My Will Be Done

I used to think that there was some all-powerful Guidance in my life, and if I couldn't understand the reason something happened in my life, well, that was just a shortcoming on my part. But the more I thought about this idea of predestination, the more I realized it just didn't hold water, mostly just because of our belief in our free will.

Predestination is the belief that everything we think, say, or do is merely an echo, a reflection of the Will Of The All, a belief that there is a Grand Purpose, an overarching Plan which All That Is has in mind, a Point B to our Point A, so to speak, and all this guidance on It's part works toward that (whatever "that" may be is irrelevant). Yet the greater part of humanity believes in free will to one extent or another. Why? According to predestination, our thoughts are not out own, but reflections of All That Is, so therefore this thought of our free will is "given" to us as well. If there is a Purpose to everything, there must then be a purpose for us believing that we have free will.

Those who believe in predestination believe also that our insistence on our free will is the cause of much of our misery and unhappiness, that we need to "let go and let God" in order to find peace. So my question is simple: if the Oneness gives us all of our beliefs, yet the belief in our free will makes us miserable, why does the Oneness give it to us? What purpose does deliberate misery serve?

No, my friends, I cannot believe in such a thing. I cannot believe that anyone is miserable not of their own will, for such a belief turns the One into a cruel, thoughtless thing, using us for It's own devices and purposes with no more excuse than "suck it up, it's only an illusion". I cannot believe that we are only the Potter's clay, or at best the Potter's wheel. I can't even believe that we are only the Potter. Instead, I believe we are all three, the Creator, the Created, and the Device of Creativity, and we may choose at any time to move into whichever role and perception we want.

As I said at the beginning, once I believed in predestination. Then one day I took a good long look at my life and saw that everything was a consequence of my thoughts, words and actions, even the things which, at the time, I thought were Fate or Destiny or the Will of God or what have you. I saw my whole life was one great example of My Will Be Done.

Why Right and Wrong exist.

I think most people agree to some extent that ideas of right and wrong are created by us, and that they are nothing more than points in a system, bases of comparison. Yet we often feel that we must use this system for the creation of labels. We want to call some things "Right" and others "Wrong" and we often feel good when we make such judgements. Why do we do this? The answer, IMHO, is very simple.

Because that is our purpose for being alive.

Let me explain. I believe that we are all actually One Soul, fractalized and limited in perception out of choice. In the Time Before Time, the One Soul existed perfect and complete, but alone and without anything to compare itself to. Without anything else, the One Soul did not actually exist, because we can only define "exist" in comparison to something else, and there was nothing else. So the One Soul created physical reality from/within Itself in order to have a basis for comparison.

Now (and I freely admit this is all personal speculation, but it makes sense to me) we are the One Soul in fractal microcosm, and as such crave self-definition as well. For this purpose, we come into physical incarnation and forgetfulness so that we may have things in our perception that (we believe) are Not Us. But due to our conscious minds, it is not enough to compare ourselves in a simple-location way as a means of self-definition. We do not simply observe the world, we interact with it and make decisions about it and name things within it. We want to know more than just What, we want to know Which and Who and Where and When and How, and most important of all, Why.

The Why is the key, the crux of the matter, for why is Choice, and Choice is what all this moral judgement-passing is all about. We create ideas of right and wrong in order to create a dualistic framework of Why from which we base our decisions. Thus we create ideas of right and wrong so that we have something from which to choose our idea of Who We Are.

So right and wrong do exist, and are horribly important, but they simply aren't absolutes, even if we all agree upon them. Yes, I think we can all agree that love-sponsored action is "better" than fear-sponsored action, but it really is only "better" because we say it is. The only real difference between the two is that one is action which acknowledges our Unity and the other is action that acknowledges our separation. Yes, that separation may be an illusion in the grand scheme of things, but it is the separation which is the truth in physical reality, and all this spiritual kanoodling won't change that one iota.

