Posted by Roberta Grimes • August 07, 2021 • 55 Comments
Book News, Human Nature, Understanding Reality
One ship sails East, and another West,
By the self-same winds that blow.
’Tis the set of the sails, and not the gales,
That tells the way we go.
– Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919), from “’Tis the Set of the Sail” (1916)
There is a persistent strain of scientific thought which holds that you have no free will. When you thought this morning about whether to have cereal or take the time to make French toast, in fact that decision already had been made in your brain without your active participation. You had cereal. And you had no choice in the matter. Your belief that you actually were making a choice is for many scientists a pure illusion, since their science proves you to be an automaton. You are incapable of ever in your life making any conscious choice.
I confess that when I first noticed this problem in science, I saw it as a transitory silliness. I wrote about it in The Fun of Dying a dozen years ago as an example of how completely around the bend that useless “fundamental scientific dogma of materialism” had driven the scientific community. Materialism has fostered in science the certainty that the human brain must generate consciousness, so for at least six decades scientists have obsessively studied that particular organ. The notion that matter generates consciousness is a staggeringly strange idea, on a par with believing that rocks generate sunshine; but materialist scientists remain undaunted by the fact that all their work over decades has yielded little progress toward figuring out how the meat in your skull creates who you are. One current idea is that the process is quantum, so no wonder it’s so hard for us to figure it out!
And as they have been chasing their tails in a pointless study of gray matter, scientists have drawn a bogus conclusion that they oddly persist in believing despite all the evidence against it. They believe that they can demonstrate that free will actually does not exist. A researcher named Benjamin Libet showed in the 1980s that muscular and nervous preparations to move a digit begin about 350 milliseconds before we actually decide to move it, thereby proving to many materialists that human beings have no actual free will. There are some scientists who are sure that Libet’s work proves no such thing, but theirs is a minority view. Scientists who stubbornly believe in free will still are mostly relegated to the religionist side of the battle between science and religion that goes back as far as Plato and Aristotle.
I bought Sam Harris’s book entitled Free Will when it first came out in 2012, and I read it as the in-joke howler that I assumed that he meant it to be. Sam Harris is a brilliant and sophisticated man. He has couched his career in the scornful materialist-atheist mold of the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, but he is of the generation following theirs. And he always has struck me as too smart to fall for any kind of stupidity, and especially for the pseudo-religious scientific nonsense of dogmatic materialist atheism. But, no such luck. A more recent article lauding Harris and his book explains why he holds these views. He says that “‘The phrase free will’ simply describes what it feels like to identify with certain mental states as they arise in consciousness — and our ‘freedom’ constitutes nothing more than this illusory feeling of control.” And at this point, most of the scientific community apparently shares this misconception. We are being urged now to accept this scientific theory as correct, but to believe in free will anyway, because if humanity’s prevailing view becomes the notion that we are not responsible for our actions, then civilization soon will fall apart.
On second thought, Sam Harris’s book, Free Will, is not remotely funny. Materialism and a fear-based refusal to look at any of the evidence for a greater reality have led him to write a paragraph that is breathtaking in its ignorance:
“Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn’t choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime — by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this?”
Please take a moment to appreciate the fact that because he refuses to go beyond the beliefs-based religion of scientism, poor Mr. Harris doesn’t know much of anything about anything. Every statement in that paragraph is wrong! In fact, your life was planned beforehand so you did choose your parents, your gender, and the time and place of your birth. Therefore, to some extent you controlled your genome as well, and in your pre-birth planning you also masterminded the major events of your life on earth. The scientific dogma of materialism makes it impossible for those who are stuck with it to investigate the whole truth about any important fact whatsoever.
But inevitably, the truth will win. Even if the scientific community and folks like Sam Harris refuse to open-mindedly seek what is true for another thousand years! At this point, there is so much evidence that consciousness is primary, just as there was in Galileo’s day abundant evidence that the earth circumnavigates the sun; and the modern scientific community has sadly put itself in the position of the medieval Catholic church, having to defend indefensible beliefs-based lies. Their enemy is no longer religion, for heaven’s sake! At this point, their enemy is the simple pursuit of the truth, untainted by any dogma. And if we aren’t seeking reality by now, then whatever we are doing is a waste of good oxygen! The plain fact is that what we experience as human consciousness is primary and it pre-exists everything else. The only thing those forty-year-old brain experiments prove is that these bodies are true avatars, no part of which contains our executive function. Our eternal minds decide and begin to move our bodies, at which point our bodies become aware of our decision.
