Will

When a person has found the way of being as described in this chapter, he is free of day-to-day personal angst. There is no longer the worriers fear of what unfortunate thing might happen or the controllers concern about losing control. There is no fear of being found out. There is no fear of being left alone, or of being culpable. Instead, there is a sense of strength. In this way of being, there is the ability to let things go. Instead of getting hooked by someones egocentric jab or provoked by some news that historically would have caused a sense of angst for this person, there is a confidence that one is able to deal with whatever life delivers.

This inner strength manifests itself as will. The word will , of course, is the future tense of the verb to be . This is worth a moment of reflection. In a sense, when a person who has transcended her robotic ways says what she will do, she is collapsing time. She is not just saying what she will do at a certain time, she is declaring to the universe that as far as she is concerned , her statement declares that she has already incorporated fulfillment of her promise into her being. The sentence , ˜˜I will pick up my son at 3:30 P.M., means a certain little boy can count on the 3:30 arrival of his mother. Period. This is a mother who will keep her word.

One of the biggest issues humanity faces is what I call ˜˜ forgetting conviction . It is the reason people dont keep their New Years resolutions , why they dont lose weight when they say they will, or why they start and then stop exercise programs.

I remember myself twenty-five years ago promising to stop smoking. I tried several times before I was actually able to do it. On one cloudy day, I would finish a cigarette and declare to the person next to me, ˜˜Thats it, I quit. I would put the cigarette out, fully intending, with all the conviction in the world, to quit. But then, sometimes only a half hour after that big production, I would, for example, be driving onto the on-ramp of a local highway a trigger point for this smokerand bingo, I would reach for a cigarette. I would remember my intention to quit, but I would forget my conviction.

Nowadays I would say I was not close enough in proximity to the awareness required to actually implement my will. I possessed inadequate control over my meta-level thinking. I was ruled by my meta-level. This was an issue of will. Not in the Victorian sense of willpower, as a force of will that would fight against personal appetites, but in the sense of being able to transcend the struggle between appetites and conscience.

My smoking habits motivated me to reach for cigarettes. My meta-level thoughts surrounding smoking were based on fears that I would die, judgments about why I was wrong to smoke, desires to please those around me, shame at lacking the will to go through with it. At one moment I was a smoker, identified with the pleasure of the whole affair. At another moment, I was a judge, disgusted by my weakness. What I had to learn is that I could be a will.

The work of the founder of psychosynthesis, Roberto Assagioli, stimulated me to take a new direction. For the last twenty years I have successfully operated on the assumption that when you gain control of your meta-level thinking, by knowing what triggers you and by accepting the insecurity underlying all of your psychological machinations, you suddenly become a will.

When we stop being whatever crosses our consciousness, we are left with will. We choose. We act. We observe our judgments and our emotions. The observer is the will. We do not possess any more substance when we are in this form than when we are identified with our feelings of self or our emotions. There is nobody in there, but things are getting done. We experience life in the present while the future is coming at us. Instead of functioning based on our habitual pressures, we function according to our intrinsic nature.