The Source of Will is the Source of All

Inner Frontier
Fourth Way Spiritual Practice

Inner Work

For the week of June 16, 2014

The Source of Will is the Source of All

Everything, the universe, the multiverse, and us people, comes from one unfathomable Source. Physics tells us that Source is the Big Bang, which happened some 13.8 billion years ago. This view leaves us with no connection to the Source. It was long, long ago, and although we see remnants of it with our telescopes and satellites, it does not touch us personally, individually. Even though our bodies are made of stardust, we are on our own, disconnected from those far-distant roots.

This picture looks very different, however, if we consider the Big Bang to have been intentional, not just some inexplicable, mechanistic accident. If that consideration is true, then the One whose intention it was must still be here, and the will of that One is even now driving the whole accelerating expansion of the universe, and much else besides.

The mystery of will goes deep, deep enough to touch each of us directly, intimately. One way, from a rational, logical stance, to see how that can be is to suppose that the Will of the Source touches us all by operating through a higher dimension than space-time, a dimension that gives that Will access to every point in space-time, including within us personally. Imagine the fingers of a hand touching a flat surface. From the point of view of the surface, there are five separate circles. But from the point of view of the hand, there is one unity in which all five fingers are included. If we now add a further supposition that the degree of complexity of an entity determines the degree to which it can manifest will, then we humans, with our remarkably complex bodies, must have some strong capacity for will.

This is not to say that we all exercise our will all the time. Clearly we do not. The times we live on autopilot are most certainly times of lower degrees of will. But when we are more awake, more present, we have greater capacity to act from ourselves, from our will, rather than from reaction or habit.

The form of will that is easiest to recognize in ourselves is attention. We choose where to put our attention. In doing so, we drive our awareness and senses. Moving our attention is an act of will. Holding our attention on something is an ongoing act of will. Furthermore, our will defines us. At our most essential, we are will, we are our own will. All inner work, whether active, receptive, or synergic, involves will. Our work of presence, particularly, can teach us who we are, that we are our will, that our will is I.

Yet we mistake our ego for our I. We have a lifetime of building and defending the personal illusion of my ego. We take our personality patterns of thought, emotion, and action, our skills, memory and experience, and we weave them together to form our self-image. That self-image is our ego. It is just an image, but one that we take to be our very person. It is an illusion of parts making to which we give a name, a name that implies a wholeness that is not really there, and that is what we believe we are. Yet our will, our I, goes well beyond our thinking and emotions and personality patterns. Our I is not defined or limited by any of that. It is pure will. We are pure will.

This becomes even more significant in the context of the Source, for the Source is will, the Will of World. The nature of will as being unconstrained by space and time makes it something of a mystery to us, different than anything else in our experience. The Will of the Source is a unity. All will belongs to that unity. We share in that unity in our own individual will. It is both uniquely ours and a ray of the great unity. Thus our personal will is directly connected to the Source, is the Source. But the illusion of our ego inserts itself, making us see the world as flat, and preventing us from opening to our true nature.

In deep meditation and contemplative prayer, we can relax deeply, let go deeply, to the point that we temporarily drop our posture of being our ego, of being our name, of being separate from everything and everyone. In that moment we can reconnect with the Source, we can become the Source, or rather the Source can become us. If that happens, then we are and the Source is, and there is no difference between the two. Indeed there are not two, just One. Right here in our own core, our I is the Will of the World. And we recognize that same Will in everyone else.

The question remains: how to reconnect with the Source? First we need our quiescent and unified will, free from any attachments and identifications, at least for the period of deep meditation or prayer. Then two effective approaches open. In one, we wait. We remain in the stillness. Any thoughts or emotions just slide past. We make ourselves available to the Higher by waiting. In the other approach, we reach out and in, we reach toward to Sacred. We open our mind, heart, and soul toward the Sacred. We bring our entire being, our entire will into this one intention: to connect our will with the Divine Will, to enter the Greatness, to invite, to beg the Greatness to enter us. We do not know the direction. We do not know the signs. But yet we look, we try, we invite, and we plead. Here I am, for You.

For this week, open toward the Will of All.