Session Thirteen – Free Will vs Willingness

This is a series created from the book “Be Love: A Book About Awakening” authored by Ned Burwell. This series is a guide for people who are seeking a life of purpose and peace told through the life experiences of Ned Burwell. The material is told through a variety of concepts, practices, anecdotes, and experiences. Hosted by Seamus Evely

The Awakening Podcast series was created to give you the tools to live a more purposeful and peaceful life through the teachings of Ned Burwell, author of the book “Be Love: A Book About Awakening”.

Session Thirteen – Free Will vs Willingness: So by the end of this series you may begin to feel the gravity of this series and how your life can be changed. There really is only one thing left to understand and that is whether are willing to surrender the will of your mind and accept the will of your soul. You may feel like there is a new you after hearing these sessions in quick succession but guess what? The old you is standing directly beside you with enough momentum to take over the new you. You will have a lot of sideways movement, backward movement, and of course, forward movement on your trek to enlightenment and this session clarifies that this is okay and totally expected. 11e0a1b11ae1

Tools for Session 13

1. Reflect on how you use your free will. Do you follow your mind, or do you look deeper within before you make big life decisions?
2. Ask yourself: What is the will of my soul? Take some time with this question. Ask yourself before your mind takes hold, like before bed or when you first awaken. Then write down your answer. Another tool is to ask before you meditate. During the meditation, let go of the idea that you will receive an answer. Your answer may just come when you least expect it.
3. Make small steps at surrendering the will of your mind. Notice where and when you can let go of little wants and desires. Work this into your relationships with others, staying present with the moment. Surrender your desire to leave this moment to endlessly chase thoughts in your mind.
4. Take time to work at developing your ability to listen to your heart. Make life an adventure. Spend a day following your inner guidance. 1. Start by becoming quiet. 2. Listen and watch for clues. When it feels right or when you get a nudge or a sudden knowingness, act on it. 3. Do whatever your guidance is telling you. For example, go for a walk. If you are guided, stop into a store. Allow whatever comes. The fun part is to just trust, even if it doesn’t make sense to you. The longer you work at being guided, the more interesting it gets.
5. As you keep practicing surrender, bring as much love into your interactions with self and others as you can.

Transcript

session 13: 

Free Will Versus Willingness

Positive Affirmation: With a clear and earnest heart and mind, I direct my will to create harmony in my life.

Seamus: In this chapter, we are going to be discussing free will versus willingness. This is a very deep chapter. Let’s start things off by defining free will.

Ned: Free will is the choice we have to choose whatever path we want to pursue. Our choices come with responsibility. Before we make impactful decisions, I think it’s important that we ask ourselves, “Does this serve my soul or am I fulfilling a desire?” We talked about this in the second session, about fulfilling the soul versus our desires. When it comes to free will, it can be tricky to manage.

In the book I say, “Free will—it’s fun to play with but potentially dangerous if mishandled. In an effort to escape my life unscathed, some of my greatest struggles have come from exercising my free will; however, there can be order to our struggle and our joys.”

The mind doesn’t understand the larger context of life. Free will is a choice we make, but we must realize that the choices we make can imprison us, leaving us feeling anything but free. This can be the case when the choices we make are not in alignment with our soul’s purpose.

Seamus: What should we consider when we make a choice to select a certain path?

Ned: It is important to be self-reflective before we make big choices in our life. Asking yourself, “Will this choice lead me to love or will it lead me to heartache?” Also, are the choices we are making meaningful and productive in our life? I don’t believe that free will gives us permission to wildly chase our desires. Nor is it right for us to force the world around us to comply to our mind’s desires, to satisfy our ego’s demands. Our soul is an unbiased witness to life. Its nature is free and unattached to our endeavours.

Seamus: There is a quote in the beginning of this chapter that I’d like to read. “Chasing desires is a fruitless pursuit that bastardizes the purpose of having free will. The will of your soul is very different than the will of your mind.”

Ned: My soul understands the duties I’ve agreed to in this life. It is impartial to these duties. In my position of being impartial, I’m able to commit to my duties with fewer interruptions from the demands of my ego.

Seamus: Is it necessary to surrender your mind to access the will of your soul?