To begin to open the minds of all those trapped in their scientific church with its bogus materialist dogma, here are a few places where they might begin a more open-minded exploration of the astonishing phenomenon that is human consciousness. Max Planck and Albert Einstein were perfectly right. Consciousness is primary and it gives rise to matter, and not the other way around:
You and I have absolute and unrestricted free will! We must have free will in order for us to be able to choose to grow spiritually, and in any event all the non-dogma-based evidence for our free will is consistent and overwhelming. Every decision that you make is deeply your own. I’m sure that even the scientists and the good Mr. Harris know this by now, but they play along with believing nonsense because it lets them keep their successful careers. The Medieval Catholic priests who came to suspect that Galileo was right and the earth does indeed go around the sun mostly had to keep their mouths shut, too.
Far from being just automatons, the evidence now indicates ever more amazingly that:
Scientists insist that you are just a meat-robot, without even the ability to decide what’s for breakfast. But in fact, you are a glorious eternal being for whose use the whole universe is continuously being created! You are nothing less than an integral part of the Consciousness that is all there is. And you are loved, dear precious friend, beyond all imaginings and beyond every rational measure. Don’t trust a materialist science that is blind to 
anything but solid matter, when in fact there is no such thing as solid matter! Instead, trust your own dawning awareness of the truth, which is something that no religion and no version of science even tries to investigate. As Jesus tells us, “The Truth will set you free!”
Like the winds of the sea are the waves of time,
As we journey along through life.
’Tis the set of the soul that determines the goal,
And not the calm or the strife.
– Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919), from “’Tis the Set of the Sail” (1916)
Excellent post today!
If there is no free will, are some predestined to harm others? Murder is neutral? Not a crime anymore? Why even punish robots made out of meat, right?!
Why even teach ethics and morality?
What about people who cannot decide easily? Brain malfunction?
What about regret about certain decisions?
What about Harvard neurosurgeon Eben Alexander’s book? Just Trash? Or truth indeed!
The notion that we are robots made out of meat is so ridiculous, so culturally potentially harmful, that I don’t understand why anyone would actually believe this utter nonsense. These materialistic ideas are as dangerous and harmful and brainwashing as some fanatic religious cults.
My dear Adri, you ask some wonderful questions! All of this is so obviously crazy, so absolutely surreal, and yet the scientific community holds materialism to be above all so they simply refuse to notice what nonsense this theory really is. Clearly SOMEONE makes these decisions! Our friend Sam Harris considers them to be the product of genetics, life experiences, etc., but that doesn’t explain why they happen at that one particular instant. The only explanation I can imagine is possible is that – you know – maybe God flips the switch? Or some sort of godlet, if you will? But the notion of a divine gremlin of any size making that decision 350 milliseconds before we are aware of it is even worse for the atheist dogma of materialism than is the notion that we might have free will! And it pounds poor Fr. Occam’s Razor into just a pile of little pointy bits 🙂
Dear Roberta,
Congratulations for your perfectly accurate assessment of how we come to life here, and why, and how ignorant the materialist scientists are with their new religion. Quantum mechanics (QM) was founded on a false premise, and has led to false conclusions, what Einstein correctly termed instantaneous spooky action at a distance (it does not exist). So, hooking explanations of how consciousness functions to QM drives understanding about it further into a black hole. If any “scientist” really believed that they were a robotic machine lacking any autonomy, why would they bother to get out of bed?
Now, the body does have biological functions regulated by the body itself, such as breathing and metabolism for energy, freeing the mind to do what mind does best, what the body cannot comprehend. Freud, for example, correctly described the Id as functioning for bodily needs and wants, and an Ego to regulate the Id’s blind desires, avoiding consequences from misbehavior, with a SuperEgo sensitive to social norms, but in trying to be a good materialist scientist, he ruled against any role for the soul and its God.
It’s interesting that Id and Ego functioning have been localized to specific brain areas, but not the SuperEgo. The SuperEgo is really best explained as the moral conscience of the eternal soul. I have a paper in review now that proposes that psychotherapy would be vastly improved by recognizing that there is a real conflict between body and soul, and counseling ought address that conflict instead of numbing people with drugs to alleviate what amounts to guilt over unkind, or malicious, behavior.
