[From private correspondence]

Correspondent: How do you tell the difference? How do you know what is Will and what is mind?

By investigating the mind and determining how it works, and what things arise from it. This is what mindfulness is all about, moving away from the perception of “I am angry” towards the perception of “my mind is having a thought that it is angry.” Continual application to this practice improves one’s ability to determine what is real, and what arises in the mind.

Can you recognise a thought when one arises? How about an emotion? A belief? An opinion? All of these things are imaginary. The process of mindfulness is become aware of these things, of learning to continually observe them and to identify them. Sufficient practice results in the knowledge, not just the understanding, that when you say “my mind is having a thought that it is angry” instead of “I am angry,” you are perceiving accurately. Sufficient practice gives one the ability to reliably perceive the falsity of all these things. Instead of forcing yourself to say “my mind is having a thought that it is angry,” it becomes the natural way to think, although obviously you don’t verbalise it like that all the time. Once you think that way, it becomes easy to say “this stuff is from the mind.” The Will is what is left over. This has to be known through experience and not merely understood.

Some things are obvious. To take a trivial example, “I don’t like cabbage” is clearly a manifestation of my Will. Similarly, “I hate French people” clearly isn’t, to anybody who’s not a total idiot. Then there’s the in-between stuff that you have to sift out through this practice of mindfulness.

“Know thyself” — know the workings of your mind so you can perceive what it does, and how it misleads you. Asking “How do you tell the difference?” is like asking “How do I go from not being able to fly an airplane, to being able to fly an airplane, without ever having to get into an airplane or having to take any lessons?” By practice, by investigating the nature of your being, that’s how you know. How do you know how to drive a car? Because you learned how to do so. There is no alternative than to get into the mind and to observe what it does, over an extended period of time, and to develop a proficiency in doing that. It’s a skill, like any other.