From private correspondence. The correspondent has been working with some of the ideas on this web site, but remarks:

I’m still finding signifacant frustration with getting any kind of grasp on my will … When I try to just be quiet and look at my desires without trying to analyze them, I tend to find that I really don’t have any desires at all in one direction or another.

This entry was the bulk of my response.

The fact that you’re feeling “frustration with getting any kind of grasp on [your] will” still suggests to me that you’re looking for something to guide you in a much more conscious sense than the will actually does. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that if they “do the work” for a long enough period of time, if they sit doggedly in their asanas and assume the godform of Anubis for long enough, then one day this big glowing red arrow will pop up out of nowhere, pointing to the phrase “it is thy will to research theoretical cosmology at the Aspen Center for Physics, now go forth and do thy will!” but unfortunately, that’s not how things work at all.

The will can be found in any moment. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re in a job that you dislike, and that you’d prefer to get out of, but for whatever reason, you’re doing that job right now. You’re driving on a several hour journey to see a client, and half way through that journey you stop to think: “what is my will, right now, at this point in time?”

For the sake of simplicity, let’s exclude options such as pulling a pistol from your center console and shooting yourself in the head, reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards at the top of your voice, driving straight into the back of that truck in front of you, and all the other completely random and arbitrary things you could do at any given moment. We find that there are essentially two non-silly choices: to continue towards your destination, or to go somewhere else. Once in a great while making a sudden change, just deciding “that’s it, I’m done with this job, I quit, I’m going off to North Dakota to farm tomatoes” will be the appropriate choice, but the vast majority of the time continuing towards your destination will be.

Now let’s look at that. You’re in a job that you hate, that you want out of really badly, but I’ve just said that it’s your will to keep doing it. How can this be? Nobody likes to hear this. They want to hear that their will is something that’s going to deliver them from their misery, something that’s going to lay a path to the place where everything is just how they want it. Saying that it can be your will to keep on this same old track you want out from doesn’t sound like it can be right, but it only doesn’t sound that way because of a misunderstood idea of the nature of will.

To simplify, the will is whatever it is that you do, in any given moment, when all resistance is taken away. As I’ve explained a few places on my web site, this is not the same as the absence of any kind of constraint whatsoever, because your will needs to be constrained to a particular direction in order for it to have any direction at all, and if it had no direction, it wouldn’t be will. The will is, to put it simply, the path of least resistance for you. The important thing to remember is that this “resistance” is not just external; it is internal as well. If you are sitting there thinking how much you hate what you are doing, then you are creating resistance to what you are doing. You are doing something, but those thoughts in your mind want to stop you, they work against that action. Maybe you really shouldn’t be performing that action? Well, maybe you shouldn’t, but if this is the case then you don’t need those thoughts in your mind to tell you that. I don’t need to think “man, it’s so tedious and unpleasant holding my hand to this hot stove top” in order to pull my hand back from it, and I don’t need to think on how much I loathe the taste of cabbage before the notion of refraining from eating it occurs to me.

Now, you can try this as an experiment. Put yourself on that car journey, miserable as sin. Why are you miserable as sin? Because you’re sitting around thinking how miserable you are. That’s it. Remember, at that point in time, all you are doing is driving your car. There’s nothing remotely miserable about this – most of the time it’s positively pleasant. There are two ways you can try reacting to that situation. The first is to just cease those miserable thoughts. If it is those thoughts that make you miserable, then you will cease to be miserable once you stop attending to them, by definition. Instead, you might attend to the trees by the side of the road that are rushing by, or the hills in the distance. Maybe the height of the sun is conspiring with the particular cloud formations to create an unusual quality of light that you notice. Whatever it is that you notice, when you remove your attention from those thoughts – i.e. once you remove that resistance – you discover that this moment is actually rather pleasant. Sure, you might be on your way to a job that you don’t like, but that’s way off then; we’re talking about right now. And this exact same process can be applied to any “right now”, so if you can do it in this moment, you can do it in all the others, and you have nothing to worry about.

The second way is not to cease those miserable thoughts, but to remove yourself from them, so that rather than experiencing them yourself, you’re observing your mind experiencing them. This is generally more wholesome, since you don’t have to deny or suppress anything that’s going on. Isn’t this consigning yourself to misery, though? Well, not really, because for one thing you’ll notice that it’s your mind that’s miserable, not “you”, and for another thing once you start observing these thoughts in this way they tend to quieten down all by themselves.

