Freedom is attained by living your divine purpose, by expressing its will and embodying its nature.
I often get asked whether I thought there was free will, and then, often, facts from neurology are quoted to claim that we don’t. To begin with, I think the question is wrongly worded. It should be whether we have choice or not, and the answer is obviously yes, we do, but it is subject to how much our conditioning will allow. Will is a completely different problem. I believe in our current state we do not have will but only choice. There is only one will, and that is the will of the Divine. And that is the will for life, for free expression of all lifeforms and the will to live in harmony with all species and bring about the blossoming of more life, importantly, including non-human life because it is mainly non-human life that supports us and makes sure that we are blossoming and can continue to live here.
In this current context, another question often asked is, “How can God allow there to be so much misery?” The misery is entirely of our own making, it is human-created. If we end up making ourselves extinct, and there is about a 50% chance that we might, then it has nothing to do with God, it is our own great creation. And one of the reasons why that is possible is because we do have choice.
In the Bible, it is said that the human being is created in the image and likeness of the Divine. We have misunderstood this statement and created a Divine in the image and likeness of ourselves. A human-like, egotistical god that becomes jealous if we believe in somebody else and then punishes us with plagues, locusts and floods.
But what does it actually mean to be created in the image and likeness of the Divine? The main quality of the Divine is that It is unlimited in space, time and potential; It is free. Because we are made in the image and likeness of the Divine, we are created free, too. If we let somebody be free, it means we have to let them make choices of their own even if we consider them wrong. unless you let somebody make choices independent of your own views, and that includes choices that you consider poor, they cannot learn. That is our drama, the drama of humanity. We are free to make our own choices, but we also have to live with the consequences of our poor choices. But once we have made poor choices, there is no point in accusing the Divine to have let it come to that. We make the wrong choices, and we have to deal with the consequences. There is no point, after centuries of us ignoring divine law (such as that homeostasis, the fluctuation of the bio-parameters within a narrow band, is maintained by biodiversity, which itself is a function of bio-symbiosis), to now try to dump the results of our flawed actions on God.
The whole situation reminds me of having teenagers. As your children grow up, you have to give them more and more freedom. The only way to empower them is to gradually step back, watch them make wrong choices, hit the canvas (or possibly harder surfaces), and if necessary, help them to get back on their feet. It is through the making of wrong choices and the having to get yourself off the canvas that empowerment takes place. There is no point in trying to overprotect others because we cannot truly learn other than through having made wrong choices ourselves. There is no faster learning than having to realize that one’s own choice was flawed, one’s own evaluation of a situation having led to a disastrous outcome. The humiliation alone of having to live with flawed choices is well worth making the experience. Making bad choices and having to live with the consequences hones one’s capacity to make better choices. There is nothing that makes one mature faster than having the freedom to decide from an almost unlimited variety of choices how to go about one’s life. How else are we going to grow up and live successfully? By listening to the advice of others? In most cases, this advice is wrong anyway or at least based on the needs of a completely different person.
Choice we do have, and we have it because the Divine is not a heavenly dictator that created us like little robots having to adore It like a narcissistic autocrat. However, we have to go even further in stating that the Divine does not even know about our misery. The Divine is absolute beauty, love, freedom and intelligence. Everything that the Divine thinks comes automatically to pass, i.e., passes into reality, because apart from the Divine, there is no reality. There is nothing to oppose or limit it.
The Divine cannot perceive anything not in alignment with its own nature, which means the Divine can only reason deductively. Deductive reasoning means to think from an already established premise. That is, the Divine can perceive the world and the beings only in line with its own perfect love, beauty, freedom and intelligence. Any misery that we can create for us, due to the fact that we have choice, cannot be perceived by the Divine. If the Divine could perceive our wrong choices and their results, it would mean that the conditions created by our choices would automatically become real and part of the true world. They cannot and do not because they are outside of the perception of the Divine. our many miseries will always be an artificial creation not enshrined in natural law.
Secondly, because the Divine can only ever see us in the eternal perfection in which it created us, It will always welcome us back into Its embrace, whatever we have done. That is the message of the parable of the prodigal son. The son believed to have squandered his inheritance, but he never did because it was not within his exertion to do so. But the father embraced the son as soon as he saw him because, in the view of the father, the unity, the original covenant, had never been broken. The very fact that the Divine can reason only deductively is what guarantees our return to Divine Love and to spiritual liberation and freedom.
Spiritual liberation means to become free from the tyranny of our own mind, conditioning and enculturation. We become free by uniting with the divine presence felt in our hearts. It is then that we can align with divine will. Divine will is the flourishing of all life and its co-existence in bio-symbiosis. By embodying this will, by becoming again the guardians of all life on this planet, we become free from the darkness and destructiveness within us.
This is an excerpt from my book How To Find Your Life’s Divine Purpose – Brain Software For a New Civilization.
