Chapter 2: Free Will

1God controls. 2Even so, every person has free will: to align himself with the eternities or to disregard them. 3Every soul is at the helm of her own individual and eternal existence.

4Self-will without God-consciousness is inconsequential. 5Unless we surrender our self-will voluntarily to divine purpose, the deep-flowing fulfillment God wishes us to have cannot be accomplished.

6And this is God’s will and law: in the human body, the soul is subordinate to personal free will. 7Free will is a product of the brain. 8Hence there is discord between the exalted intent of the soul and vagaries of thought. N.B. 9Obstacles to the soul's eternal process of refinement—inclinations like misperception and gross egotism—will diminish. Or be abolished.

---

ECHOES & NOTES

Chapter 2: Free Will

2.1: God controls.

Either spirit has power or it doesn’t. If there is only one reality, nothing in the material world stands outside God; this means that if you want something, spirit can provide it. Deciding what part you need to do and what part God will do is delicate. … Don’t listen to the voice that says you have to be in charge, that things aren’t going to work out, that constant vigilance is the only way to get anything done. This voice is right because you listen to it too much. It won’t be right if you let spirit try a new way. (Chopra [2000] 2001: 292)

2.2: Even so, every person has free will: to align himself with the eternities or to disregard them.

For the Creator granted to the minds created by him the power of free and voluntary movement, in order that the good that was in them might become their own, since it was preserved by their own free will, but sloth and weariness of taking trouble to preserve the good, coupled with a disregard and neglect of better things, began the process of withdrawal from the good. Now to withdraw from the good is nothing else than to be immersed in evil, for it is certain that to be evil means to be lacking in good. (Origen, De Principiis 2.6, c219-30)

2.3: Every soul is at the helm of her own individual and eternal existence.

The individual soul emerges as a being of light from a primordial state of sheer divinity on the Celestial Plane—the highest of the five planes of manifestation—from which the soul embarked on a cycle as the Self through involution and evolution, in conformity with the grand creative and progressive plan. Over unfathomable ‘earth-time,’ the souls of humanity have completed their individual passage of involution (descent of spirit into matter) from the Celestial to the Physical Plane, the lowest state of manifestation. In their pursuit of an empirically enriched return to their origin through evolution (the ascent of spirit from matter), the individual souls have since progressed collectively to the second lowest stage, the Astral Plane. Each soul is a monad—a germ of individual spiritual existence. (Kesting 2010)     

By means of its actions, the human spirit has really brought about its own destiny. In a new life it finds itself linked to what it did in a former one. It may be asked, ‘How can that be, when the human spirit on reincarnating finds itself in an entirely different world from the one it left at an earlier time?” This question is based on a superficial notion of the connections of destiny. If I change my scene of action from Europe to America, I also find myself in entirely new surroundings. Nevertheless, my life in America depends entirely on my previous life in Europe. … In each case my previous life decides my environment. It attracts to itself, as it were, out of the whole surrounding world, those things that are related to it. So it is with the spirit self. It inevitably surrounds itself in a new life with what it is related to from previous lives. … The physical body is subject to the laws of heredity. The human spirit, on the contrary, has to incarnate over and over again, and its law consists in its bringing over the fruits of the former lives into the following ones. The soul lives in the present, but this life in the present is not independent of the previous lives because the incarnating spirit brings its destiny with it from its previous incarnations. This destiny determines life. (Steiner [1922] 1971: 66-8)

The soul is not a container of contents but the inherent capacity for perceiving spiritual realities. We are soul and spiritual beings, not beings with a soul and spirit. … We are like harps, sounding when the being of the soul and the spiritual worlds sound. (Wehr 2002: 15)

2.4: Self-will without God-consciousness is inconsequential. 

So long as you desire to fulfill the will of God, for just so long are you not truly poor: A man must become truly poor, and as free born, from his own creaturely will as when he was born. And I tell you, by the eternal truth, that so long as you desire to fulfill the will of God, for just so long you are not truly poor. He alone has true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing, desires nothing. (Eckhart in Huxley 1946: 87)

2.5: Unless we surrender our self-will voluntarily to divine purpose the deep-flowing fulfillment God wishes us to have cannot be accomplished.

For the thorough-going monist the soul, in so far as it is real, is substantially identical with God; and the true object of existence is the making patent of this latent identity—the realization which finds expression in the Vedantist formula, ‘That art thou.’ But Kabir says that Brahma and the creature are ‘ever distant, yet ever united’ that the wise man knows the spiritual as well as the material world to ‘be no more than his footstool.’ The soul’s union with Him is a love union, a mutual inhabitation; that essentially dualistic relation which all mystical religion expresses, not a self-mergence which leaves no place for personality. This eternal distinction, the mysterious union-in-separateness of God and the soul, is a necessary doctrine of all sane mysticism. (Underhill [1975] 1973: 11)

2.6: And this is God’s will and law: in the human body, the soul is subordinate to personal free will.

The soul will not speak about the error which is here: For the soul, the one from the height, will not speak about the error which is here, nor transfer from these out-raying qualities from the divine nature, since it will be transferred when it becomes free and when it is endowed with nobility in the world—standing before the Father without weariness and fear, always mixed with the Mind of power and of form. (The Second Treatise of the Great Seth in NHLiE [1977] 1990: 366)

2.7: Free will is a product of the brain. 

Our free will can hinder the course of inspiration, and when the favourable gale of God’s grace swells the sails of our soul, it is in our power to refuse consent and thereby hinder the effect of the wind’s favour. (François de Sales [1567-1622] in Huxley 1946: 199)

2.8: Hence there is discord between the exalted intent of the soul and the vagaries of thought.

We make the mistake of allowing the body to attempt to overcome something in order to contact the soul—while actually the soul is trying to contact the body so that it can find through it its own self-expression. When you come to the point of realisation, you have reached the place where your Spirit within you, your individual soul, tries by way of your desires, to free itself through your bodies as peace, health, and supply. It is not something that you have to battle for. (Nicol Campbell 1954: 113)

2.9: Obstacles to the soul's eternal process of refinement—inclinations like misperception and gross egotism—will diminish. Or be abolished.

This early intimation of the soul’s cosmic and timeless pilgrimage is consistent with the portrayal in the perennial philosophy of human life as a cycle of the Self through involution and evolution. The statement alludes to the karmic cause-and-effect process of the Self’s evolutionary aspiration towards spiritually awakened consciousness over successive embodiments in this or other worlds. This belief is central to most religions other than the three main prophetic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). In the latter—the more universal doctrine of the pre-existence—transmigration and ultimate restitution of all souls as primordial beings of light is replaced by the belief in embodied human existence as a unique, non-recurrent event whose outcome is eternal salvation or damnation. That credo, notwithstanding the ontological principle of involution and evolution, has asserted itself over the centuries in the esoteric expressions of these religions, viz. Kabbalah, Christian mysticism, and Sufism. (Kesting 2010).