Remember when we were talking about learning to observe, free from the mind overlaying interpretations on the observations? That’s what’s happening in both of these methods. And what both methods do is, in that moment, remove the resistance your mind has to what you’re currently doing, and when that happens, what you are doing is your will. So, you can see that you can find will in any moment, and if you can find will in any moment then you can find it in all the moments from this one up until your last one, at least in theory. If you can pull this off, you’ll find that there’s an unmistakeable feeling that goes along with it. You’ll suddenly switch from seeing yourself as this downtrodden individual who’s being forced by circumstance into undertaking a journey he doesn’t want to do to seeing yourself as a sovereign individual whose freely and calmly reacting to his circumstances in an appropriate, deliberate and free manner. You’ll actually be able to almost physically feel that resistance being lifted, and you’ll realize that underneath that image of a miserable and downtrodden victim of circumstance there actually was and still is a sovereign and free individual after all, if you’d only lifted up the corner of the veil to see him.

Now this sounds highly suspicious to many. They think it’s just a case of denying facts through the power of positive thinking, a matter of convincing yourself that you’re sovereign and free even if you aren’t, and this type of thought is all you need to justify not following either of the two methods described above. But what you need to realize, and know from experience, is that your thoughts are creating resistance, and if you let them govern you then you aren’t “free” just because it is your own thoughts you’re following, rather than someone else’s commands, or rather than the external necessities of having to earn a living. Ironically, the Christians almost have this one down – they refer to the bondage of being a slave to one’s own thoughts as “sin”, and when they talk about sinners being punished they’re really referring to the fact that if you follow those thoughts when they contradict your own nature then, quite naturally, you’ll suffer for it. Of course, where we differ is that their response is to turn oneself over to the will of God, or to let Jesus “save” them by substituting his will for their “sinful thoughts” so that they no longer put any stock in those thoughts, but the Thelemic approach is to substitute the individual will for it instead. Christian doctrine says that one should surrender oneself – who is worthless – to Jesus or God, who is divine. Thelema, on the other hand, says that this is unnecessary, because those thoughts are not your “self” at all, but your mind which is getting in the way of your self. But the problem in essence is the same – your thoughts arise from your mind, not from your self, so if you follow them then you’ll find they never satisfy, however great of a carrot they might present to you. So if you have a thought that says “I’m not going to be happy doing this job” then taking action to satisfy the demands of that thought is not the act of a sovereign and free individual, because you’re being led around by your mind which doesn’t know what you really want that well.

Now that right there is the problem with the “big red arrow” idea of will. People say they don’t know what their will is, and they want a mental representation of it (such as “it is my will to research theoretical cosmology at the Aspen Center for Physics”) so that they can do that instead, and be happy. But this isn’t what will happen. In reality, they’ll just end up chasing another mental picture which they will continue to compare unfavorably with reality and that’ll make them miserable. It’s the wrong approach, because the will is found in the moment.

I don’t like making analogies with rivers, because it sounds too grasshopper-ish, but here’s one anyway. Imagine a river flowing. We can simplify and state the “will” of the river as this: to travel downwards by the most direct route. If you take in a macro picture, you might indeed see that the river does form a relatively stable direction from west to east from its source down to the sea, but this is not it’s will; it’s the *result* of it’s will. You say that when you “try to just be quiet … [you] tend to find that [you] really don’t have any desires at all in one direction or another”. The river might flow broadly from west to east, but at any given location it might flow in any direction. Rivers wiggle around all over the place. In the course of its broad west-east path, at any given time it might have to flow north for a while, or southwest, or north by northwest, because it’s not following a west to east course; that west to east course is created as a result of the combined total of its small scale movements. What it’s really trying to do is to go down. Whether it goes north, east, south or west at any given time depends entirely upon which way it is easiest for it to go down. The two dimensional path the river makes across the land is of an entirely different order than the third dimension in which its will actually acts. The two dimensional path it makes across the land is merely a pattern, the result of adapting to its circumstances and finding the most direct route downwards, wherever that route may take it across the other two dimensions.

Now, if you were able to pick up the source of the river and move it to a different location, even if that location were close by you’d likely find that the river would take a completely, vastly different course across the land. Yet it’s “will” to seek the most directly downward path is completely unaffected by that. You can see that it’s a mistake to try to derive the will of the river from seeing what path it takes over the land; to do so is to commit a category error.

Now, when you say that you “really don’t have any desires at all in one direction or another” it’s because you’re looking in the wrong place for your will. You are trying to look for a direction to follow, whereas the reality is that direction will be created as a result of you following your will. Therefore it’s not remotely surprising that when you look you find that you “really don’t have any desires at all in one direction or another”, because when you focus on your will, that’s exactly what you will find. When you focus on your will, you’re focusing on that third dimension, and what “direction” this causes you to take on the two other dimensions that you’re looking for this “direction” in is wholly inconsequential.