Ned: The mind clouds our ability to know what the soul knows. We must surrender the mind to get into what the soul knows. The mind can’t process what the soul knows because it’s so vast and doesn’t always follow linear logic. The mind is designed to handle what’s been put into it, for that’s all that it knows.

Seamus: You say in your book, “You abandon the mind and the ego in order to surrender your will. It is common that your mind will have temper tantrums about that.” Can you talk about this?

Ned: Surrendering the mind is basically the death of our ego. When our mind is not controlling us, our personal problems go away. It’s not that we will never have problems, but our relationship to the problem’s changes. Our mind itself is not a problem; it’s what you do with it that causes all the problems. When we treat the mind as a tool, we know how to pick it up and set it down at will.

One day a young man came into my office. He wanted to take my workshop, “How to Become a Gentleman.” He came in of his own free will, saying he wanted to learn some of the things I teach in my workshop.

I asked him, “Do you ever get sick of your mind?” I wasn’t prepared for his response.

He said, “No, I love my mind.”

Well, that ruined my whole shtick. What I was going to say next was based on him saying, “No, I’m tired of my mind,” but he’d just said, “I love my mind.”

My reply was, “Well, that’s great. You’re in a small league. I’m really happy that you are in harmony with your mind.” I then said, “Well, maybe you can answer this: can you shut it off?”

He looked at me strangely and said, “Are you crazy? What do you mean, shut it off?”

I said, “Well, what good is it, then?” And then I shared with him an analogy I’ve shared many times since that day. I said to him, “Let’s say you need a car, and I have one for sale. It’s a good runner. It starts every time and it’s cheap. Do you want to buy the car?”

He said, “Hypothetically, yes.”

I said, “Well, here’s the thing. The paint is good shape, the transmission is works fine and the fluids are all topped up. However, if you want to go to Toronto, it will take you to Windsor, or if you are looking to go London, it will take you to St. Thomas. It runs well, it starts every time, it even has a 

new battery. Do you still want to buy the car?”

At this point he’s looking at me like I’m crazy.

I then said, “If the car doesn’t take you where you want to go, it’s really no use to you, right?” He agreed. I then said, “The car is like your mind: even though you love it and it’s working for you, if every time you get in it, it takes you where it wants to go, then what good is it to you? It’s no good at all.”

When we learn how to surrender the mind, we can engage our mind by choice instead of being run by it. Most of my life, my mind controlled me. When I was first introduced to the concept of surrendering my mind’s will, it was threatening to my ego. It almost sent my mind into a panic. Like I have mentioned repeatedly, we are not our mind; we reside in our soul.

Seamus: We talked about how our mind tends to make things more complicated than necessary. Why does our mind tend to do that?

Ned: The mind makes things complicated out of sheer habit and to reinforce its worth. It doesn’t have the capacity to understand what’s true and what’s not true. I think we talked about this earlier: the mind will accept whatever we put into it. If you feed your mind all kinds of delusions, the mind will take them in and accept them as your truth. Whereas the soul makes things simple; it doesn’t complicate things and its truth never deviates.

When I’m resting in my soul, it takes the most complex things and makes them easy. This is the hallmark of truth. Truth is always simple and direct. It’s only the mind that complicates things. Here is one of the reviews for my book Be Love from my friend, Carole King: “Ned takes complicated concepts and boils them down into easy-to-follow concepts for the reader to digest.” When you have the truth, it’s not complicated.

Seamus: We talked about the moment being non-linear. How does becoming more present bring clarity to the randomness of life?

Ned: There is more order to the events happening in our life than our mind can process. On the surface, it looks like life is full of random acts, but there is a great deal of order to these random acts. When we learn how to become consciously aware of this moment, we allow the things that don’t make sense to gestate. In time, we can usually piece together purpose and relevance in what appears to be illogical and random. Once we learn to rest in our soul, we begin to sense on a deeper level that life’s random events hold great purpose.

Like the story in my book “Be Love” about meeting the artist with my little brother. It seemed random that my mind said, “Turn right when you reach the corner.” My mind couldn’t make sense of that, but on a deeper level I knew that turning right instead of left served a purpose. I just had to employ a little faith that my soul was guiding me in that moment.

There was a part of me that knew what I had to do. I was present and resting in my soul when that knowingness arose. This is how we tap into our intuition—by being present with our soul. This allows us to accept random occurrences more readily. Sometimes we may be required to be more agreeable to life and allow ourselves to flow with it. A “Yes to life” kind of attitude can be helpful.

