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Training the Will: 1
Let's talk about training the will.These days you pretty much have to be an old-fashioned occultist, a martial artist, a new recruit for a combat branch of the military, or otherwise in some unpopular corner of society to have encountered the idea that the human will can and should be trained, focused, and put to work. There's good reason for that. "Just Do It" isn't merely the slogan brandished by that overpriced third-rate footwear company -- it's the message that most of a century of cheap sorcery disguised as mass media advertising has been trying to drum into your head. Just do it -- don't think about it, don't decide for yourself whether it's a good idea, and above all else don't wonder about what motives are behind what's being pushed at you. Unthinking, reflexive reactions to collective stimuli are exactly what every ruling elite wants to inculcate in its serfs.
Of course there are plenty of less political reasons why you might consider will training. What you can accomplish in life is measured, not by talent or intelligence or education or luck, but by will. We all know talented people who've never done anything with their gifts, really smart people who have never amounted to anything, people with advanced degrees who are failures in life, and people who've frittered away more than one lucky break. Without a strong, focused will under conscious control, you get nowhere. With that, you can accomplish astonishing things.
Here's the good news: you already have all the willpower you need. You simply don't know how to use it yet.
The will is never actually weak; when it appears to be weak, the problem is that it's in conflict with itself. The will can only exercise its full power when it is undivided -- when you will one thing, and only one thing, with all your heart. Getting to the point where you can do that -- ah, that's the difficulty. Hoc opus, hic labor est!
Let's say that you want to make a million dollars. Nothing could be easier. All you have to do is set aside every goal except for making your million. When you wake up in the morning, look over the day ahead and figure out how you can use every hour to make money. Before you spend a cent on anything, assess whether that expenditure is going to help you make your million. As you go about your day, constantly look for opportunities to make money. Treat each dollar you earn as a tool to earn more dollars -- that's how the rich get rich, you know: they know that it's easier for money to make money than it is for human beings to make money. Do those things and you'll have your million sooner than you can imagine. It's that simple -- but simple, of course, is not the same thing as easy.
There are two primary barriers in the way of the free, potent, and unified will. The first consists of conflicts of will; the second consists of habits of will. Let's take them one at a time.
If you try to use your will to achieve two conflicting things at once, it's as though you tried to take one step forward and one step back at the same time: you go nowhere, and if you're clumsy enough you may fall on your rump. If you want to make a million dollars, and you also want to spend a million dollars, and you try to do both, your bank balance is not going to rise very far. Mind you, you can do these things one at a time; you can devote a few years to making your million, and then spend it all on a few months of Bacchanalian excess; if that's what you want to do, by all means get out there and do it. Most people, though, want to have their cake and eat it too, and so they end up where they started without ever getting the confidence-building results of seeing a cool million in the bank, on the one hand, or the fond memories of that fantastic two-month blowout in the Bahamas on the other.
Conflicts of will are easy to real with; it's habits of will that are where it gets tough. All through your life you've been establishing habitual patterns of will. Most of what you call your personality consists of nothing more than that: habits of will. You habitually do this and don't do that, behave this way and not that way, respond favorably to this thing and not to that, and so on: that's your personality.
There's another word for habits of will: emotions. Think about any emotion you choose, and you'll find will at the heart of it. Love, hate, jealousy, anger, kindness, greed, you name it -- every one, at its root, is a motion of the will in response to some thing or some group of things in the universe of your experience. Spend some time thinking about the emotions you most commonly feel until you get a sense of how they relate to your will. That's important for what follows.
The difficulty with habits of will is that when the habits you have established in your life have results you don't like, and you try to use your will to do something else, you've just landed in the middle of a conflict of wills, and what happens? You get nowhere, as noted above. You're trying to step forward and backward at the same time. Most of us have had the experience of landing on our rumps at least once while doing that.
Does that mean that you're stuck with a permanently divided will? Nope. There are ways to change your habits of will, and we'll be discussing them as this series of posts proceeds. The most important of them is this: establish the habit of conscious willing.
How do you do this? To begin with, by using your will deliberately when absolutely nothing of importance depends on the outcome.
Right now, before you read the sentence following this one, touch the tip of your nose ten times with the index finger of your left hand. Have you done that? Good. That's an action on which nothing at all depends: an absurd, pointless, arbitrary action -- and thus it's perfect for beginning the training of your will.
Exercise 1: Write "Touch your nose!" on a piece of note paper or the like. Tape it up someplace where you know you will see it at least once a day -- preferably someplace private enough that nobody's going to freak out when they see you touching your nose. For the next week, every time you see if, if you haven't yet done this exercise that day, touch your nose ten times with your left hand.
