Erwin wrote:

The way to discover [the “true will”], essentially, is to stop paying attention to the things that distract you from it. If you stop paying attention to those things, the will makes itself known without any effort required to dig it up.

Halla wrote:

I see what you mean.

Unfortunately one may also find efforts to ignore distractions thwarted by those around who have no interest in you finding your will but instead want to exert theirs. ;-)

One may indeed. Discovering the will is the “science” part of magick,and successfully imposing it on your environment is the “art” part. There are no guarantees that either part will be successful, although if you adopt a definition of “will” that is unaffected by external constraint then you improve your chances at succeeding in the art considerably. This may at first sound like cheating, but turns out to be no more so than restricting the will to those things that don’t require, for instance, being able to breathe unaided underwater for several hours at a time, or being able to travel to Jupiter solely by the power of your own flatulence. There are plenty of external constraints out there that can not be overcome but only adjusted to, gravity being an obvious example. There’s no a priori reason to treat the interference of other human beings as a separate category to these.

Any given individual can be considered to have a “natural” course of action in any given situation, regardless of what the details of that situation are, including situations where some possibilities are being withheld from you by other human beings. If you are in a room with only one exit, then without an ability to walk through walls you can be pretty sure that at some point in the near future your “true” will is going to be to leave that room through that single door. The walls are not “restricting” your will, in this case; they are defining it. The same can apply when people get in your way in a similar manner. We can draw an analogy with an electrical current; a resistor offers opposition to the flow of current, but if that current is not confined to a well-defined and closed circuit in the first place then there will be no flow at all, and no will. To a large extent, discovering the will can be considered to be a process of determining “defining constraints” from “restricting constraints”. If there is a “natural” course of action, then it is natural because your nature demands it, and your nature is outside of your control. You never get to choose what your “true” will is, you can only choose whether or not to conform to it.

But anyway, if this “natural” course of action is considered to be the will, then it is always available regardless of opposition, if one could only become aware of it. It’s only when you’re faced with a number of seemingly suitable and feasible options that a wider definition of will becomes useful.