The Education of Free Will

by Robert Perry

I wanted to share something I’ve been chewing on. It’s theoretical but I also find it practical. It’s basically a single idea that kills a number of birds, so to speak, at once. I’ll first develop the single idea in a series of brief points and then explain the idea more fully:

  1. As a creation of God, our will must be free. God’s Will is free and we are like Him, so ours must be, too. In the original dictation, Jesus mentioned “the proper creation by man in his right mind” and then said that this “required the endowment of man by God with free will, because all loving creation is freely given.” In other words, to create, we need to have a free will.
  2. This necessarily means we inherently possess the ability to choose wrong.
  3. Our freedom must be used, however, to point our will in the right direction. This is how we create in Heaven and how we remain aware of Heaven.
  4. We most effectively learn which direction is the right direction by the results of our choices. Although choosing entails an inherent awareness of the rightness or wrongness of a choice, that rightness or wrongness comes through much more strongly when we experience the (joyful or painful) results of that choice.
  5. Experiencing the painful results of wrong choices and the joyful results of right choices ultimately educates us to point our will in the right direction—consistently and eternally.

OK, that’s the single idea. We have to have free will, because God does. This means we have to have the ability to make wrong choices. That seems bad, but it’s OK, because the experiential results of making wrong (and right) choices will inevitably educate us. It will inevitably teach us to point our will consistently (and eternally) in the right direction.

This single idea does a lot of work at once.

First, it explains the separation. Once God created us free, the possibility of us choosing separation—pointing our will away from God—was automatically there. But when we did, the results of that would simply educate us to point our will back in God’s direction.

Second, it explains why things happen in our lives the way they do. Events in our lives are merely the results of past choices coming home to roost in the most educational manner possible. Once we chose separation, we needed a feedback mechanism by which the results of our choices would be delivered to us, thus educating our will about which direction to point in. That feedback mechanism is the events of our lives (along with our emotional reactions).

Third, it is part of the explanation for why wrong choices are ultimately innocent. Wrong choices are not an expression of a fundamental wrongness in us. They are not the proof that we are sinful. They are just a way in which we learn. Sometimes you need to put your hand on the stove before you learn to not touch the stove. And we all will eventually learn that.

What is going on in this world, then, is that inherently perfect Sons of God are appearing in forms that reflect their past choices and are surrounded by circumstances that reflect their past choices, so that, quite simply, they can learn from those choices. They can learn which way to point their all-powerful wills. That is all that is happening in this world. It doesn’t matter if some of those Sons look more holy and some look more sinful, or if some appear more spiritual and some seem more worldly. They are all the same and are all simply going through a process of the education of their wills.

If we back all the way up to the biggest picture possible, here is what happened: In Heaven we chose a wrong thought, “Maybe I’ll be better off if I am a special Son, or if I can be more than a created being.” Then, in an instant, this thought fragmented into trillions of time-space episodes that reflected this thought—or more accurately, reflected various ratios of either going into this thought or moving out of it. All those episodes were experiential results of that thought. On a trillion fronts at once, then, we experienced the education of our will. We experienced the pain that comes from separation choices and the joy that comes from union choices. And then it was over. It only took an instant. We put our hand on the stove, and then we took it off and said, “I’m not doing that again.” We learned to point our wills consistently in God’s direction, to shine them consistently in the direction of creating.

Now, however, we seem to still be in that ancient separation thought, and experience our awareness locked up in one tiny episode—in this place and time, and nowhere else. But in reality, all that is going on is that this is one education-point in a vast process, whereby we are learning, via the results of our choices, to point our wills in the right direction. And that is what is also happening to the person in front of us, and the one to our right, and the one to our left.

That’s what’s happening to everyone we see. We are seeing a Son of God appearing in a form that reflects past choices and surrounded by circumstances that reflect past choices, so that he can ultimately learn which way to point his will.

This may not do much for you, as it is very theoretical. But for me what it does is wrap a lot up in a nice simple package: why the separation occurred, why things happen to us the way they do, why people are innocent even when they choose wrong.