You share so many great thoughts, thank you.

I think we can be conditioned but that we have the free will not to be. That is a struggle, but I think worth it.

I think there is a Self, not the "I" of so much Western thinking that is really just Ego. I consider the Self to by the locus of multiple forces that make up a person. The mistake some Indian philosophers made was mistakenly thinking that because the forces inside a person are multiple and variable, that means there is no center. That the center of Self is not exact does not mean it is not a center or does not exist. It means it exists as process not as static entity. That dicohotomy between process and positivism has dominated philosophy both East and West: https://medium.com/inserting-philosophy/process-versus-positivism-philosophys-continental-analytical-divide-439a2cab0125