There are many things that we reject because we don’t realize it’s something we have asked for. For example, let’s say you want apples and the neighbour shows up with an apple pie. You may be thinking that you only want apples, but they have shown up in the form of a pie. In the end, you got your apples. That’s the thing about life: just because you asked for one thing doesn’t mean that it will manifest in the exact form your mind assumes it will.

Seamus: Interesting. How can we discern where our will comes from?

Ned: It’s by asking yourself, “Is this purposeful and in alignment with my soul?” When we are honest with ourselves we usually know the truth that lies within. Sometimes I will meet people who are struggling to know their truth, but when I ask them to take themselves out of the equation and look at their scenario like it is someone else’s life, often they are quick to know their answer. Our emotional investments often obscure us from the truth. You can learn how to determine what’s a desire and what’s a knowingness in your soul. The thing about this is that it’s not that the soul has a will per se; it’s more like it has a destiny or a knowingness about it. The destiny that’s in your soul never wants for anything. Rather, it just knows. It’s only desires in our mind that ever want for things.

Seamus: So, does God have will?

Ned: Yes, I let this one out of the bag quite a while ago. God’s will is our individual soul’s purpose. God’s will is found inside of each and every person’s purpose. What I’ve come to realize is that before my soul came here, it had a destiny and a purpose. If my soul had my destiny and purpose already intact, then it must have come from God. Therefore, my destiny and purpose in my soul is actually God’s will for me. All I must do to fulfill God’s will is live my purpose.

Another thing about our purpose is that when we live our purpose, it’s the life that’s tailored specifically for us; it’s the most joyful, amazing trip that you’ll ever go on. When you live a life that’s not yours, life becomes mundane and difficult to manage.

“Creating God’s will is the work of the soul. It is also what brings us into union with the true self.”

Seamus: What do you mean by God’s grace?

Ned: God’s grace is the greater intelligence in life. Understanding God’s grace allows you to accept life and flow with it. God’s grace is always at work. I credit God’s grace to the miracles that are taking place around us. It’s by the grace of God that the flowers open up every morning. It’s by the grace of God that you and I are sitting here, collaborating on this project that we hope will, by the grace of God, open the hearts and minds of our community and beyond.

Seamus: So, grace is the persuasion of God? Is that what the grace of God really means?

Ned: God’s grace is the power and intelligence of God in motion.

Seamus: How do we become more conscious of the grace of God?

Ned: By entering the sacredness of this moment now. It is also by surrendering the will of the mind and surrendering ourselves over to our soul.

Seamus: By doing that, what happens to us?

Ned: It puts us in communion with the Divine. Our relationship with God deepens and sweetens. God’s grace is a gift that we are given. By acknowledging the grace of God, we begin to have a deeper reverence for life and all the miracles happening around us.

Seamus: What happens to us when we look toward our soul or toward love?

Ned: This reminds me of something that Thomas Keating said: “When we look toward God we just have to look God’s way, and God moves the rest of the way to us.” I found that such an interesting and comforting thought. However, what does that mean in relation to my life? In my mind I went back to one of my darker times when God wasn’t in my vocabulary. Frankly, the word bugged me.

When I was going through a time of struggle I remember a point when I looked toward God and asked for help. Within a few days the doctor that I talked about in the beginning of this book came into my life. We just look toward God and God comes the rest of the way. That same principle applies with creation and manifesting our reality. We look toward what we want, and it begins to move toward us. I don’t want to convince anyone of this, but I do encourage you to open your mind to the possibility.

Seamus: Do you think the common response to this will be impatience? We often want things as fast as we can get them these days.

Ned: Only if your mind’s engaged. When the mind’s engaged it starts working out the details, which is not necessary. Life is full of purpose and reason for all that comes or doesn’t come to us. This is where faith gives us a comfortable place to rest our mind.

Seamus: Yes. right.

Ned: We don’t know how life’s going to unfold. Inserting our mind into the equation only restricts the process. When the mind rejects the moment, it’s better to surrender.

Seamus: You are saying that you are surrendering your free will?

Ned: Yes and no. I have learned to surrender the will of my mind. I now do my best to live by my soul’s purpose.

