Harry Potter and the 12 Powers – Will & Voldemort

Welcome back to our Summer Series on the 12 Powers and Harry Potter.  Today is an important day for us and I hope you are all planning to stay and enjoy our Anniversary Celebration.  Thanks to you we are 3 years old and growing!

This week we are looking at the Spiritual Power of WILL.  Will is the ability to choose, to decide, command, to lead, to determine.

 

Our free will is the most important element of our make-up, because within our will lies the power to choose – to choose by faith to follow God or choose by our emotions to follow self.

Our will in the Greek is called dianoia. Dia means “channel” and noya means “of the mind.” And this is exactly what our will is, the channel or conduit for God’s Spirit to flow from our hearts out into our lives. In other words, our choice is the key to whose life will be lived in our soul. Faith choices allow our Creator’s Life to come forth; emotional choices quench that Life

 

Free will” refers to the type of choice which is uniquely human: a moral choice. But don’t mistakenly think that morality is the choice between “good and evil.” Everyone chooses to be “good” – even what we would call the most evil, immoral people. Hitler rationalized that the Jews, gypsies and homosexuals were the enemies of the world, so in his mind he justified that eliminating them as doing “good.”

Free will is the choice between life and death. As the Torah says: “I have put before you, life and death… Choose life so that you may live.” (Deut. 30:19)

You might wish to look at how you define life and death????

 

One way or another, we are using our will, our executive mind power, all the time. We choose a course of action. We resist or resent. We submit or fight back. We aim high or we slide backward. Or we are willing to consecrate and dedicate our will to God and to let it be reeducated to go our creator’s way.

 

Romans 12:2 states: “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”
That is our job in developing our Divinely-given potentialities – to reeducate the will, to teach it to become receptive to spiritual motivation, rather than to goals determined by our materialistic pursuits alone.

 

The rewards of unifying our wills with the will of God are great. They include health, happiness, joy, peace, harmony, prosperity and other good that we cannot even visualize in our present state of consciousness.

 

Many in harmonies in human relationships result from the clash of human wills. Learning to activate the divine will in your life does not mean that you will simply submit to the human will of others. Instead, it will give you a new freedom that recognizes the human force applied by others but does not submit to it.

Greatness lies in how we resolve conflicts – in using our free will to grow – not to quit. To face reality – not to escape. To live and not to die.

I found these 5 stages of free will…

Five Stages of Free Will

Level One: Self-Awareness

Become aware of the choices you’re making. Life is a constant stream of choices. Once you become sensitive to the fact that you are constantly making choices, then you can monitor them. That’s using your free will actively, not passively.

Don’t let decisions just “happen. “Have an intention for the day.  Ask yourself:

Why am I reading this article right now? Am I just surfing the web? Or do I have a specific goal?

Your choices shape your life and determine your destiny. Take charge. If you don’t, you’re just a pedestrian watching as life passes you by.

 

Level Two: Be Your Own Person

Don’t accept society’s beliefs as your own unless you’ve thought them through and agree with them. Live for yourself, not for society.

This refers to Don Miguel Ruiz’s 5 Agreement – to question everything. To look at your domestication. And his ‘Don’t make assumptions!

Evaluate your past choices. Start each day anew. Don’t remain bound to guidelines and determinations you made years ago, or even to ones that you made yesterday.

Check your assumptions and make sure that they are really yours and not someone else’s.

Level Three: Distinguish Between Body and Soul

Within each of us, a fierce battle is raging constantly. It’s a battle between the cravings of our body, versus the aspirations of our soul.

There are times when you know objectively that something is good for you, but your physical desires get in the way and distort your outlook.

Here’s how the battle-lines break down:

BODY: Gravitates toward transitory comforts and sensual pleasures. Desires to quit, to dream, to drown in passions, to procrastinate.

SOUL: Seeks understanding, meaning, productivity, accomplishment, permanence, greatness. Confronts challenges. Embraces reality and truth.

You’ve heard the Native American story about the two battling wolves inside each of us and which would win the battle depended upon which one we feed.

Identify whether it’s your body or your soul talking. Until then, you don’t even know why you’ve made the choice that you are making.

Choose what is meaningful and productive. Choose life.

 

Level Four: Identify with Your Soul, Not Your Body

Point to yourself. Who are you?

We believe that your soul is the real you.

Attain inner peace. Achieve mastery over your body by identifying with your soul.

