WILL AND DIVINE WILL #1

COMBINED 7/24-7/31-8/7

p. 155-165

I am going to attempt to keep this as simple as possible. 

There is my will—the will of my “little self” the ego consciousness that is essentially only aware of itself and its own needs. “I want what I want when I want ti and I want it right now!”

There is the Divine Will-the will of God; the will for only good. The ego perceives the divine Will as being “outside” itself; whereas the soul sees itself as the embodiment of the Divine Will. 

You are probably familiar with an old cartoon image of a person with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other carrying on this continual moral “tug-of-war.” 

And depending on circumstances, one side wins.

This oversimplified model does not answer the question, “Who/what decides?”

There is a an aspect of self described in A Course in Miracles called the “decider.”

The “decider” can be influenced by many factors, and it would be foolish to try and list them all, but you can explore for yourself all the varied influences on your decision making process.

The object lesson here is to raise the level of frequency of the decider so that choices become more and more drawn to the highest good of all. We do that through awareness, acceptance of love, compassion, raising our own level of self worth and the realization that all our actions, all our thoughts touch everyone and everything around us.

“When you have a choice, in any moment, to go with the lower or the higher, you can choose the higher if you want to. And the results of your life, those things that respond to those choices, will become higher in accordance. Period. But the bondage that you have to your own self-will is something that we will discuss now.

To understand right now that the will that you correspond to most times is a lower-energy way of self-identifying, then you begin to move through it to access the higher information.”

In other words, most of us are “stuck” in lower level choices; well, not stuck so much as we habitually fall into these lower vibration choices—we are used to doing that; it is familiar.

“Paul is wondering, “How do I align my will with Divine Will? How is this done?” Now, Paul, we want to tell you that it is done through choice and through surrender to honoring the frequency of Word.

“I am now choosing to Word through my own will to align my will into accordance with Divine Will. I am now aligning my will in alignment with the knowing of what I require to make this so. I am choosing now to offer myself at this frequency to the higher frequency that would accord my will into agreement and into congruence with Divine Will. I am Word through this intention. Word I am Word.”

If you have ever struggled with an addiction and gotten to the surrender part, you realize you have a whole new set of choices you can make. Initially that might not be easy, but after some time you find yourself making these “higher” frequency choices much more naturally.

Discernment here is going to be different for each one of us, and for me, her is where prayer and guidance are essential for me to know the difference between making a decision based on fear or making a decision that allows me to move beyond my fear.

This might be a really good point to discuss in class.

Two last things for this part of the study:

1. Every thought, every action affects all beings. If we believe we are one then that would be obvious, but we do not live in that truth all the time.

2)   Why is there suffering?

This same question has been asked in all sorts of ways; why is there evil in the world? how can you explain evil if there is a loving God? etc.

“Now we will tell you. God does not create pain, God does not align to pain, you do. And as you create through your fear, you create trouble. But the pain that is in the world now is the result of thousands of years of conscious restriction that has borne pain and suffering. Your choice now as a species is to become responsible to the self that thinks and creates and to the brother that stands beside you. How can you fear pain when you can truly understand that there is a Source that is made of love?

Now we will explain what we mean here. The evil that you see, and that is not a word we like to use, is an out-picturing of consciousness and it is controlled through an out-picturing and an agreement at a level of matrix that you have all engaged in. Now there are reasons that people have experiences in this life that you cannot understand or cannot accept as a good thing. And some of these, in fact, are chosen prior to incarnation by the soul in order to balance karma or to learn certain lessons that will be of benefit to others in later lifetimes. If you can imagine that it takes a form of humiliation for some to learn true humility, you will then understand that what is required of you is that lesson, so that you can learn it in order to be a vessel later on when that service is required of you.”

This is NOT an explanation; it is a description. You are still nto going to be able to grasp this with your mind. We are in the realm of mystery here, way beyond wha the thinking mind can comprehend.