It sounds like the id and ego relationship is quite delicate and can go awry fairly easily. Could this account for some of the irrational behavior we see in people? It seems to me that some type of traumatic event could upset this balance.
Lola, That’s precisely correct. The body is driven by its needs and wants, and they may and often do come into conflict with our moral conscience. A noted therapist,Thomas Szasz ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz ), had argued from his experience with patients that the bulk did not suffer from any physical maladies, but instead were suffering from the conflicts generated by their own sense that they were behaving badly; and that they needed to come to grips with the difficulties of life.
To make the case for this conflict even stronger, I cite three NDE reports in which the body was seen to be acting on its own even after the spirit left in an OBE and watched as it continued to function. In one case, the body swam to avoid drowning, in another the body punched the truck driver who hit it, and in a third the person watched herself yelling. There is a real conflict between body and soul that arises from ordinary life.
I certainly agree, and I feel that the conflict between body and soul can become very extreme sometimes, especially due to the fact that almost no one is aware of this conflict, I also agree with you that numbing people with expensive drugs is just sweeping dirt under the carpet – I guess it’s too much work to address the actual problem.
That’s interesting, Jack, the NDE-er’s body blindly forging on! I hadn’t heard of that. I did quite a lot of NDE studies in the eighties, until I became convinced via testimony of the actually dead and a lot of internal evidence that no one having an NDE goes to the afterlife, but instead they are just astral-traveling. Fascinating phenomenon!
Dear Jack, I agree that many individual scientists likely have problems with the notion that we don’t have free will. They think the experiments are flawed, or some of them even suspect that those experiments point to a lot more going on. I have seen rare cases where a scientist will say in writing about this or some other weirdness that perhaps it “calls our underlying assumptions into question.” But at this point, that’s like questioning some stupid Christian dogma. Like “celibate” Catholic priests, for example. If you say it, what you said just drops into the sea without so much as creating a ripple. There is no more strictly enforced belief-system than the atheistic materialism upon which the whole structure of modern mainstream science is built!
Good Morning Roberta…
I’ll keep this comment short…. Your absolutely correct in your statements, Why?
I, personally, am able to direct healing energy to anyone, who willing will accept this energy, any place on this Globe.. All I do is think the thought of to whom, brief description of why, what date and time; and then go about my day.
Weather the direction I give is for today or next week the energy arrives at the request time. This is not by brain working, IMO, it’s the mind who has the connection to the Quantum Field that is inside us and all around us. We live in this soup of energy….
I can’t think of any other plausible explanation of how I am able to accomplish this act of thinking a thought and the request is processed by GOD.
Skip
Please heal my emotional numbness/anhedonia. I’ll give you whatever you need.
Skip what an amazing gift to have x
My goodness, dear Skip, now you have a following both here and in my email in-box! Love your description of what it is that you can do. We do indeed live in a “soup of energy”!!
It’s too bad he’s ignoring us
Dear Dorothy, this message today is so important but since I face a decision at almost 91, how to spend my last years, your words that we did mastermind the major life’s experiences before we incarnate, then whatever I decide is not a free decision once I incarnate- that is for this big decision it was already made? Whether to return to Brasil and my beloved family and work until my final days on earth, or stay here in the States where I am unhappy with churches, the individualism of Americans and the false theology all about us. Thank you, mind provoking !
Oh my dear Barbara, I continue to love that you call me Dorothy! That is my dear, sainted mother’s name – she would be 102 now, but she graduated eight years ago. And she did not for a minute believe in the afterlife, but once she got there she traveled all over; she said that she was checking my work in having written The Fun of Dying :-).
No my dear, of course you make your own decisions! Materialist science is altogether wrong and foolish. It is likely that you planned that your husband would go ahead of you so you would have some personal time here without him for further individual growth, but you know that you will be going to your real home very soon! I know you haven’t asked my view, but I think that in your place, I would go back to Brasil to be with family and very old friends and simply enjoy life. The US is going through an awful time. If I had somewhere else to go, I would be tempted!
