Earth is a School Extract

 Earth is a School (see right) was published three months ago now. It has not yet set the bestseller lists on fire and I'm told I should do more to market it so T shirts and mugs will be available shortly - or perhaps not. One thing I thought I could do was include an extract here so that potential readers can see what it's all about. This is from a chapter entitled Freedom.

         

If Earth is a school, what’s it a school for? The answer to that is basically simple. It’s a school for turning men into gods. In other words, it’s a school for consciousness. Consciousness just means having the ability to be conscious and there are grounds for thinking that everything has this in some degree, however limited it may be. But only humans have self-consciousness and this Earth is a school for turning that into divine awareness, in which the created soul becomes a fully-fledged creator itself, able to express the triple qualities of Will, Love and Intelligence in complete form.

A god must be self-conscious. Anything not self-conscious has no freedom and freedom is the defining characteristic of divine being. It is the source of creativity and the necessary background to love. With that in mind, let us examine this extraordinary quality a little.

Nothing else that we know of in the world is free, but a human being is. That does not mean we are totally free. We are conditioned and determined by many things, hereditary things, environmental things, our biology, our experiences and so on. Nonetheless, at the core of our being there is a freedom that is recognised by all sensible people, known instinctively to be there at a level beyond the purely phenomenal one. This is the basis of our individuality. It is what makes us who we are. It potentially makes us free of nature or matter which are determined things and offers us a way into the true and unlimited creative freedom of the spirit.

Where does this freedom come from? It cannot come from matter because everything material is conditioned by what it is made of. It's a product of other things which define it. There is no freedom in matter. No one really knows what goes on at the sub-atomic level, but it is not freedom. Therefore our freedom must be non-material or spiritual, which means it comes from God or else it is innate in spirit itself. But spirit is freedom before it is even being which is another way of saying that it is "I" not "it", personal not impersonal.

The personal nature of God or spirit (I don't really differentiate except that you could say the one is transcendent and the other immanent) has important implications for what this world is for. It is a place in which we may exercise our freedom. That is why it is a place in which suffering and evil exist. Our life is a series of choices leading up to the all-important choice of God or not God. If we choose God, we choose the creative freedom of spirit, light, love and truth. If we choose not God, we choose matter. Effectively, we choose prison and darkness but so that the choice may really be free these can be seen by the mind rebelling against God as freedom and light. However, it is freedom for the ego which is the product of the spiritual self identifying with matter. This unrepentant ego then goes to what we can call hell, but hell is only seen as hell by the soul that has chosen God and spiritual freedom. To the soul that goes there it may well be just a place of experience, albeit limited experience, like any other. The eternal privation would only be felt as such, to the fullest degree anyway, by the soul that has given itself back to God in love. For the soul that has denied God, the loss of God is not so keenly felt even though it will certainly be known on some level.

It may be that, spiritually speaking, freedom is more fundamental even than love because love is only possible as a result of freedom. It is also the case that the freer you are, the more you love but this refers to true spiritual freedom not mere self-will. The devil has self-will, but he lost his real freedom when he rejected God. Complete freedom is only possible in God because God is the Father of freedom. It is what he is.

I said that suffering and evil come about because of freedom, which raises the question as to how we may overcome the one but keep the other. The way is through Christ. That wonderful statement in the Book of Common Prayer that 'in his service is perfect freedom' sums up the truth that material bondage can only be broken when we freely align ourselves with the spiritual reality of Christ. At the moment, we have freedom, but we are still largely bound. In Christ that limited freedom becomes full and complete. At the beginning, we were one with God but not consciously so. Through being born in a place in which the ability to exercise freedom is possible, a place of duality, where inside and outside are fully separate, we can consciously choose God but this choice is not just an intellectual thing. It must be a redirection of our whole being from material to spiritual. This is why the path back to God is a hard one. It requires complete reorientation of the will.

Freedom is why God made both us and the world. It is what lies behind creativity and gives the universe its dynamic quality. Correctly used, it is our passport to becoming a god but at the moment many of us are giving it up by surrendering to evil, the very reverse of what should be. We must break the chains of material bondage and claim our freedom in the world of spirit.