For me I tend to follow a philosophy that’s basically taoist (with a small “t”, the philosophy not any of the religions - I’m not religious) mixed in with animistic shamanism and the current models used in modern physics.
The taoist way of describing basic cosmology:
The Tao that cannot be named created the tao that we can talk about. “The Tao produced the One tao; One produced Two (yin and yang); Two produced the Five (elements), The Five produced the Ten Thousand things (everything else).”
(Different versions have different paths, this one is based to teaching of my qigong teachers and it works for me, still it’s more symbolic than actual physics)
The Tao does not exist per se - existence means manifestation, and anything manifest is not the tao, but what the tao made. The Tao cannot be known.
To put it “my” way, the primordial chaos/infinite potential and the closes thing I can get to “god/source/The All” of any kind produced the universe, which in itself is a gestalt entity, and continues to produce energy with the capacity to exhibit properties in a spectrum (- yin and yang are not absolutes they are relational, like hotter or colder), meaning intensity variation exists in energy. Energy in variations of intensity creates the forces (including time) and they create the elements - hundreds of them - and from there the fundamental particles/waveforms, (which make elements and from there molecules) and energies recombine in every way to make everything else.
In this model there’s no such thing as gods. The universe naturally tends not towards chaos, but towards order, order of higher and higher complexity. Pieces develop and then recombine in new ways over and over.
This is because the one driving impulse of the universe is to understand itself, which is does through experience - trial and error. This is the purpose of all existence. It’s the purpose of orders of complexity so convoluted we call them life.
Thus all life in all forms is an expression of the universe discovering itself and one experience is not better or high than another, just different.
Now from an animistic perspective, all these things are sentient. Energy is sentient. Consciousness runs through all of this - the consciousness of the universe. Part of the universe understanding itself is that shards of consciousness isolate themselves to experience without influence. Like drops from an ocean. Every thing that combines multiple pieces of conscious-matter can be seen to have a gestalt consciousness. It may or may not be complex enough to be called self aware.
From here large formations of consciousness coalesce, and these are loosely termed “spirits”. Spirits exist of all sizes but some are complex enough to be self aware and what I call “sovereign”. Sovereign spirits are sometimes called ISBEs in some circles. They have taken millennia, maybe eons (millions to trillions of years) to form.
Spirits then - going back to taoism - can “incarnate” - which means attaching itself into a vehicle. The vehicle serves the purpose of making interaction with a given set of universe contrasts easier and more energy efficient. I tend to call these a “level of reality”.
Thus there are available vehicles for a spirit to incarnate as human by taking on multiple vehicles in order - the causal, the emotional, the mental, the biological energy and the physical biology “subtle bodies”. These then allow a spirit to interact with the causal, emotional, astral, biological or human qi, and physical realities respectively. There is an order of incarnation based on the physics of how these interact.
So now I have a model of a human, which is a spirit “wearing” multiple subtle bodies, each also having it’s own consciousness, and basically being a “gestalt” or aggregate and very complex entity. It is capable of interacting at all of the levels of reality for which is has good control of it’s subtle body at that level.
It is possible for a human to be broken and have incomplete or damaged integration with as well as imbalance or blockages in one of more subtle bodies, and this is displayed in illness or mental/emotional dysfunction. The extreme complexity leads to extreme complication in the issues such a being can exhibit, but also to extremes in experience and the ability to think and manifest new experiences in ways that other being cannot. Hence the value in humans and other complex gestalt beings following similar models.
Death at this point is then a change of how a set of bodies are combined. Incarnation and deincarnation happen in order, so having the entity leave the physical body is called he 1st death - such a being is now called a “ghost”. Removing it from the qi body is the 2nd death. From here the human, still knowing what human it was as it still has the mental and emotional bodies which comprise parts of the personality, can choose to reincarnate into a new qi and physical body. Usually the emotional and mental are dropped as well and this allows the memory wipe between incarnations.
Mages that achieve immortality are often ghosts that find a way to feed the qi body without the physical powerhouse that used to maintain it. This usually doesn’t last more than few millennia at most.
Non-humans may be physical but are more often energy based. The Djinn/Fae are examples of energy beings that also live of the Earth. Astral wildlife also exists as well as physical wildlife. Life exists - meaning, spirits using vehicles to interact with the universe - at all levels of the universe. Most have less developed mental and emotional bodies than humans. The “higher beings” also called variously gods, angels, demons, daemons/daimons, some nature spirits (e.g. stars, planets), ascended masters etc are human-capable or better spirits that did not take physical human animal vehicles.
Re: Free will, this is a fundamental “law” of the universe, as everything IS the universe and it is doing basically whatever it wants, hence so are we as aspects of the universe.
However coercion and probability exist. Strong patterns of probability that look inescapable in the micro level are called “fate” or “destiny”. Some planets have patterns that are so “hive minded” these might as well not exist, others like Earth have strong currents of chaos and instability that allow disagreement and hence more choices.
Choices are strongly influenced by the bodies and the environment the bodies exist in, and the relationships are almost entirely not understood in any detail by the one experiencing being human.
These variations are a reasonable result of the universal drive for variation in experience.