I do believe that at least some people are predestined to pursue certain careers or passions that they seem to be obsessed with, but they probably pre-planned it before this current incarnation. However, it would be ridiculous to think that decisions about what to eat and other mundane things are beyond our control. Who would benefit from this? As Skip said, we live in a “soup of energy” all around us, and I think we are meant to work with this energy, but we wouldn’t be able to do that if we had no free will.
My dear Lola, I think that most of us plan a line of work, or at least a class of work that will be most suited to the life-lessons we have planned. I knew from when I was very young that I was going to be an attorney, and it turns out that was indeed a part of my life-plan for a number of reasons.
And of course we have absolute free will! It is our greater mind that makes these decisions, and communicates them to our body, so our conscious awareness apparently realizes the decision has been made only when it notices that the movement in question has been initiated. There are many body-related things that our limited earth-minds apparently leave to our greater minds to initiate and carry out, such as the movements required in walking, opening a door, and so on. The system works wonderfully, but since mainstream scientists refuse to study it – refuse even to acknowledge that our minds exist at all outside of our meat-brains – they have no idea how any of this works!
If we have free will, does anyone know what prevents us from having the desired outcomes. For example, if a person chose to be born healthy, then why were they born with a disability? Could this be caused by the Free Will of others? Thank you.
Dear Terry, at any given time when people are planning a new lifetime with the help of their spirit guides, there will be a limited number of bodies about to be born in the right time and plaee for them to hit all their marks in their just-planned lifetime, so we can’t really entirely choose our ideal body.
There are a number of descriptions in the literature that I find fascinating! For example, three suitable bodies – but you wanted female and they all are male. One is being born into a dysfunctional family, so some risk there, although they are likely to work it out; one will have a tendency to high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes. The third is intellectually on the slower side. Take your pick!
In my own case, I understand that my need to be born when and approximately where I was born required that I be born outside my soul group, conceived out of wedlock, and as a female. The parents were going to marry and they were good people, so that was okay. Thomas talked himself into the female-body thing being actually an advantage in this work, and I think indeed it is an advantage; but he seems never to have gotten over a kind of squeamish about his always-male friend through 17 prior lifetimes now being a woman! And what he considers to be a somewhat ditsy one, at that.
It is not science that you are dealing with, it is the truth. The Bible is still the best explanation for why this life exists. A creator God, that created it for you to understand why you live this life. May God bless you and help you see that the entire Bible is God’s message.
Hi Terry Gaddis. The entire Bible begins with a God who sets up a temptation for the first two humans and a serpent to do the tempting. He instructs the Jewish people to make war with almost everyone they meet He kills almost everything in a flood. He makes a wager with Satan about Job. And sends his son to be tortured and crucified. Not my idea of a loving god.
Oh, and had the Angel of Death slaughter children in Egypt.
This sounds more like the classic definition of a sadistic psychopath rather than a loving god. How does this pan out to be “the best explanation for why this life exists.”?
Because one needs understand the story from beginning to end. When man and woman made there free will choice, the bible states what the consequences were. Everything that seemed to follow these choices, we have paid for.
Actually, except in the Gospels, we don’t find a good explanation in the Bible for why we even must live these lives. But those that we used to think were dead tell us the same thing that Jesus tells us: we enter these lives in order to grow spiritually away from fear and toward ever more perfect love. That is it, and that is all!
Oh my dear Ray. I think a great many people feel as you do! As is sometimes said to practicing Christians: “Think bigger – your God is too small!”
Dear Roberta. I hadn’t heard that one 😆
Modern Christians say it to one another. But even those who say it still are thinking about God in terms that are WAY too small!!
When you read right through the Old Testament, you get a strong sense of who the Jehovah-God of the ancient Hebrews actually was – and you feel an empathy for that God and a sense that we really were (and still are) kind of awful and exasperating. It is so easy to see where the Christian image of God came from! He is so far above us, and so perfect compared to all our many failings, that no way is God likely even to want us around. Of course God wants to squash us like a bug. Of course God’s wrath is upon us, and God’s sending Jesus to be tortured and killed so God won’t torture and kill us all as we so richly deserve is a great mercy!
Having all of that in your mind makes it harder to grasp the genuine Godhead – Which is only perfect love! – and the preciousness of each one of us in God’s eyes. I had to come to see us as God’s baby prince, so perfectly loved and so precious and eventually to become a literal part of the Godhead, so we are loved beyond measure and all our worst failings here are like the baby spilling milk on the carpet. They are nothing! And we will grow past it all, and grow into being the spiritual royalty that in God’s eyes we already perfectly are.
