“Freedom and Will are Attributes of the spirit, which remains forever changeless because it is always in the Divine’s Presence. Free will, or the option of choosing to join one’s will with the Divine’s or to choose otherwise, is an attribute of the split mind, not the spirit.” “In honor of the sanctity of your will, Reality cannot break through the obstructions you interpose, but It will envelop you completely when you let them go.”
An essential expression of the Law of Creation is that the Divine honors all of our creations, even our miscreations, because It honors all of Its Creations, or Children. The difference is that the Divine never miscreates, though some of Its Children believe that they have miscreated in making the world perceived outside themselves. This belief resulted in the dream world we find ourselves in.
Freedom, free will, and the sanctity of our minds and creative activity are major themes in the Course. Every Divine Attribute, from Joy to Peace, has Freedom at Its Core. Our Creator created us as free beings, to exercise Freedom in our own creative activity. How else could a limitless Creation have been created? Our free will can express and extend this Freedom or, because it is free, can deny It. However, our free will exercised outside of Divine Will leads to unreality because it has removed itself from Reality. The result in our experience when that happens is that of dissonance, chaos, and harm. Our free will exercised within Divine Will leads to Resonance, Peace, and Joy, i.e., to Freedom.
Free will is discussed on the very first page of the Course: “Free will doesn’t mean that human beings get to determine the courses they must master in the school of life. Free will means that human beings get to choose what they want to focus on at any given time.” The Course confirms this idea at the beginning of the Manual for Teachers: “As this Course emphasizes, you are not free to determine awakening’s curriculum, or even the form in which you will learn it. You are free, however, to decide when you want to learn it. And as you accept it, it is already learned.”
Because free will is an aspect of Freedom, it can oppose Freedom only in delusion. “Peace is a natural Heritage of the spirit. Everyone is free to refuse to accept their inheritance, but they are not free to establish what their inheritance is. . . . All the separated ones feel that they are imprisoned in some way. If this has been the result of their own free will, they must regard their will as if it were not free, or the obviously circular reasoning of their own position would be quite apparent. Undeluded free will must lead to Freedom. Judgment always imprisons because it believes that it has shattered Reality into the pieces of perception, has separated segments of this delusion according to highly unstable scales of desire, and has then accepted some of these pieces and rejected others.” “You are not free to give up Freedom, but only to temporarily deny It. In fact denying It is what makes the temporal. You cannot do what the Divine did not intend, because what It did not intend cannot and does not happen [in Reality].”
Through these reflections it becomes clear that we are given free will within parameters. It makes sense that some things in life must be done, for instance, in a sequential order in order to make sense, such as the order we speak or write words, the sequential order we follow to accomplish many tasks, etc. In life we can’t just do whatever we want in whatever way we want. All rational adults understand this limitation on free will. Does the fact that many things have a built-in order we must follow mean that we aren’t free?
An analogy is that we aren’t free to make up the rules in a game we have merely joined. Some rules in the game have already been established, and within those rules we get to play the game if and as we will. To believe that this isn’t the case is a form of magical thinking, and someone with this belief will be frustrated when they find that their wishes that are counter to the rules of the game can’t be realized. As one Course Workbook lesson theme states, “Because my true will is free of all conflict, conflicting wishes cannot be my will.”
This natural limitation of free will exists in this dimension we experience of life, and a similar arrangement exists in Creation. We are held within a meaningful Universe which is governed by Divine Laws. We have unlimited Freedom within those Laws, but we don’t have Freedom to establish those Laws. Our natural state of being, and that to which we are returning in our awakening from illusions, is to align what we will, or intend, with the Divine’s Will, which is expressed as the Divine Laws.
“(The Divine’s) Laws govern you because They govern Everything. You cannot exempt yourself from Its Laws, although you can deny Them. But if you do, and only if you do, you will feel lonely and helpless, because you are then denying yourself Everything. When the Children of the Divine accept the Laws of the Divine as what they gladly will, it is impossible that they be bound or limited in any way. For in that Instant they are as free as the Divine would have them be.”
It is deeply meaningful that only when we align our will with Divine Will are we free. In dissonance from the Source of Creation we cannot be free because it’s an unstable state, and our power is required to try to hold the instability together rather than in exercising our Freedom. Resonance with this Source is completely stable, a state that frees us from engaging our power in attempts at stabilization, allowing us to be truly creative. Still, our free will means that we can choose to go against Divine Will until we choose otherwise. However, when we do choose to miscreate we remove ourselves from the true Creation and fall asleep into a dream state.
“The Divine’s Laws will keep your mind at peace, because Peace is the Divine’s Will, and Its Laws are established to uphold Peace. Its are the Laws of Freedom, but the ones you made up are the laws of bondage. Since Freedom and bondage are irreconcilable, their laws cannot be understood together. The Laws of the Divine work only for your good, and there are no other laws beside Its. Everything else is merely lawless, and therefore chaotic. But by Its Laws the Divine Itself has protected Everything It created. Therefore, anything that is not within Its Laws does not exist.”
Our free will is so powerful that it can’t be opposed with regard to the effect it has, by our choice, on ourselves. “My [Jesus’] will cannot overcome yours, because yours is as powerful as mine. If it were not so, the Children of the Divine would be unequal. All things become possible through our joint will. But my will alone will not help you. Your will is as free as mine, and the Divine Itself would not go against it. I cannot will what the Divine does not will. I can offer you my will to make yours invincible by this sharing, but I cannot oppose yours without competing with it and thereby violating the Divine’s Will for you. Nothing the Divine created can oppose your will, as nothing the Divine created can oppose Its Will. The Divine gave your will Its Power, which I can only acknowledge in honor of the Divine’s.