This is what author Neale Donald Walsch calls a "divine dichotomy", two seemingly contradictory ideas which are both true. We are all One Soul choosing to experience many limited ideas of self, and we are billions and trillions of individual souls each striving to define ourselves as singular points of view.

So the true key is this: we are free to create our ideas of right and wrong in whatever way defines us, but we must understand that our moral decisions are exactly that, decisions, and ours and no one else's. These choices are the tools with which we define ourselves, and that is nothing less than our sacred work in this reality.

Free Will and Destiny

The whole free will vs. destiny concept is something I've spent a great deal of time mulling over. The entire subject really hinges on two interrelated things, namely the nature of the Divine (what I call the One Soul) and the purpose of physical reality. So let's take a look at the idea of Destiny and see what that tells us about the above. If there is such a thing as Destiny, it must be put in place by God, or the Divine, or the Higher Powers, or whatever limited little name you wish to give the Unlimited. If this is the case, then the Divine must have requirements, desires, or preferences of some sort, otherwise there would be no purpose to Destiny.

So my question then is what sort of preferences would the Divine have? One does not have preferences simply to have them, they must fill some need, whether it be psychological, emotional, or what have you. Yet we are talking about That Which Is, the source of everything in existence, the Alpha and Omega. How could such a Being need anything?

Second issue has to do with Time. For something to need anything, there has to be Time involved, because there must be a moment when the thing desired is not possessed, then another when it is either achieved or thwarted in order for the entire process to exist. Thus for the Divine to have any desires or needs, the Divine must be bound up by Time. Yet we have proven that Time is actually an aspect of physical reality, that there is not Time and Space, but the Time/Space continuum. But if we are speaking of the Creator, we must be speaking of a consciousness which existed "before" Time existed, thus it cannot be bound by Time.

Thus in order for Destiny to exist, it must be possible for the Divine to have requirements and be limited by Time, yet there cannot be anything the Unlimited does not have, and the Creator must exist outside of Time, thus I cannot see how Destiny can exist.

Yet there must be a purpose to physical reality, otherwise it would not exist either. So where does that leave us? This quandary bound me up for a very long time, until a friend sent me a link to a very nifty video explaining how to conceptualize how 5th and higher dimensions work. Here it is if you wish to watch it yourself: http://www.wimp.com/tendimensions/

The important point is this: when a conscious being makes a choice, a "fracture" occurs in 6th dimensional "space", a splitting off like the branches of a tree, one path representing one choice, the other the opposite. What this means is that every choice, every possibility, exists multidimensionally. This was the final piece for me, because this meant that no requirements could possibly exist, since all possibilities already do! I cannot have a specific destiny when an infinitude of CSs exist in an infinitude of possible worlds doing an infinitude of different things, and the same holds true for everyone else.

This also solved my conundrum concerning the purpose of Reality. Put simply, the purpose is Experience. There is only one thing which a singular consciousness cannot do, no matter how transcendent, and that is to understand itself if there is no basis for comparison. For "I" to exist, there must be "not I", for "here" there must be "there", and so on. The One Soul created All That Is within/from Itself in order for there to be a way for it to experience Itself as Itself, and also as not-Itself.

We, as conscious beings, have a most important job. Since we can make choices, we can create those multi-dimensional fractures of probability I mentioned before. Basically, each time a conscious being makes a choice, it doubles the possible ways the One Soul can experience Itself by splitting Reality into two.

Thus, our entire purpose is to make choices, and which choice we make is completely irrelevant as far as the One Soul is concerned, since from It's point of view, both choices exist. But this does not mean that it is all meaningless, not at all, because our choices make all the difference in the world to us. It is through our choices that we forge our experience, our particular perspective. The more consistent we are with our choices, the stronger our particular experience becomes, the more we are able to tap into the creative power within us. Therefore, the closest thing we have to an official purpose in life is to decide and proclaim Who We Are. Thus, in many ways, we are on the same voyage of self-understanding and self-creation which the One Soul is, only in microcosm.