karma and enters the lower realms of being encumbered by these various conditions as well as a complete (usually) loss of memory of what It truly is and the point of view it had when it existed freely beyond duality. What i didn't see mentioned here are the mental states, but they are assuredly a part of the awareness of the Physical self. Soul, being blinded has to learn to make the right choices so as to avoid gaining more karma than It came into this world with
Usually this is a thing that must be learned the hard way, and this conflict and the pain of negative situations are what eventually ignites the desire to experience ever greater stages of awareness, until that Soul acsends from the ground floor up to Its natural state, this is a system that encourages the making of selfless choices, which also begin to unwind the karmic knots that Souls tend to acquire due to the limitations of Its own being i.e. mental states and emotional ones that can seem to be on the verge of destroying the Individual. By learning in an ever progressive way, this teaches the individual the importance of balance in these lower states of being.
In any case, Soul eventually acquires enough good karma to bring that one into a position where It can make progress climbing back up that "ladder" and into Its true state. But this is never the "end of the road" so to speak. There is always another step in development that a Soul can make. But before all of that It must go through the tough lessons needed to inspire It to look further and more deeply than It had before that point. Selfless actions, to use a generalized way of explaining it, is how Soul earns and gains the right to make degrees of choices in Its next incarnation.