Some popular terms within current culture are determinism, control, and agency.

What is their meaning, and how do these concepts relate to our health and happiness?

Determinism opines that everything that has happened and will happen in this world was determined by the initial cosmic coordinates present at the advent of our universe about 14 billion years ago. All subsequent outcomes were predetermined at this inception, so there is no true free choice in this world.

Agency stands in opposition to determinism. Agency refers to our ability to choose. Choosing is not only selecting from multiple possibilities, but it is also rejecting other possibilities, yet an outcome remains undetermined. It is a response to inputs, not a reaction to inputs, and it is an output, not an outcome.

Under the coordinates, rules, and laws of determinism, our perception of our agency in the world is defined as an illusion. Conceding that it is the environment, the universe, meeting our cells and our genome that determines most of our physical, emotional, social, behavioral, mental, and spiritual states of being, it still feels incorrect to conclude that determinism is the rule of our experience and existence. It feels like we do have some agency.

In fact, when we dig into the depths of cosmic functions at the level of quantum fields and mechanics, it appears that the universe........

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