This paper considers practices, brain states and theoretical approaches that may cause non-experience of free will, i.e. phenomenal experience of oneself as acting, for reasons or for no apparent reason, without freely choosing one’s actions.
The main criterion for non-experience of free will, regardless of how this state of mind is attained, is the capacity for subjective experience of action as part of a causal process extending spatially and temporally beyond the boundaries of the self.
The self qua free agent must be understood intellectually and simultaneously experienced subjectively as an abstract representation, a locus of control constructed erroneously in response to repeated observation of apparent causal links between thought and action.
I discuss meditation, hypnosis, pathological disorders, drug-induced altered states of consciousness, electrical stimulation of the brain and theoretical methods. The ‘paradigm shift route’ is presented as the most effective single method of attaining sustained non-experience of free will.