Visions of Eternity
It’s a great feeling to come to an understanding that will likely stay with you for the rest of your life. While this understanding may change and develop over time, its core will remain the same.
I haven’t focused much on exploring the concept of free will. For some reason – probably to my own detriment – I’ve tended to avoid philosophical approaches to life, instead favouring mythological and psychological perspectives. Like a Russian doll, psychology is encased within mythology. It can be both rewarding and useful to recognise psychological patterns in oneself and others, and then see them reflected in mythological characters.
Some philosophical discussions, on the other hand, can feel a bit more theoretical than relatable. Philosophical debates can sometimes feel more like performances than genuine searches for truth. It often feels more like a chess match between two egos, each battling for victory. From my experience with debate training at university, I realised that winning a debate isn't always about truth, but often about how arguments are presented – the speaker’s charisma, the humour of the speech.
Nonetheless, recently I have been reading and thinking about the concept of free will, and I believe I’ve learned something useful that will influence me moving forward.
Free will can be defined as the ability to act at one's own discretion, without being constrained by necessity or fate.
Do we have free will? Before answering, here are some assumptions I’m working with:
I believe that the infinite being we call God exists. God created the universe. The creation is finished, i.e. everything that ever will be in existence, already is. God is eternal – existing beyond our concepts of time and space. God is all-knowing and all-powerful.
One way I like to think of it, is that the universe is a dream in the mind of God. God is to this universe what we are to the universes we create in our dreams. Our consciousnesses are the substance, the hologram, that make up the worlds we build in sleep, just as God (infinite consciousness) is the substance of this universe. It’s a concession to the material perspective, but useful nonetheless, to imagine God lying in bed with our universe suspended in his mind.
Do we have free will?
I believe we have free will in the assumptions that we make about ourselves in the present moment. We create these assumptions about ourselves through our thoughts. These assumptions in the present ripple through eternity, down channels that have been preconceived by God. In the now, we are free to believe anything we like about ourselves. These beliefs then gain materiality over time.
It's like a map with an infinite number of pathways, and we select an avatar, a character, to cross that map. This avatar is created in the present moment through the assumptions (repeated thought patterns) we cultivate about ourselves.
Yes, we have free will over the now. No, we don’t have free will over the future materialisations of our choices.
In other words, we are at the mercy of the tides generated by thought. Thoughts about ourselves create assumptions; these assumptions are like pebbles cast into a pond that ripple outward and materialise in our lives.
This is why we must be so attentive to what we think.
Neville Goddard is one of those wonderful spiritual thinkers who grew out of 20th century America. He grew up in Barbados. I believe he’s cut from a similar cloth as the mythologist Joseph Campbell, but with a far more mystical approach. In his The Power of Awareness, he writes:
“The events which you observe are determined by the concept you have of yourself. If you change your concept of yourself, the events ahead of you in time are altered. But thus altered they form again a deterministic sequence starting at the moment of this changed concept. You are a being with powers of intervention which enable you, by a change of consciousness to alter the course of observed events, in fact, to change your future.”
I am just breathing through this, Patrick. It will take a while to percolate but this is why I subscribe to your work. Cool water in the desert.
So much here! Thank you for this. I'm struck by echos of Evagrius, when he says "Prayer is the rejection of concepts," particular to that final quote you shared by Goddard. As well, the way you orbit what the "is" is -- and how, it would seem, you prefer capital R Reality to the theories that can emerge from philosophy, which rings true with so many of my teachers who've said awareness (or at least, the work of growing in awareness) is the movement from the ideal to the real.
Grateful!