God, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and the faulty idea of free will.
by Vic Shayne
author
Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience
Free will is an idea that has been batted around for millennia: Are we just puppets or do we have control over our own fates? Actually, these typical questions are posed from the perspective of the egoic mind and therefore set us off in the wrong direction before we can even start to tackle the issue.
Let’s set the stage by discussing consciousness. Consciousness is the entirety, the totality, of all existence — creation, destruction, movement, action, potentiality, life, death, phenomena, objects, bodies, thoughts, and so on. It is an undefinable, singular movement without separation. But if we take this idea of consciousness and we anthropomorphize it, then what we end up with is a concept called God.
Thus, religious people who do not understand consciousness, personalize consciousness into a God and attribute human characteristics to it. But because God is said to be even greater than human beings, it is also imbued with supernatural powers, great insight, and savior qualities. It is said that God is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and so on. And God becomes a being rather than a beingness. It is infused with anger, love, charity, goodness, revenge, partiality, and so forth.
Gods of earlier religions than those invented in the West, such as those of the Greeks, Romans, and so on, had a wider range of human characteristics and behaviors. The Western religions streamlined the idea into one major deity ruling over everyone and everything.
A God who is macro copy of a human being is one who bestows upon humans free will. Herein is the problem: Although consciousness itself is the movement of life and the determinant of what shall happen as it unfolds, this is not what can be called will or free will. Like the wind, consciousness heals and destroys, yet without purpose or intent. But because the human mind is so limited and conditioned, it cannot apperceive consciousness for what it is.
The conditioned mind forms the egoic self
When the mind becomes conditioned by way of psychological influences (teachers, parents, relatives, religions, cultures, authority figures, et.al.), a sense of self is created, called the egoic mind, the ego, the egoic self, “me,” “I,” the persona, etc. It is only this sense of self, this egoic “me,” that invents ideas such as free will, karma, good and bad, fairness and unfairness, pain and pleasure, etc. It does this because it is influenced to do so, and it is unable to embrace the wholeness that is consciousness. But when consciousness is called God, then it can conveniently act just like a human and further the delusions of human thinking and egoic preferences and rejections.
If you were able to realize that the egoic mind does not really exist, because it is only an accretion of thoughts, then you would also realize that you are not the doer. Consciousness is the doer. This means that as consciousness you are the doer, but not as the individual self. Still, acts of consciousness are not willful, purposeful, or for any reason except that it simply is.
