Training the Will: 1

[ecosophia]

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. 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

The order can change quickly though: eating is more important when you're on an empty stomach! This is a theme for meditation right here, isn't it?

[ecosophia]

Yep. ;-)