The Talmud teaches: “The righteous talk to their bodily desires, while evil people let their desires talk to them.” The question is who’s running the show? Who will dictate what you’re going to do?

The only way to win is to get to the body to desire what the soul wants. Because there’s no way you’ll ever achieve peace by giving in to the body. Your soul will simply not give up. Never.

Level Five: Make Your Will God’s Will

The highest stage of free will is not when you ask yourself, “What does my soul want?” It’s when you ask yourself, “What does God want?”

When that is your prime interest, you will have achieved the highest form of living. You are using your free will to merge with the most meaningful and powerful force in the universe.

Free will is the choice between life and death.

 

Free Will Summary

Level One: Don’t be a sleepwalker. Make decisions actively.

Level Two: Don’t be a puppet of society’s goals, or a slave to your old decisions.

Level Three: Be aware of the conflict between the cravings of your body and the aspirations of your soul.

Level Four: Identify with your soul, not your body.

Level Five: Make your will God’s will.

Pic

 Tom Marvolo Riddle, the half-blood orphan, was to transform himself into the very powerful Dark Wizard known as Lord Voldemort.  Eventually he would lose all – not because he lacked power, but because of his ruthless methods, his inability to love or trust anyone but himself, and his belief in his own infallibility.

He believed that “there is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.”

The name ‘Voldemort’ from the French means “flight from death”. This is what he was trying to do by hiding pieces of his soul in magical items he valued over humans.

Could Voldemort represent our shadow side? Our shadow side – an unconscious aspect of the personality which the conscious ego does not identify in itself. Because one tends to reject or remain ignorant of the least desirable aspects of one’s personality, the shadow is largely negative, or everything of which a person is not fully conscious.

An interesting thought to contemplate.

 

We have been talking about choices; Choices reflect the character we have and shape the character we will have.

We might try to be understanding to Tom Riddle, knowing his life circumstances, left to grow up in an orphanage; yet it is still his choices that turn him into the person he became. He is a materialist because he places part of his soul outside himself. It is an ego preservation, material identification with material things.

But consider:

“what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his soul.” Mark 8:36

Nothing. We gain nothing if we lose our soul. We must be true to it.

 

We will look at Dumbledore next week, but it is difficult to look at one without the other a bit.  In mythical terms, they are the representation of Good and Evil.  Dumbledore, as Wisdom, has chosen to turn his trials into triumphs, to learn from life’s experience and use that learning to help others.

Voldemort has chosen to use his Will to control and harm others.  Dumbledore uses his Life energy for the good of all; Voldemort has subverted his Life energy in order to manipulate and terrorize.  Both men were very powerful – and they made very different choices.

Remember what Dumbledore taught Harry in The Chamber of Secrets?  “It is not our abilities that show who we are, Harry.  It is our choices.”

 

What are we choosing?  Are we choosing to create out of the Truth?  Or, as we see with Voldemort, are we creating out of our wounds?

 

Voldemort, out of feelings of rejection, of being “different”, created a life based on fear.  The more hurt, the more shamed he felt, the more control he tried to exert.  A modern analogy for Voldemort would be Adolph Hitler.  Hitler created a life, a Hell on earth, out of his wounds.  His Final Solution ultimately killed over 6 million people.  His ideal was of the Aryan man, the tall, blue eyed, blond master race.

So, here’s what’s interesting.  Hitler was short, with dark brown hair and brown eyes, and had a Jewish ancestor.  Don’t you find it amazing that he exerted so much control over his followers that no one questioned the in-congruency of his message?  Can you imagine what good this man could have done, given his powers of persuasion and leadership, if he had created out of the Truth of who he was, instead of out of who he was afraid he was?

 

How often do we do that?  How often do we create out of reaction, out of fear, instead of out of love and wisdom?

We live in a dualistic world…It’s about our choices, about how we choose to see life.  Is it a struggle or a joy?  Is it a curse or a blessing?  We believe that our thoughts create our life.  How we’re showing up reflects those thoughts.

 

Here’s an interesting exercise to do this week: Set a timer, either on your watch, your computer, your kitchen stove, for every 15 minutes.  Whenever you hear the beep, stop what you’re doing and observe your thoughts.  What do you see?  Are they thoughts of love or fear?  If you acted on that thought in the moment, what would you create?

Interesting what we do with our time and energy and we are not even aware of it.

Let me know your thoughts.