CHAPTERS

Chapter Two: The Nature of the Will

As what we’ve emphasized in the previous chapter, clearing out such illusory needs and wants off of one’s mind is the main aspect of Thelemic practice. However, this is not the complete description. A lot of people say that ‘our minds is often our greatest enemy,’ and if you think about it, the mind indeed is the one responsible for veiling one’s will. Whenever we do something, it is natural for us to use our minds, which is why it’s impossible to completely shut it down. What one must do in order to find and follow one’s will is to use the mind to the service of it. It’s not enough to just clear off the mind with unnecessary clutter of preferences; one should also learn to make it become aware of the true preferences, and be able to train it so that it will not become a distraction with the perception of one’s will.

Using the Mind in Alignment to the Will

The main role of the mind is to train it to become aware of your own preferences because this is what will lead to discovering your True Will. It’s not about knowing what to do; it’s more about knowing why you do what you do. The will can be made apparent if you pay attention to it instead of paying attention to the mind. The main purpose of why you need to make your mind aware of your True Will is not just so that your mind can create a representation of your will that could guide you, but rather make your mind assist or help you in the fulfillment of your own will.

For example, if your Will says that you want to move from one city to another, it’ll be impossible to achieve that task without your mind’s assistance right? At the same time, the mind can’t also accomplish such task unless it knows that moving to another city is your true desire.

If you put it in another perspective, your objective could never be your True Will unless you are aware of what it’s like living in another city or if such city exists, and such knowledge came from your mind. From this example, you can see that both the mind and the Will work together. Both of them should be aligned with one another. However, even if the mind contributes knowledge to the process, the mind cannot distinguish the true preference of the self, only the Will does that.

It is possible to find out what your Will is but it’s impossible to square it out, so to speak. Your Will can never be found through thinking or working out. It’s never found through analysis because one must ‘know thy will’ before you even use your mind to think about it. You don’t figure out what your Will is because then it becomes a mental process; the mind can’t become aware of True Will by attending to its own processes, it should be informed by something that’s external. To reiterate, your mind should be capable of consciously representing your True Will but not in a way of knowing what to do, instead the mind should just help you know how to do it, how to fulfill your Will.

Perhaps in layman’s terms, the Will can be something that’s coming naturally from one’s heart or from one’s innermost being. It’s not something you find because it’s already within, and you need to use your mind to figure out how you can fulfill such Will.

Training the Mind

In order to fulfill your True Will, a person must learn how to train his/her mind. This is what comprises the bulk of Thelemic practice.

The first thing you need in order to accomplish this is to give your mind a comprehensive general education. If you want to have the maximum chance of fulfilling your True Will then you need to ensure that your mind has a good knowledge of the opportunities and methods for doing so.

A simple example to illustrate this point is that, the self can’t satisfy its basic need for food, if the mind doesn’t have knowledge of what a food is in the first place, and materials like plants and animals can be cooked or eaten. Even if your mind has knowledge about such things, your Will may still remain unfulfilled because you have no idea which animals and plants to eat, or the methods on how one can eat them. Of course such ‘knowledge’ may come from basic instinct as a human being, but it still resides entirely on the mind, if it has enough knowledge about agriculture, food manufacturing etc., which can increase the likelihood of success or the fulfillment of one’s Will.

A mind that’s also hampered with false knowledge, beliefs, notions of morality, and the likes will be far less able to help in the fulfillment of one’s self preferences, and if that’ll be the case as in some people, it will be difficult for them to come to terms with their self – preferences or True Will in matters like relationships or sexuality leaving them unsatisfied and perhaps unhappy.

The second most important thing after letting your mind learn as much as you can about life in general is to train it to become aware. Usually, this is the most essential thing why people fail to know what they truly desire, it’s because they don’t have self – awareness. You need to be able to question your own mind or your own self whenever you’re making decisions or choices in anything. The Will becomes apparent if one learns how to observe the interactions of one’s self and its environment especially if it’s free from the influences of the mind.

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