September 11, 2005

• Free Will

  Greyfox and I have an ongoing metaphysical discussion that crops up
  once in a while, and it came up again today.  I can’t say for sure
  if it’s a disagreement or a misunderstanding.  I keep thinking
  that if he only understood what I’m saying, he’d agree.  Maybe not.

  We never have seen eye to eye on metaphysical matters.  Before we
  met, in 1990 when we were corresponding, he told me he was “studying
  Seax Wicca theology.”  About twenty years before then, during the
  homeless time when I spent all my days in the public library, I had
  studied theologies of many religions and found nits to pick with every
  one of them.  Then followed my grand epiphany
  and a return to the gnosis I had known as a very young child.  I
  lost all interest then in theology and only wanted to broaden and
  strengthen my communion with Spirit.  By the time I met Greyfox, I
  wasn’t just listening to the Divine voice in my mind, I was channeling
  it for clients, living as an oracle.  That’s how he met me, even.

  After he had married me and moved to Alaska, he told me that he had
  done so because he believed that we were fated to be together and he
  had no choice.  I didn’t at that time, and don’t recall any time in my life when I ever
  did believe in fate.  I might have tried it on for size briefly
  during the time in my youth when I was converting to a new religion
  every time I found a fatal flaw in the last one, but free will was what
  I was taught as a child and free will is consistent with everything
  I’ve ever heard from that voice in my head.  Even when I believed in
  Karma and Dharma, I believed that we had choices about how and when we
  would release karma or fulfill dharma.  I wholeheartedly accepted
  what Aliester Crowley taught:  “Love is the Law, Love under
  Will.  Do what Thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

  Metaphysically, Greyfox and I have both matured and changed.  He
  now understands and accepts that we humans have free will.  He
  understands Divine Will in the terms of Neale Donald Walsch’s
  Conversations with God.  Walsch says that God wants us to be, to
  live up to, our own highest conception of what we can be.  I don’t
  argue with that, but whenever Greyfox and I get into one of these
  discussions it seems evident that the two of us have somewhat different
  conceptions of what that means.  He keeps quoting it at me and
  insisting that he believes in free will, implying thereby that he
  thinks I do not.

  At Twelve-Step meetings, I’m totally in tune with, “praying only for
  knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.” 
  Other than my ongoing all-day, 24/7 unceasing prayer of thanks, all I
  ever ask for is wisdom, guidance, and strength.  I stand there at
  the end of each NA meeting and say the Third Step Prayer emphatically
  and with feeling:  “Take my will and my life, guide
  me….”   Greyfox seems to think that by doing this I am
  abrogating my own free will. 

  I suppose that’s an understandable mistake.  Those meetings are
  frequented by many people who have interpreted those words to mean that
  they can and should just give up their own wills and let the Almighty
  take care of everything.  I think that is a departure from what
  the founders’ intent was.  I see it as an unfortunate one because
  it has become an obstacle to many people’s ability to accept the
  program, and for those who do accept that belief it often leads to
  addictive relapse.  Then they wonder why God didn’t stop them from
  using.

  Greyfox is more outspoken than I, in those meetings, with his
  “heresy”.  He is disgusted and I am distressed at the True
  Believers there who preach the corrupted and distorted dogma of
  powerlessness and seem to think that God’s will for them is to have no
  will of their own.  When they speak of their will, they are
  talking about their addictive cravings, their fear, the drives and
  appetites of the biological machine.  They speak of God as
  separate from themselves, out there somewhere.  They are obviously
  identifying with the sleep of the machine and not with the awakened
  self.  They have not gone within and found the indwelling Divine
  spark.

  I speak in meetings of my reality and share my experiences, but not
  with the attitude that Greyfox has.  I observe that a lot of what
  I say goes over some of their heads.  Greyfox, on the other hand,
  tends to get in their faces and under their skin.  Where the two
  of us are in accord is in the idea that we control our own
  behavior.  We choose our path.  We exercise free will, as
  Divine Will intends for us to do.  I think the only place he and I
  really differ is in that “highest conception of ourselves” that we both
  aim to live up to. 

  Greyfox’s has changed a lot in the decade or so since I convinced him
  to read Conversations with God.  As he transcends his NPD, he sets
  ever higher sights for himself.  He is probably closer to
  realizing his ideal self than I am, because he has never set his ideal
  much higher than where he is at the time.

  Back in the mid-seventies, when I read the Urantia Book, I acquired a
  concept of humanity as godlike and perfectable.  This resonated
  with my Virgo soul.  In three decades I have become much closer to
  realizing that ideal, but the ideal has never changed.  What I
  wanted then is what I want now, to have a will that conforms to the
  Divine Will.  It is my will.  Like everyone else, I was given
  it to do with as I will.  I will, to the best of my ability, do
  what is best.  What could be better than God’s will?
  

  • 1:16 am
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