“If you want to be like me, I will help you, knowing that we are alike. If you want to be different, I will wait until you change your mind. I can teach you, but only you can choose to listen to and learn my teaching. How else can it be, if the Divine’s Realm is Freedom? Freedom cannot be learned by tyranny of any kind, and the perfect Equality of all the Divine’s Children cannot be recognized through the dominion of one will over another. The Divine’s Children are equal in will, all being the Will of their Creator. This is the only lesson I can teach, knowing that it is true.”
“(The Divine) created you and all Creation for Itself, but It gave you the Power to create for your Self, so you would be like the Divine. That is why your will is holy.” “(The Divine) will not interfere with you, because It would not know Its Children if they were not free. To interfere with you would be to attack Itself, and the Divine is not insane. When you denied It, you acted insanely. Would you have It share this insanity?”
In honor of the sanctity of our creative will, the Divine will not “save” us from what we want or desire, or even wish. We can only save ourselves by learning that what we really want is only that which is aligned with our Creator’s Will, and letting go of all else.
“After the separation the Divine honored even the miscreations of Its Children, because they had made them.” “The Divine builds the Bridge [leading us Home], but only in the space left clean and vacant by the miracle. The seeds of sickness and the shame of the belief in sin It cannot bridge, for It can’t destroy the alien will that It created not.”
While this principle of the Divine honoring even the miscreations of Its Children can seem quite strange, the distinction is made in the Course between our true creative activity which is eternal and which has never ceased, called “creating,” and our miscreative or false creative activity which is time-bound, and which is called “making” in the Course. That which is created is infinite and eternal, while that which is made is limited and temporal and therefore must have an ending. But the ending has to be determined by the maker, in honor of the sanctity of their mind and creative activity.
“The thoughts projected by the minds of the Divine’s Children have all the power that they give them. The Thoughts they share with the Divine are beyond their belief, but those they made alone are their beliefs. And it is these, and not the Truth, that they have chosen to defend and love. These thoughts will not be taken from them, because Children of the Divine made them. But these thoughts can be given up by those who made them, for the source of the undoing of these thoughts is in their makers.”
Because the “ego,” or the pseudo-self that we made to act as our self in the world of illusions, was the result of the (mis)creative activity of some Children of the Divine, it has a form of intelligence and power reflecting theirs, and in honor of the creative free will of its maker the ego can never be destroyed, even by the Divine. Therefore the only way to “get rid of” the ego and escape the dream world it seems to live in is for their maker – us – to relinquish them consciously and in freedom by removing all belief in them.
“The Divine did not blot out the ego, because to eradicate it would have been to attack it. Being questioned [by the ego], the Divine did not question. It merely gave the Answer. The Divine’s Answer [the Holy Spirit] is your Teacher.” “The ego’s existence does depend on your mind, and as you made it by believing in it, so you can dispel it by withdrawing belief from it.”
The things the separated ones have made in the dream world are honored as creative activity in the sense that they will not be destroyed because they are false but will merely cease to be as soon as those who have made them decide they no longer want them. This evaluation of everything resulting from our creative activity, including our miscreations, in which we keep only that which is truly an expression of Love, and therefore a true creation and worthy to be in Eternity, and let everything else go, is called the “Final Evaluation” in the Course. This is a process each Divine Child must do individually with the help of the Holy Spirit. This process when completed will mark the end of time and the reentry into Eternity for each individual who engages in it.
“Nothing that the Children of the Divine believe can be destroyed. But what is meaningful and real and true to them must be brought to the last comparison they will ever make, the last evaluation that will be possible, the ‘final judgment’ upon this world. It is the judgment of Truth upon illusion, of Knowledge on perception, which is that illusion and perception have no meaning and do not exist.”
The entire Course is designed to help each of us make this free will choice of truly evaluating, with Spirit’s Help, our creative activity and the fruit of this. The last of the Course’s fifty principles of miracles presented in the first chapter of the Text describes this process: “The miracle brings human creative activity into the Realm of Divine Creation, accepting as true what is in accord with Divine Will and Its Creation, and returning what is discordant, or out of accord, as false and requiring refinement or correction where these would be meaningful.”
This principle of the Creator, Divine Essence, and the Holy Spirit honoring all of our creative activity, even our miscreations until we freely withdraw our creative Power from them, explains why the process of all human beings truly evaluating all their creative activity and awakening to Reality could take even longer than the “separation” – the making of this world of illusions – took. “Just as the process of the separation occurred over many millions of years, the Last Judgment – the Atonement – will extend over a similarly long period, and perhaps even longer. Its length depends, however, on the effectiveness of the present Celestial speedup.” This principle also suggests why we or the world are not just “handed” awakening without our conscious participation every step of the way, in every decision we make each day. This honors our free will.
“This world will change through you. No other means can awaken it, for the Divine’s Plan is simply this: The Children of the Divine are free to awaken themselves, given the Word of the Divine to be their Guide, forever in their mind and at their side to lead them surely to their Creator’s House by their own will, forever free as the Divine’s Will. They are not led by force, but only Love. They are not judged, but only blessed.”