The Buddha was THE champion for free thought: You change the way you approach things, you change the way you look at things, and it’s going to make a difference inside and out. And you have the power to change.

"Suppose we lived in a world where your actions didn’t make any difference, and everything were determined already from the past, where everything you experienced had already been set in motion a long time ago, nothing you could do about it. It would be a pretty miserable world.

And it wouldn’t be a world in which you would have a Buddha, because he gained awakening by observing himself, testing himself — on the assumption that he could learn from his mistakes and change the course of his life by his actions. That approach works only in a world where your choices do make a difference, where you have a role in shaping things.

As he later explained causality, some influences come in from the past, but other things are chosen in the present moment. You put things together in the present moment. You’ve got the raw material coming in from the past, but your skill in putting things together right now is what’s going to make a difference.

If it didn’t make a difference, there wouldn’t be the four noble truths, or, if someone did talk about the four noble truths, they wouldn’t make any difference. This is one of the reasons why the Buddha said that if you believe that everything you experience is caused by the past, you’re left unprotected and bewildered.

Bewildered in the sense that you really don’t know what to do: Something comes up in the mind and you have no choice — you tell yourself — in whether you’re going to follow through with it or not. You’re unprotected in the sense that you could do a lot of unskillful things and just tell yourself, “Well, it’s because I was born with a certain DNA.” Or simply because, “That’s the way the material world works.”

There was an odd piece in the New Yorker recently about Spinoza, and how Spinoza was supposedly a champion for free thought. But then, when you look at what Spinoza actually taught, you see that, yes, he advocated free thought in the sense of defying the church, the synagogue — the powers that be at the time — but what he actually taught was that we have no choice in what we do or think, and that learning to accept the fact that we have no choice was our only consolation.

It’s hard to say that he’s a champion of free thought at all. The Buddha, though, was the champion for free thought: You change the way you approach things, you change the way you look at things, and it’s going to make a difference inside and out. And you have the power to change."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Some Assembly Required"