It does so happen that because of circumstance a consistent direction might emerge. As we saw with the river, it did broadly form a west to east path, and if as a result of its situation there was, local geography aside, a downhill slope heading broadly east all the way down to the sea, then whether it tries to deliberately head east or whether it tries to head down, there won’t be a huge difference in the route it takes. But, if it starts at its source and decides it wants to head west instead, then it’s going to have a fight on its hands. It will only “not make a huge difference” once it’s already figured out that a west to east path is broadly in line with its will, and it can only do this once its given up on directions and just focused on heading downwards for a while. But even then, this can be hazardous. Halfway along its course, the macro geography might change. A river might flow broadly west to east for a thousand miles, but when it gets there perhaps the land changes so that it follows a north to south course for the rest of its journey. If it gets halfway and has decided that it’ll go east to approximate its will, it’s going to resist that change in geography, and again only trying to flow downwards will show it the right way. Thus it is possible to approximate the will by looking at the two dimensional direction, but you cannot do this for ever, because you cannot trust circumstances to result in the same direction over your entire life. You can never rely on a mental representation of your will to guide you aright indefinitely. It might hold for a while, but since you are not staying still, the direction your will causes you to go in can change. It might be your will to go research physics at Aspen, but after a couple years it might be your will to do something completely different. If, at that point, you doggedly stick to researching physics because “it’s your will” then you’re going to get off track.

This is what I was talking about when I mentioned observing without discriminating, and then seeing what patterns are formed. You remove resistance and then look at the direction; you don’t look for a direction to follow. If you see a direction, then in the short term going with that direction may make sense, and if you do follow that direction and don’t encounter significant resistance then you probably made a good choice, but “following that direction” should always be a tentative move, because all you are really doing is using it as a shorthand indicator of your will. Unlike a river, we can’t really get through life without the involvement of the conscious mind, and we can’t usefully live a productive life by focusing solely on immediate stimuli, so we often find a mental representation of will is necessary, we just have to be careful not to start believing it, but just using it as a signpost instead, and stopping regularly to actually look around and see if our will really is still pointing us in that direction.

And if you don’t perceive a pattern? Well, maybe circumstances are such that you’re not being pushed in any broad direction right now. As we saw in our example, the river forms a broadly west to east path, but it meanders much on the way. Maybe right now your circumstances require you to navigate obstacles on your downwards course when you are having to change direction regularly such that an overall pattern cannot be discerned, and that’s OK. Remember, the direction is the result, not the objective. There’s no reason at all for you to feel bad just because you aren’t steamrollering straight in a particular direction, because you aren’t being a single-minded legendary Thelemic hero of will. If your will isn’t pushing you in a particular direction right now, then don’t feel like you have to try and find one. The will is in the moment, not in the two-dimensional direction, so just because you can’t find a pattern, it doesn’t mean you can’t do your will. Focus on removing resistance and letting yourself do whatever it wants to do. If that results in you going here, then there, then somewhere else, then fine, because it’s not drawing a straight line across the land that’s important. You needn’t feel like you’re some kind of incomplete person if you can’t find any strong desires to follow right now. Maybe your circumstances are such that your will is never going to lead you in an easily defined direction, and if that’s the case, so be it. It doesn’t matter. If, at the end of all analysis, your will leads you to a simple existence, just equably meeting whatever comes your way without constantly striving for a goal, then that’s fine, that’s no “worse” than someone who rushes around climbing big mountains, flying fighter jets, becoming President of the USA or finding a cure for cancer. There is nothing instrinsically more “worthy” about these latter things, they just look sexier from the outside.

And that’s how it can be your will to continue to make that journey. How you go about from place to place in the world is just circumstance. There’s nothing instrinsic to it that defines what you are – it arises from the interplay between what you are and what circumstances you find yourself in. Your will has to be something in any given moment, and sometimes all the possible choices from a particular moment are unpleasant, so it makes no sense to say it cannot be your will just because it’s something you don’t like. It’s a mistake to think “it’s my will to go to this place, but not to that place”. Going to one place rather than another might be the result of your will, but it can’t be your will itself. Your will is what you do to get from this moment to the next moment in conditions of minimal resistance. The sum total of that might form a discernible path, but you take that path as a result of following your will, that path is not pulling you like a magnet. Remember, if you start in a slightly different location, the path can be completely different without your will being affected one tiny little bit.

So, in short, don’t get caught up in looking for a clear direction. If you perceive one forming, then OK, but if you don’t, that’s OK too. Let the direction be whatever it turns out to be. Don’t go looking for grand purposes or making the mistake of feeling that you’re under some kind of obligation to achieve something “great”, or to conform to any image your mind might have of what you should be doing, for that matter. Just focus on removing resistance from each moment, and let the direction – or lack of it – that takes you in be whatever it is, because that isn’t what’s important.