Oh my dear Terry, it would be so simple if only it were true that “the entire Bible is God’s message”! How simple and powerful that would be. But I have studied the Bible extensively, read it cover to cover at least a dozen times, and I majored in early Christian history in college. And the plain fact is that the Bible is so full of both human and divine barbarities, cultural horrors, and blatant internal contradictions that it cannot possibly all be the Word of a loving – or even of a sane and rational – God.
The entire Bible is man’s search for a God made in man’s image, and it reads that way. Except for the four Gospels. There we find the extraordinary story of the Godhead’s search for humankind! Jesus did in fact come to us directly from the highest aspect of the Godhead. That is real, and true, and perfectly extraordinary. When you read the Biblical books in order, the difference between the Gospels and the books that come before and after those books is so obvious. And very moving!
I love that expression: “the Godhead’s search for humankind”! Do you mind if I borrow it?
Hi Mike! No, of course, use it as you like. It’s true in fact about the Gospels, and it feels so profound!
I feel that way about the bible as well. God sounds so angry all the time and full of the desire for revenge. Do you think it was written by people who were so used to the violence that existed then, they may have projected their own feelings onto a god that they created in their mind, but didn’t really exist?
Dear Lola, all the gods of all the religions – including Christianity – are made by humans, in the image of powerful humans. So the gods of all the religions are angry, judgmental, vengeful, petty, and in other ways they act the way people expect powerful human beings to act. But the Godhead is not a human being! The Godhead has no human failings. And that can be a surprisingly difficult concept for people who grew up worshiping fallible gods to really get their minds around.
That/s very true. Add to that the fact that all these made up gods have a gigantic ego, and you have a perfect dictatorship, which is what they were used to back then
Dear Roberta,
I would agree with you here. But, man’s interpretation of a message can be flawed by his own nature. As Moses was writing the Genesis account, he certainly didn’t get all the details.
I like the fact that you seem to be extracting the positive material from the Bible and not the negative such as the Gospels. I think this makes the Bible only one of many sources upon which to draw truth from, thank you.
If the entire Bible is not God’s message, then none of it truly is because it is mixed with partial truths, especially the ones from man himself. But, it seems to me either way that there is something greater than ourselves that has tried to communicate with us, and this is why the Bible has retained it’s value for so long?
Hi Roberta. In your opinion, would I be correct to say that it is God’s will that we have free will, so that we can then learn to choose, of our own volition, to align with, or surrender to, God’s will? Some might see paradox there, but for my own part, it is coming to make more and more sense. (Not my will God, but thy will be done – to paraphrase the Lord’s Prayer.)
Yes, my dear Scott. Precisely! Our complete free will is central to the reason why we enter these bodies, which is to be repeatedly challenged and stressed and always to choose love over fear. It’s easy to say, but it can be hard to do in practice!
I must say that your story is a quite a story, especially the male friend who is now a woman. Truth is stranger than fiction. And no one knows for certain of any guarantees. But, one thing about this life that sucks, is that once we make a choice, we are stuck with it.
Dear Terry, we generally favor one gender through many incarnations, but we do occasionally incarnate as the other. That seems to be the source of some gender confusion. I recall wanting desperately to be a boy when I was a child, and beating up all the boys in my third-grade class, but once my hormones kicked in at sixteen or so I was fine. So I am strongly opposed to letting children transition pre-puberty, since in fact for nearly all of them puberty makes them comfortable with their birth-gender. And if this trans fad had been around when I was a child, I would likely have done it. And ruined my life.
Hi again Terry Gaddis. I do like some scripture. ( I’ll paraphrase). Life is a vapor, that appears for a little while, then vanishes.
Dear Ray, scripture that is thousands of years old doesn’t necessarily get things right! And in fact, life is a primary property of consciousness, which is the base creative force that continuously manifests this universe. It may be true that even all forms of matter are to some extent conscious, and to some extent alive. I don’t think anyone can yet say for certain, but the evidence is tantalizing!
Dear Roberta. I was thinking more in terms of this earthly life.
