On Free Will

Aka Where Is The Summer?

I have not always been a believer in free will.  Or at least, not a big supporter of it.  Let me explain.

In my high school days, down at the beach at Laguna, as was the habit and haunt of us kids from Long Beach, up the  coast a ways (the waves were always bigger further down south.  Or so we liked to think, with our driver’s licenses otherwise going to waste), I was engaged in idle conversation with one of my buddies at the water’s edge one fine day when ‘out of the blue’ - or so it felt - he asked me something like, “Do you think that we will come down to the beach like this when we have our own kids?’” And my immediate response, as I recall, and somewhat to my surprise, was to reply to him that I didn’t want to have any kids.  Not that I had ever given it much thought, if at all, before that moment.  He asked me, Why not.  And my response - again, much to my surprise - was to say (words to the effect) “Because they will grow up with minds of their own.  And they could be a disappointment to you.’” 

My next flirtation with that sort of subject was in my Junior year at university, when I had ‘a spiritual experience,’ which I have talked about in these pages before, and which caused me to drop out of school - at least, my formal education - and go searching for capital-t Truth.   I wanted to know ‘what this is all about’.  Years later - after a lot of such searching; and which mission is still with me to this day - I was to appreciate, and well understand, something that Gandhi said once, to some prompt or other.  Quote: “We don’t live in order to eat and sleep.  We eat and sleep in order to live.” 

Let me go back to ‘the beginning’ for a moment, to put all of this in a context.  When I was in the First grade, we were out on the school’s grounds during Recess one day, and I was pretty much just standing there, not engaging with the other kids in running around like chickens with their heads cut off (or so it seemed to me), when one of my classmates came up to me and said, “The Second graders are shooting at us.  What do we do.” Sure enough, a short ways away from where we were standing, some kids were crouched behind the school’s entrance stairs and such and were ‘shooting at us’ with their finger pistols.  What did this have to do with me?  I thought it, well, juvenile.  In any event, without batting an eye I turned to the tree next to me, and pretended to be ringing up a phone on it (we had the windup phones in those days), and said, calmly, in my pretend speaker, “The Second graders are shooting at us.  Send reinforcements.”  And that look care of that matter.  

Which also brings up the matter that I always felt more mature than the kids around me, at my level of schooling.  Later on I was to ‘write it off’ as due to the fact that I was already six years old when I started school, having turned six just a couple of months prior; whoever was in charge of these sorts of things in those days in my life (another story) having in their undoubted wisdom decided that I was too young to have started school the previous year.   For whatever actual reason, it was a fact of my life.  I remember more than once, while I was ‘growing up,’  wondering why the kids around me were acting so, well, foolishly.  Not ‘becoming’ to their age.  At least, according to my reckoning of such things.  But when I found myself thinking the same sort of thing much later on, I began to awaken to a larger potential answer to the conundrum.

That I was simply more mature than those around me.  Period.  Further on my Path.

I mean, who else would drop out of a very prestigious university in their Junior year and go out searching for capital-t Truth???  

I should have been paying more attention to the signals around me.  In any event, this is all by way of saying that it was very easy for me to entertain the notion of reincarnation, when I came across it in said search.  And understand why I would have felt, way back in my high school days, that I didn’t want to have my own kids, in ‘life’.  Because - quite possibly - I had done my dash in 3D life.  And it was far behind me.  Where I was, by then.  Wanting, ’not my will but Thine to be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven’.  As I intone every day, as part of my blessing over my daily food.  

I finally got it, in life.  (Well, one would hope that I ‘finally got’ something, after some eighty-five years at it.)  That we are here, as part of our exploration into All That Is.  Including to have a walk on the wild side.  Exercising our own (little) wills.  In order, finally - finally - to come to the understanding, and awareness - the consciousness - that 

we only want our Creator Source’s Will to be done.  Not our small individual one.  That it can lead us astray.

Off The Path.  That leads us 

to the

highest

Heaven.   

And find ourselves back where we began.

‘And know the place for the first time,’ as the poet put it.  Meaning, in part:

the richer for the experience.

And to hell with those who would attempt to deny us 

the Way

Back.

To

Unity.

Also known as

Home.

In the metaphorical Prodigal Son’s return.

A time - and Time - for rejoicing.

But in the mean time

we have a work to do.

Let’s do it.

It’s what we came here for, anyway.

And to awaken to that fact.

In time.

And

Time.

And leave our bodies on the distant shore.