"Can you overdose on free will?" Charque asked me last night after he'd said so at least twice in his Sunday message to Unity Church yesterday. My knee jerk response was to say "Well, you can now!" Years ago we used to work with a very psychic friend who saw past lives, but we had to be very careful in how we formulated our questions to her. If we asked something like "Is he carrying a sword?" about maybe a knight she had picked up on in another lifetime, her response was "Well, he is now!" The mind can be very susceptible, as every advertising company is all too well aware of. But even when I first heard Charque mention "overdosing on free will", it seemed like a new, and very interesting and helpful way to look at an old issue. Yes, we have all been created with free will. Of course it is a good thing. None of us need be slaves or puppets to anyone or anything, not even to our concepts of God or the Big Universe. Do we know how to exercise that freedom and choice wisely? Gulp!! Have you looked at the world recently or listened to any news? Let's not roll over laughing at the very notion of wise choices and a constructive use of free will! Or worse still, let us not be too convulsed at the pain, misery and suffering that our collective use of free will is causing us. To quote Shakespeare: "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" The first lesson in free will is that it is not entirely free. There are consequences to any and all of your choices. Or, may be we should say, you cannot understand free will without paying attention to the consequences of your choices and actions. This is the only way to come to a more mature and wise understanding of free will. But humans seem to be slow, both collectively and individually, in recognizing this truth. We all know that angry, rebellious teenagers ultimately need to learn to manage their anger or have it managed for them through restriction of their freedom if they misuse it and allow their anger and rebellion to run to excess. On the other hand, we somehow believe that it is OK to make unlimited amounts of money, with unrestricted use of resources, and no concern for each other’s health and well being and get away with no consequences. There is an inconsistency here.

The next significant question is why do humans overdose on free will? We were exploring what it means to trust life for our talk yesterday and Charque made the comment that the Hunter Gatherer finds his survival in the day and where he is. He trusts the universe to sustain him day to day. Every animal and plant of the earth lives in that trust except for humans who have lost this trust and live instead in fear of their day-to-day survival. Humans probably started out living more in trust. The Native Americans seem to understand that Our Mother, the Earth, will support them. At least, they understood that before catching the white man’s disease, of which smallpox was only a mirror, the real disease being "goods" or "stuff", or what one native community in the Pacific called "cargo", because it all came in on boats. That doesn’t mean that "cargo" is necessarily a bad thing. It is the accompanying dependence and fear of shortage that then lead to accumulation, competition, defending your goods, slaughtering your perceived enemies and living in a constant state of tension, insecurity and disease at all levels that is so destructive. You forget that God or the Universe supports and sustains you. You forget too that the Earth will sustain you. You believe that you have to do it all yourself. You start overdosing on free will when you attempt to control life and forget that God has a vote. You no longer work co-creatively with God or with the Earth and you attempt to manage your life all by yourself. Your will is no longer aligned with the Universal Will. By definition, free will allows you to do exactly what you want and forget all about God and the Big Universe. And you do just that!

Then comes the question of how did humans start overdosing on free will? If you follow the myth of creation, you find the so-called first humans, Adam and Eve, scurrying out of the Garden of Eden where they experienced abundance and then having to live by the sweat of their brow. They chose to "bite of the apple" and consequently had to vacate Eden, or so the story goes. But we can bring this story up to date and re-phrase it to say that each moment is a choice to bite of the apple or live in Eden, to live by the sweat of your brow without God, or to live in a state of trust and abundance in Eden with God. Your free will can choose either direction. But when it chooses to vacate Eden, it has to "sweat" life alone, amass goods, compete with others, stockpile arms and live in a constant state of fear and shortage, no matter how much you accumulate. Does that sound familiar? We have all either been there, go there regularly, or are there now, mostly the latter two.

Charque also came up with various examples of working with what he termed "the sweat of your psychic brow". These are the many and various practices of controlling your destiny through willpower and what has often been termed "manifesting". We ourselves learned about this type of practice through the teaching of "Silva Mind". Many people have learned about it from the more recent teaching and practice of "The Secret". The numbers of such systems of mind control are legion. Their initial appeal, which is quite valid, is learning to perceive the negative thoughts in your mind which keep you blocked from physical "abundance". These systems deal largely with the more surface concepts of the conscious mind and its conditioning and fail to recognize the deeper karmic patterns that reside in the ancient chaos of the vast, unconscious and hidden mind. Being based on fear, the process of all of this mind control becomes more and more complicated. Because you have pre-empted any action from God, it undermines trust that the Universe will support you. You feel you have to go it alone. So you overdose with more and more will and more and more work, whether psychic or physical. It all serves to pull the knot of fear ever tighter.

If you approach life with the lightness of freedom that comes with trust, if you hunt and gather the experiences from the soil of your past and the richness of your present, you will have influence on your life and on the lives of others. You affect your landscape by your very presence, without artifice and control. You each come into life with a path of expression that is your great joy. You can accept and actively follow with trust where this path takes you. As A Course in Miracles states over and over again: "You are as God created you". You do not need to feel afraid or inadequate, and then always feel defensive and keep having to work through constant control and vigilance, trying to make yourself into something that you are not. This creates addictive patterns and requires an overdose of will, with its accompanying stress. Be who you are. Keep life simpler. Believe that life can be simpler. Trust!