A human being has been endowed with only twenty-five percent of free will. Where is the remaining seventy-five percent? It is broken up between pre-natal and post-natal instincts, habits and karmic actions deeply buried within the subconscious mind.
As previously stated, you are born with about seventy-five percent of your life predetermined by your past. You will make up the remaining twenty-five percent. If you yourself, through your own free choice and effort of will, do not determine what that twenty-five percent will be, the seventy-five percent will make the twenty-five percent up for you, and you will become a puppet.
That is, you will be ruled absolutely by your past, by the influence and effects of your past tendencies. This is why spiritual training is vital. It takes into consideration not only the seventy-five percent of our lives that we already are, but also designates the methods to mold the brand new twenty-five percent that we ourselves are going to create by the exercise of our freedom.
This Cosmic Law is not the doer of things, but the evolutionary mode of operation of cause and effect. This law works changes when activated by the agency of our decisions, which are determined either by our past tendencies, or by our present free choice.
The motive of Eternal Good that is interlinked with the Cosmic Law is in every atom, and in us too. It is what inherently urges us to learn from past mistakes, and to use our free choice and will to initiate those positive causes that produce everlasting good effects.
What we do automatically is within a predetermined realm of the law of cause and effect. That is, when habit-psychological or physiological determines our conduct, the habit is the cause, and our conditioned response is the effect. What we do with a distinct motive decided upon by free choice is within the realm of “final cause.” When we act in accordance with a forethought of a distant purpose, such as to realize a goal or attainment of an object, and we harness our habits and will-initiated actions to serve as the means to that end, we are acting according to the “final cause.”
Every motive is a “final cause,” and every “final cause” starts the series of ordinary cause and effect. President Wilson wanted world peace. He boarded a ship, crossed over to France, and gave his”fourteen points.” The thought of world peace is the “final cause,” or motive; the preparation for the trip, taking the boat and crossing the Atlantic, delivering his speech, and so forth, are the series of ordinary causes and effects started by the “final cause.”
All our impulsive and habitual acts, and motive-caused acts (that is, actions initiated by “final causes”), are the chariots that carry the will of the Lord, the Cosmic Law, the Divine Final Cause. In other words, everything happens according to the will of God as expressed in His Cosmic Law. We are instruments for the fulfillment of that Law. Our part is to make the right free choice so that our instrumentality is used to fulfill the good effects rather than the unpleasant ones that cause suffering as a means of teaching man to avoid wrong actions. When our chariots run into the ditch because they were hitched to wrong actions, they have to be pulled out by strenuous effort of our will and God’s will as expressed in the CosmIc Law.
Frankly speaking, from the highest metaphysical point of view, the truth is that the Cosmic Law has its hand in everything that we have done or are going to do. Fortunately, we do not realize that. If we try to fathom with our crude understanding that greatest mystery by which the universe is governed, we would become paralyzed from self-induced fatalistic blows to our psychological make-up.
Do not let your dream or be broken by fatalism when it is not yet time for you to wake in the daylight of God. You will be puzzled by your wrong judgment of God’s ways. The first step toward understanding is to use your will to make those choices that are in harmony with the Eternal Good within the Cosmic Law.
Truth Be Known.
Most men and women think they are free while their consciousness is completely shackled and chained in psychological chains. These are not like ordinary chains for in their subtlety they are even harder to get rid off because of the difficulty in recognizing them let alone knowing how to destroy them. These poor souls are dragging their semi-unconscious coma-like minds and bodies around all day long. Every now and then you see a man who is truly free. A man that doesn’t walk in dead man’s shoes, a man who is free because he is not influenced by activity but by wisdom.
This young boy was endowed with reason under the strict discipline and protection of his mother; but as he grew up, he told his mother he realized how safe he was under her custody and supervision but “why” he asked, “did you foster my intelligence with the power of free choice when you are always deciding how I should behave?
