I don't know that it's really zen, so much as good old Western mechanistic thinking.
The premise of determinism is that as everything is causal, all subsequent actions are determined by prior causes, possibly going back to some initial cause.
The logical flaw in this goes to our perception of time.
As these mobile organisms, our experience is a sequence of perceptions, which we are constantly sorting and judging, in order to navigate. Consequently we experience time as this flow of the present from past to future situations. Cause leading to effect. Physics codifies it as measures of duration.
The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events rise and fall, come and go.
Yesterday doesn't cause today, the sun shining on a spinning planet creates this cycle of days and nights.
There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect. It is like a tapestry being woven of strands pulled from what was woven.
So time is an effect of activity, similar to temperature, pressure, color, sounds. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don't model them as dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, not the sequence of thought.
Energy is "conserved," because it is the present, not a dimensionless point between past and future.
As the present and as process, energy goes past to future, while the patterns it generates go future to past. In terms of a wave, the energy is what drives it, while the forms, the fluctuations, rise and fall, back to equilibrium.
In a factory, the product goes start to finish, future to past, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product, past to future.
Similarly, lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.
Since consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form go future to past, it would seem consciousness functions as an energy, though it is the gut and heart processing and circulating the energy, while the central nervous system only sorts and orders the forms. Thus the assumption reality is order and chaos, signal and noise, rather than energy and the forms expressed.
Then consciousness, as energy, is causal.
The point being that there is only this state called the present and the act of determination can only occur in it. The future hasn't been realized, as the factors determining it haven't been computed. There is no omniscient omniscience watching from outside space and time, because perception is a function of perspective. Too much information flattens back into noise. Whiteout. The equilibrium of infinity.
Necessarily a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdm and judgement, from which we fell. The ideal is aspirational, the absolute is elemental.
Good and bad are not some cosmic duel, between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience. Even bacteria get that.
When we view good as aspirational, rather than elemental, conflicts do become a race to the bottom of us versus them, as all the evolved complexity and nuance is suspect.
The religious assertion that morality requires a belief in god is belayed by the fact that religious people often sin, under the assumption their god will absolve them.
Monotheism is based on tribal monoculture. One people, one rule, one god.
Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic societies, as that was how the Ancients analogized multiculturalism. The Romans adopted Christianity to formalize the Empire and bury any remnants of the Republic. Though with vestiges of pantheism, in the Trinity.
Which came from the Greek year gods. The son/spring reborn, of the sky god and the earth mother. Though the mother was denatured as the holy ghost and the entire premise of regeneration was obscured, since the Catholic Church was the eternal institution. At least until Martin Luther tried to do what Jesus had tried with Judaism, push the reset button.
Consequently the default political model for Europe, for the next 1500 years, was monarchy and feudalism. When the West went back to less monolithic political systems, it required a separation of church and state, culture and civics.
Now "free" will is also an oxymoron, as an action free of cause would be equally free of effect and the premise of will is to affect. We are a small part of nature's process of selection.
Sooner or later, all the increasing incongruities will cause the modern world to reconsider some of the cobwebs in its collective attic, but not just yet.
