December 22, 1992

• Free choice

• Randomness versus predetermination

• The intervention of God and guides in human life

God blesses the life of each of you. God points the directions that are appropriate for you to travel.

The questions which you discussed related to the randomness of life and the exercise of choice or free will are extremely important and indeed challenging to you, to all who ponder these issues. The question of free choice can be especially puzzling. You are correct in recognizing that free choice is not always entirely free, but is influenced and given shape by all of one's understanding, one's background, interests, biases, fears, objectives. So taken in the purest sense, there is no real unrestricted free choice, but the expression of free choice implies that you must choose to act or to be passive toward events that occur in your lives.

You may recognize what you perceive to be according to God's will and yet walk down a different path. You can willfully act in a manner which opposes your perception of how God would wish you to act or how Jesus would act or how another would act for whom you feel both love and respect. Your experiences in life help to clarify your sense of what appropriately leads you closer to God. Your sense of rightness, therefore, has been shaped by your knowledge, your past experiences, influences from family, etc. That perception of how you may proceed in a manner bringing you closer to God will change as your experiences and surroundings dictate. From an obvious position, your perception is as you perceive it, not as someone else perceives it.

If you intend to live a life devoted to bringing yourself closer to God, at whatever the cost, such commitment will frequently eliminate the need for choice. It will be clear in many cases which is the most appropriate path for those objectives. But you must remember that you had to make a choice to begin with to live such a life. Even that choice was shaped by prior experiences and your perceptions at the time such a choice was made. No individual really has free choice, for no choice is entirely free. You weigh the consequences of doing one or the other, and you are brought to a position where one action is more desirable than another.

Your perceptions and background—environment if you will—all have a hand in the action which you take, so your action is not entirely free. Even if you devote your life toward becoming closer to God, you may still act in a manner contrary to that objective. When you do so, you do so for a reason, and those reasons are given life by your own background and hidden agendas. But still the moment comes when you must either do one thing or another. There are reasons for both. There are influences pointing in both directions and you cannot have the luxury of proceeding along both paths simultaneously. You must ultimately still make a choice. This is what we refer to as free choice.

Randomness is not a part of choice in this sense. Were randomness a central component, choice would not exist. It would merely be blind action. Choice presumes the recognition of influences. The presence of those influences negates randomness in free choice.

You wonder about the presence of randomness in life—events which take place that have impact upon your individual existences. You may be more comfortable in understanding randomness as events or chains of events which occur outside of your ability to control them. To this extent, things happen in life which you cannot control, but things happen because of a chain of circumstances.

A storm occurs because of a specific set of events which must be present in a particular manner to produce that storm. The storm is not random. It is the result of a succession of specific events. You cannot control those events. So in your reality, the storm just happens. You may be the victim of whatever results from that storm. Being a victim of a storm in itself is not random, for it is the result of the storm. The timing of the storm, the placement of that storm within your life, is outside your ability of control and is therefore thought to be random in your sense. Understanding the progression of events and conditions which must be present for a given storm, you must then accept that the storm itself is not an isolated event. Because it is not an isolated event, it is not purely random.

Considering randomness from the perspective of being outside your ability to control, there is much in life that contains an element of randomness. God does not place the timing of the storm into the continuum of your life, but God created the conditions which were necessary for the storm to occur in the first place. All that happens in life is the result of events or conditions created by God, but God does not establish the condition of time as it impacts upon your lives for all events which occur. For some events, timing the interface with your lives is essential.

We have talked in the past about God and we your guides intervening in your lives to bring about a potential for response on your part that might lead to growth of the spirit. Your growing awareness of the fact that some coincidences are not coincidental, but can be viewed as being somehow coordinated in a way not clear, attests to your acceptance of the intervention of God and guides within your lives.

But God does not intervene at all levels at all times. There are many instances in your lives when God and your guides do not function within the realm of time. God sets the conditions which enable human life to prosper. God sets the conditions which provide for the presence of storms. God sets the conditions which are necessary for illness. God sets the conditions which are necessary for healing. You must be willing to accept the fact that if it were God's will to be in control of all that occurs in life within the realm of time and place, the world could be perfect. There could be an existence in human form devoid of all suffering, all inequality of whatever kind. Life would function with no discord, peace would be total and permanent, individuals would never disagree, and progress would not be made because the goal had been reached.

Do you suppose God wills that creation includes mistakes, errors, elements of poor judgments, or judgment of humankind? The world is a perfect creation if you consider the succession of conditions which are necessary to produce given results, but the world is imperfect when one considers that succession within the framework of time and space, for then we observe the interface, contact between events of the physical world and human beings.

God does not send a storm to you so that you may suffer. God creates the succession of conditions for that storm. God creates you. When that storm meets your existence in the framework of time, mainly the same time, that coinciding of events cannot be assumed to be the choice of God.

God is present in all. God is part of everything that is created. There is nothing that exists that is not within the creation of God. You are all part of a continuum. You are all part of a river which flows. The contents of the river and the contents of what exists along the banks of that river have all been created by God. What happens between the banks of the river and the moving water is what happens to each of you as you traverse through life. What is torn away from the bank has not been torn away by God, but it is something which occurs at that place where the water meets the embankment.

Your lives are not predetermined in all accounts. No one individual is absolutely destined to live a specific life with specific emotions and specific events surrounding that life. Not all has to be controlled. You are riders on the globe of earth, but you are not entirely passive. The evolution of the globe within the universe is part of a continuum of conditions created by God. The future of the earth as a planet is governed by principles which describe what God has set up as conditions. But even within that predetermined set, inhabitants on earth have a say in many aspects of their own lives.

The universe exists because of conditions created by God. Each of you is a minute speck in that universe and just as the future of the universe is determined by God, the future of all that has been created within that universe is subject to the conditions of the universe. You are subject to the conditions of the universe, but those conditions are very broad and very general. The specifics are left to you as individuals. So to an extent, the energy which created your lives and the energy that will remain when your lives are completed all belong to the total energy of the universe, and that has been determined—Its course, its future. In that sense, life is predetermined, but only on the grandest of scales. Your lives on a day to day basis, your interaction with others, is determined to a great extent by your own sensitivities, the result of choices you make, awarenesses that you accumulate.

Randomness and free choice are complex issues for which there are no simple solutions. The fact that you asked the questions at all is important for your answers, and insights that you achieve by asking those questions have much to do with your ability ultimately to reach out to other souls in love and to receive the love offered by them. You are really all connected to each other, and you are really all connected to everything that has ever been or will ever be created. It is a magnificent presence!

God surrounds you as God does all that has been created. God illuminates your path. Open your eyes and see that brilliance. Walk towards it, embrace it and be consumed by that fire. We bless you with that radiance.

Amen.