Seamus: There is a quote from the book that reads, “We receive guidance from our soul by moving outside the context of our mind. By doing so, the guidance deep within us gets louder and clearer.” Is this a practice?

Ned: Yes, every day. It’s been my practice every day for a long time. As we develop our relationship with our soul, we get to know it in a much deeper capacity. We start with a friendship with our soul and as we move deeper into it, we move into communion with our soul. My soul comforts me like no other, for it is my home with the Creator.

Seamus: What lies ahead if we are willing—and that’s the key word here— if we’re willing to surrender to our soul?

Ned: Endless possibilities and purposeful endeavours, all of which lead us to fulfilling our purpose. It also leads to peace and union with God.

Seamus: Here is another quote out of your book: “Ceaselessly staying with God is the deepest devotion you can offer to God.” What’s the full message behind that? The other morning you told me that this quote resonated with you more deeply than it ever has. Why is that?

Ned: When we stay with God in our soul, there is a resonance that builds. When I was going back through the material in the book, I felt like I was ceaselessly staying with the presence of my soul and staying with God. There was sort of a momentum that built up, and through that momentum, there was a resonance. I fell into a deep interior silence.

As I stayed inside of that interior silence, it kept getting richer and richer. I realized that it’s the deepest devotion I can offer to God. By staying with God ceaselessly, I came into union with God.

Seamus: You move on to say that giving our devotion to our soul is how we ceaselessly stay with God.

Ned: Yes. That’s the ticket.

Seamus: You have an interesting take on the concept of heaven on earth. Will you share your views with us?

Ned: I believe that heaven is in me. It’s at hand in this present moment. I don’t see heaven as a future reward or a great promise. It’s discovered by deepening your relationship with God and by loving each other. I believe it’s here in this moment. It’s not something that we dangle over each other and say, “If you don’t behave, you don’t get to go to heaven.” That is like threatening to take away dessert from a child if they don’t behave. I don’t see heaven this way. I think it’s a solid, stable reality that lives here now. Jesus said in the Bible, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Matthew 4:17, ESV.) Was He lying?

If we continually bring love into our life, we experience the unfoldment of heaven here now.

Seamus: Why do you think people see heaven as a reward?

Ned: I wrote a quote that talks about heaven and hell: “Heaven and hell are temporary results of the karmic path we walk upon this earth, whereas the soul is the eternal life of God.” When we think that heaven is a treat for being good, it makes fear your motivation to love. Fear doesn’t take us into a relationship with God or into love.

Intention is important. If your intention is built on fear, that intention has no power behind it. If my intention is built around love, then that intention becomes a superpower. Our intentions contain God when we include love in them.

We don’t try to behave to get to heaven; when we love, we experience heaven here, now. The ‘hamburger reality’ where heaven is above and hell is below and earth is between needs to be updated. When it comes to the concept of heaven, if it doesn’t include love then it has nothing to do with God.

The will of God’s love is forever accessible. There is never a time when you are beyond its reach. Consciously surrendering your life to your soul’s will makes your life an instrument of God. Becoming an instrument of God positions you as close as you can humanly get to the brilliance of God’s love. It illuminates the path you are on and removes many of your struggles. With great persistence to execute your soul’s will, you place yourself on the path to experience a depth of love that you have only dreamed about. It is a love that is so pure that being in its presence nourishes your soul for eternity. Let the grace of God’s love remove all doubt in you. Doing so makes anything possible.

The fastest way to experience love from the Divine is to give your consent. By inviting God to be with you in your life, you allow God’s love to work more freely through you. This is your choice. It is not one that you should be bribed into. God has no desires for you. Your consent must come freely, not through fear of consequences, or fear that you will be punished if you do not consent to God. Fear has no place in your relationship with the Divine. According to Thomas Keating in his book Intimacy with God: 

An introduction to Centering Prayer, “‘Fear of God’ is a technical term in the Old Testament meaning ‘the right relationship with God.’” It does not refer to the emotion of fear.

Having a fearless relationship with God is a fundamental understanding that helps develop a deeper relationship with the Divine and the love that is available to you. It is much easier to freely come to God knowing that your relationship is based in love and not fear or judgment. God inflicts no evil punishments onto you, nor does the Divine restrict its love to you. It is we who judge ourselves and restrict ourselves from love. This is our free will.