Because I have free will I want to find out for myself what is bad or good for me and make my own choices.” “My son,” the mother replied, “it is appropriate for you to insist on the right to use your free will to choose your path but a small child with undeveloped reasoning needs the protection and nurturing of maternal love; now your time has come to rely upon the direction of your own judgment with the opened eyes of reason.”
The young man with semi-developed discrimination now ventured into the world unguarded and under the influence of wrong acquaintances got into trouble and became ill from abusing the laws of health. The youth used blind will without meaningful purpose squandering energy on passions, speed, hasty resolutions and the uncontrolled appetite for the traps of visual temptations. Evil and good actions are freely chosen, but once one has acted there is no longer free choice to the consequences.
The little boy’s example illustrates how worldly temptations constantly urge us to do wrong by appealing to present habits and prenatal karmic tendencies. It is wrong to interpret the hollow voice of our ego as divine guidance for the voice of the ego is devoid of divine guidance and one soon learns that no matter how much misguided rationalization one uses, nothing can lessen the karmic responsibility of wrongful actions.
The masters tell us of the truthfulness that man cannot be held accountable for being tempted. Maya (cosmic illusion), some call it “Satan” injected into the perfect framework of human beings the possibilities for horrible enticements that continuously urge man to go astray morally and spiritually. Ordinary people languish spiritually so easily that they are tempted to do things that will end up in hurting their “self.”
The motherly aspect of God flows through the instinctive love of parents to protect the child but when a baby grows up the time comes when it has to exercise reason by protecting itself. If he misuses his reason an evil outcome is precipitated and if guided rightly by good judgment the growing individual becomes happy. How is it then that some of these children are born with tendencies of weaknesses and some with particular tendencies of self-control prior to having any opportunity in implementing or using them?
Agnostics, atheists and intellectuals confidently declare that it is heredity that is responsible for good or evil traits in children. Very often the parents unnecessarily blame themselves for the child’s physical or mental infirmity and many times the parents are unjustly blamed. Sometimes intelligent parents have moronic offspring and likewise ordinary parents have wise children.
These seemingly unpredictable and erratic events are not freaks of nature but evidently these souls have variable evolutionary progress and it permits them to be born in the same family. If you ask a doctor what’s the cause for the boy’s ill mental health, he would say the boy probably inherited the affliction from his unstable parents. If you ask a sage or metaphysician he would say the boy’s soul was attracted to unbalanced, mentally ill parents with a tendency of madness and insanity as a result of bad actions from past incarnations.
It is impossible for an impartial God to bestow one child with a dysfunctional mind to do only evil under the convincing influence of bad or evil physiological instincts and another child with a good heredity creating a good mind prone only to good tendencies. The law of reincarnation is the cosmic dispenser of justice; the law of cause and effect and its corollary of karma govern the action of people. Accordingly with this law, the soul magnetizes to itself either good or bad mentality or good or bad heredity according to habits and desires formed in past incarnations determined by astral-blueprints.
When a child fails to make the grade at school, he has to return to this earthly school again and again to pass all examinations. It is the same with souls who fail in the performance of detachment, morality, spirituality, self-control and calmness. They must also return and persevere in the schools of mortality until they learn to direct all actions by their spirit-nature.
Those who have misused God-given independence, the gift of the power of human reason and free will have brought about The Law of Cause and Effect and its lawful results and are responsible for man’s miseries and despairs. This alone explains why God’s responsibility ended when he endowed man with free will and reason.
We have convinced ourselves by conceited egotistic habits into amnesia of who we really are and have forgotten our divine nature or soul ever since early childhood. You are not a woman or a man. Through karmic inclinations the soul is forced to incarnate not as a male or female but either with the body of a woman or a man. If you live in a boarding house you don’t call yourself a border. The body identified ego succumbs to the hypnosis of what your bodily house labels you to be. We are nothing else but pure spirit. With open eyes we identify our consciousness with our body and all its limitations and moods. We have forgotten our true self. If you close your eyes and don’t see your body any longer you will feel the invisible consciousness residing in that form. From the teachings of PY.