Hmmm… so you’re saying that it appears to us that life is like a vapor that appears and disappears? I guess you’re right about that! And scientists are especially clueless. They think some chemicals plus a lightning strike would be enough to make life appear, and when a body can no longer support life then it disappears. Yup, I guess you’re right!
Children who are pre-puberty or going through puberty are too young to make any important decisions at all, let alone what gender they choose to be, not to mention the hatred generated towards them, especially in the past. It has been the cause of many suicides and even murders.
Yes, children so young aren’t even allowed to make important decisions in other aspects of their lives! But the most crucial point is the fact that puberty seems to make nearly all “trans” children become comfortable with their birth-gender. For most of them, it fixes the problem, and this was certainly true in my case! So for adults to intervene before puberty and try to affirm a transgender child’s notion that he or she has the wrong birth gender is plain evil. In nearly all of these cases, as was true in mine mine, they have pre-birth memories of having been the other gender in a previous lifetime or two; and until there are hormones to affirm the birth gender, they can be confused. That is no reason to risk ruining a young child’s whole life!
Don’t Non-Dualists/Advaita masters believe in a lack of free will? Everyone agrees they’re enlightened people, so I guess I’ll always have cognitive dissonance with this topic.
Dear Ali, even enlightened people can be clueless about certain things. The only evidence that we don’t have free will is some scientific experiments conducted in the sixties that are flawed simply because scientists are frankly clueless about the operation of consciousness, And that’s it. The whole notion that we lack free will flies in the face of simple common sense! You can conduct your own experiment, in fact. Just randomly decide to move. Can you move? Then you’ve got free will. End of story!
We know from the real experts – those who are not actually dead – that our free will is absolute. And in fact, in order for us to complete our spiritual challenges on earth, we must have unrestricted free will. End of story!
Yes, most do. Although I started my ‘search’ in the Spiritualist Church here in Great Britain, I became heavily involved in NonDuality. The ‘pro’ was – I was shown I direct path to Self, the ‘con’ was that not one of the teachers I met would talk about the continuity of consciousness in a way that included an ‘afterlife’. It is just not part of their remit.
There’s the subtle feeling of ‘that’s it’ once you realise the Self, but to me it’s just a beginning.
Dear Tim, this is so perfectly said! Yes, unless the human personality continues after bodily death, it is hard to see what the point could be to anything that we might do, especially including our efforts to grow spiritually. No point then, at all.
And you are entirely right when you say that spiritual growth here is “just a beginning.” In fact, we continue to grow eternally! And this is the great failing of all religions, and even including Spiritism and Spiritualism. They don’t have a way to tie in with building an ever greater understanding of what really are the great truths of all of reality. No religion has the vision to attempt to do that! And yet, that is where real understanding begins….
So good to hear you validating that, Roberta. I much appreciate the clarity you bring to this whole topic. Craig Hogan has also offered me some useful insights on this topic. And, although one of my favourite authors – Bernardo Kastrup, is reluctant to elaborate on the topic in any detail, at least he says that *something* is still in exitance after bodily death – even though he says that it’s not the Bernardo he knows of right now!
Oh my dear Tim, Craig and Bernardo are two of my very favorite people! And Craig does know a great deal about what actually happens after death, but – you’re right – Bernardo hasn’t studied the afterlife evidence and it really isn’t his focus. It is only lately that I have come to realize that Craig Hogan is really the only other person I know who has made a study of this whole gigantic field of the afterlife and the greater reality, and has put it all together and found that it made sense. So, more and more, he and I are offering one another mutual care and support. It is so lovely to have someone there to validate my own conclusions!
Hi Roberta, hi everybody!
It is very important to note that the Free Will that is the subject of this blog post is that decision-making power and creative force (choice) of our higher self to have this experience we perceive as incarnation. It is intrinsic to the base Creative Force of God. There is no Creation without Free Will and the participation by choice of all that Exists in that Creation, which is ongoing. This is not about the will to decide about how to respond to physical stimuli.
My dear Mike, this is very well said. Perhaps the only thing that is integral and essential to every human life on earth is our sacred ability to freely choose love over fear! It is important that each of us always keep the fact that we face that choice at every moment forever foremost in our minds, since the more we learn to make the choice automatically the more rapidly we will raise our own spiritual vibrations. It still confounds me to realize that at our stage, spiritual growth does really seem to be that simple!