Last week I sprained my backbone, and had a great reason to rest and revise some of my all time favourites over the weekend.
CWG is has been an instrumental book in shaping my thoughts and approach to God. Infact, I never sported a committed religious image, like how I ought to have been, thanks to episodes in line with CWG and earlier, more serious books such as The Teachings of Bhagvan Shri Ramana Maharshi.
Here’s a segment that I always liked:
God: You believe in God’s will, that God is all Powerful?
Neale: Yes.
God: Except what happened with Hitler, is it so? You think what happened there was not God’s will?
Neale: No.
God: How can that be?
Neale: Hitler violated the will of God!
God: Now, how do you think he could do that, if my will were all that powerful?
Neale: You allowed him to.
God: If I allowed him, then it was my will that he should – correct?
Neale: It would seem that way, but what possible reason could you have? No….it was your will that he have Free choice, and it was his will that he did what he did.
God: You’re so close in this. So close.
You’re right, if course. It was my will that Hitler, that ALL of you, have Free choice. But it is not my Will that you be punished unceasingly, unendingly, if you don’t make the choice I want you to make. If that were the case, how “free” have I made your choice? Are you really free to do what you want if you know you’ll be made to suffer if you don’t do what I want? What kind of choice is that?
That’s fantastic. I always thought and believed that if I ever tried to analyze what I called my “choice”, somewhere down the logical chain, I would hit a parameter I wouldn’t be able to justify. Trying a random example, I chose Computers as my career, because I could do well in it, because I liked programming a lot, again because I was exposed to computers in my very young days, which was because my dad worked as a systems operator for a MNC, but then, he never had a plan to become so! It just happened.
Now and then we keep pondering over choices, and especially when we know we made a bad choice out of free will we curse ourselves, but the real thing to ask might be, how free were we when we made the choice?
