It is the Lord's will -perhaps His deepest will- that. people should feel life to be their own. It is taught concerning all the things that the Lord gives us that He wills what is His to be ours in such a way that we shall feel it to be our own. Pre-eminently, this is true of life. 

Recall the teaching that God is love, and that love wishes to love objects outside itself, wills to be mutually conjoined with them by love freely and mutually returned, and wills to make them happy. (Swedenborg, True Christianity 43) Another way that [our theology] says this is that the end (or purpose) of Divine Providence is a heaven from the human race. (Swedenborg, Divine Providence 27) It is only people who can fulfill these purposes of Providence, these goals of Divine love; and they can do so only because they possess rationality and free will. 

These we could not have-and hence we would not be human-unless the Lord's life flowed into us in such a way that we felt it to be our own.  (Animals also feel life as their own, I suppose; but, unlike us, they cannot reflect upon that appearance. What dog does not bark simply because they want to? What mosquito does not sting simply because she gleefully desires to do so? Of course, we could argue endlessly as to whether animals have real freedom, real free will; but [our theology] speaks of them as doing the things they do in freedom or in free will though it is added that animals are impelled by their bodily senses, prompted by appetite and pleasure.) 

 Freedom is dependent upon the sensation that life is our own. If we could feel life inflow, we would not seem to live of and from ourselves; therefore we would have no as-of-self, no life that seemed to be our own. We would feel ourselves to be nothing, and would either rebel against that feeling or would "hang down our hands and await influx," doing nothing even as if of ourselves. But to all possible appearance, life seems to be our own, and therefore we cannot do anything else than use it as if it really were our own. Even if we were to rebel against the truth that all life inflows, we would rebel in freedom, as of ourselves; even if we were to "hang down our hands," we would do that in freedom, too. 

As to why we feel life to be our own, and cannot sense anything else, there are two chief reasons for this. Life first flows into our inmost souls, and the soul is always above consciousness. Therefore we are living beings before we are even conscious of being alive, and with the first dawn of consciousness we already feel life to be our own. Secondly, it is a general law that we do not [tend to] sensate that which is constantly present. The influx of life is constant; even if it inflowed into a plane beneath our inmost souls, its constancy of influx would tend to make us unaware of that influx. 

Yet free will exists only because of the appearance that life is our own. …Is free will, then, also nothing but an appearance, a false appearance? By no means. Free will is a fact, the basic fact that makes us human. 

That we have free will is a fact that simply cannot be sensibly denied by anyone who believes in God. The alternatives to free will are outlined, point by point, in the chapter on Free Will in the work True Christianity (Swedenborg). At the very least, denial of free will makes God responsible for evil and, even worse, makes God responsible for people, apart from any choices of their own, having to endure the eternal misery and unhappiness of hellish life. What insanity!  (NCL Editorial, 1979)