Absurd as it is, this begins the process of building a new habit into your personality -- the habit of doing things just because you choose to do them, not because you have any inner or outer compulsion pushing you to do them. In the weeks to come, we'll build on that habit, and talk about other ways you can begin loosening the grip of your current habits of will on your life.
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(Anonymous) 2020-09-29 09:01 pm (UTC)(link)Definitely: Talent, intelligence education and luck seem to be secondary if you're determined (maybe that's one more reason why the orange guy has the impact on the just-do-it's he has?). If you have many talents, that can even be an obstacle at times and I consider myself a good example for that. In most of the things I do, I can be better than average with little effort or training - yet obtaining a certain level of mastery with a specific skill or completing one specific task can take a very long time if I try to pursue several threads at the same time. That can be frustrating and in fact leads close to nowhere many times, but sometimes t doesn't seem vain - there seem to be two different strategies: Focusing your will as intensely as possible on one goal for a limited time or dispersing it to a much wider (but well defined) range for an extended period of time without losing too much power. Does that make any sense from your perspective?
Greetings,
Nachtgurke
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As for the Orange Julius, he knows all this stuff. When he was a kid, he attended the church in New York City where the New Thought teacher Norman Vincent Peale was the minister. I'm a little startled that I haven't yet heard of his supporters piling into Peale's most famous book, The Power of Positive Thinking -- you'd think it would be right up their alley.
Okay to post?
(Anonymous) 2020-09-29 10:41 pm (UTC)(link)The air is thick with synchronicities.
So, an hour ago I finished reading through Arcane Formulas and came away thinking 'well, there's some useful stuff in there but Atkinson had a strange way of putting things and that could get out of hand.
Only to look here and see you say:
"As for the Orange Julius, he knows all this stuff. When he was a kid, he attended the church in New York City where the New Thought teacher Norman Vincent Peale was the minister. I'm a little startled that I haven't yet heard of his supporters piling into Peale's most famous book, The Power of Positive Thinking -- you'd think it would be right up their alley."
I doubt it is limited to one side or three sides or seven sides; but if the use of 'will' based on New Thought is widespread over years, and many have missed the underlying principles/potentials and reduced it to a battle of wills between competing people trying to impose their reality, perhaps it would go some way to explain the extraordinary maelstrom of the times?
P102
"...the occult denial tends to erase or wipe out the mental picture in one's own mind; in the mind of others, or in circumstances and environment..."
P100
"...clear pictures of the things and conditions which you wish to materialize into the objective world world"
P105
"Regard the objective world, or persons, things, and circumstances, as the great plane surface upon which you wish to thow or project your mental images that they may materialise objectively"
106
"..treatments.." [Dear gods!}
One might surmise there are a good number of people who've got a bit carried away with this stuff.
What happens to those who try to project regardless of anything outside of what they want?
This way lies madness?
I could envisage that the parasitic class have taken the basic tool but missed the bloody point entirely!
Like taking a violin and using it as a baseball bat.
I can see the hyper-critical importance in developing Will given this scenario [lest we get dragged down in their reality wars]!
[earthworm]
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(Anonymous) 2020-09-30 08:44 am (UTC)(link)Yes.
Of course.
Gaining an edge,
Hidden there are many edges.
Though it seems the point has been lost.
Projecting one rather than being a conduit for another has trouble baked in.
The direction of flow seems questionable and exists in relation to opposites Will dynamic equilibrium be passed over for personality power.
Missing Return into thy self content to give, but asking no one, asking nothing yet in using be not entangled in them for then already are they bad and will cause thee suffering... uhhmm!
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That's because they likely think Peale is New Age ala The Secret. Most haven't heard of the Peale connection at all. I hang around a forum full of people who discuss nothing but how awful Trump is. Not good for my mental health and I've cut back my time there because they've descended even further into TDS than before. But these folks who are obsessed with Trump don't know about Peale's influence on Trump. I haven't bothered letting them in on it, it wouldn't make a difference, they'd just go "So that's why he's delusional!!!"
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(Anonymous) 2020-10-01 12:36 am (UTC)(link)—Lady Cutekitten
TPOPT
(Anonymous) 2020-10-01 03:33 pm (UTC)(link)I'll take another swipe at it as well.
— Godozo
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I decided that doing this is very helpful to my mental health, and therefore important to do. Not doing the other things means that I either reschedule when to do them or skip them. Since the other things were things I do for mental health, it becomes a win-win for me.
When I engage in social media, I kept asking myself, why? The more I interact with it, the more it drains me. So, I guess nose touching during reading facebook is helpful.
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As for Faceplant, I thumb my nose at it rather than merely touching my nose, but your mileage may vary. ;-)