Toward Ecosophy

Let's talk one more time about training the will. 

We've already covered the essential principles of will training:  start with things that don't have any emotional loading, develop conscious action and conscious attention equally, build the habit of success before you start trying things where you might fail. The remaining ingredients are time and effort. If you work at will training over the months and years to come, following these principles, you'll develop the habit of conscious willing and you will be able to do things that seem unimaginable to you right now. 

Whether you do this or not is entirely up to you.  I can't do it for you, and neither can anyone else. Nor can you blame anyone or anything else if you don't do them; one way or another, this is on you.  The first exercise you need to do, if you want to develop a strong, supple, powerful will, is to choose to do will training exercises, and then do them. 

What exercises should you do?  Longtime reader Violet Cabra has helpfully posted 100 will exercises, any and all of which can be put to work in this process. Reading those and the exercises we've discussed here already, you should have no trouble coming up with many more. 

You can also take up some basic set of spiritual, religious, or occult exercises, make them a regular part of your daily routine, and keep doing them for the rest of your life. That's perhaps the most traditional of all will training methods, and it reliably produces people who can accomplish what other people think is impossible. Still, that's only one option; there are many others. Anything that requires regular practice, from playing the piano to lifting weights, can be approached in the same spirit. 

One thing to watch for, as you approach the continuing work of will training, is the failure melodrama. That's a habit, quite common these days, of deliberately setting yourself up to fail and then moaning about your failure in public. This has several emotional payoffs; it allows you to claim that you want to do something praiseworthy without ever having to do it; it allows you to feel sorry for yourself, which is apparently quite an addictive practice; and it allows you to parade your suffering in front of everyone you know, which seems to be even more addictive. There are various forms of the failure melodrama, but they all share the common feature that they're performance pieces -- it's all about displaying to others. 

Thus I'm going to suggest one more rule for training the will:  don't talk about what you're doing. Don't boast about your successes and don't moan about your defeats. Simply keep on going, learning from each success and each failure, watching the antics of your ego as it reacts to the whole process, and letting the process teach you. 

Got it?  Good. Now go for it. 

Let's talk some more about training the will. 

We've talked about habits. Those are the patterns that keep your will going when you have other things on your mind. As we discussed last week, habits are good servants but lousy masters. One of the central goals of will training is therefore to establish habits that serve you well, and eliminate those that try to boss you around. 

Many people have had the experience of trying to break a habit and failing repeatedly. That's one of the things that establishes the habit of failure -- the habit that, above all, you need to break. The usual cause of failure in changing a habit is trying to get rid of it without replacing it. The key to success, in turn, is to choose habits you don't want and replace them with habits you do want -- or at least can live with. 

Here's an example. I know a guy who'd gradually developed the habit of drinking alcohol. It wasn't a serious problem for him, but he'd seen one of his parents become dependent on booze and knew how that movie ends. He tried just stopping a couple of times, with very limited success, and then we talked. On my advice, he replaced it with another habit -- drinking strongly flavored black tea. Instead of pouring himself a drink in the evening to wind down, he made himself some tea, and sipped that while doing the things he normally did of an evening. It worked. No fuss, no bother, no white knuckles, just one habit gone and a less physically damaging habit in its place. 

Why did it work? Because the new habit gave him everything the old one did except the specific, narrowly focused chemical rush of ethanol, and it replaced that with a different chemical rush, the one you get from the caffeine and other stimulants in tea (and in some of the flavorings -- look up sometime how many spices have effects on your brain.) 

You can do the same thing. If you've got a habit you don't want, replace it with a habit you do want -- or at least are willing to live with. Make sure the two of them are similar enough that the new habit meets the same emotional needs that the old one did. Remember that your goal here isn't to display your heroic virtue or, for that matter, to prove to the world that you can't do anything right. (An astonishing number of people have that emotional habit in place.) Your goal is to swap one habit for another, and turn a master into a servant. 

That's one of your assignments for this week. If you don't have any habits you want to change, good for you; see if you can find a habit you want to have that you don't have yet, and take it up. Your other assignments are to continue with last week's project, changing the specific exercises you're doing. Remember -- one exercise involving conscious action, and another involving conscious attention.  By doing this you're replacing an unhelpful habit -- the habit of neglecting your will -- with a helpful one -- the habit of training your will. 

Got it? Good. We'll go further next week. 

Let's talk some more about training the will. 

At this point, if you've been following along with this sequence of posts and doing the exercises I've suggested, you've had the chance to notice some of the ways your will works -- and doesn't work. You've also started to develop the habit of will that is going to enable you to transform your life: the habit of conscious willing. The exercises I've proposed, absurd as they are, are examples of the two basic tools that will help you build that habit. The first, the one that involved touching your nose, is the tool of conscious action; the second, the one that involved noticing colors, is the tool of conscious attention. 

Most people, most of the time, spend their lives in what amounts to a shallow doze, and drift through life in a haze of emotionally tinged slumber. That's pleasant enough when the emotions are pleasant, but it can get pretty miserable when they're the opposite. The alternative, of course, is to wake up out of the doze and see the world through open eyes. You can do that, and learning to practice conscious attention and conscious action is how you do so. 

As you begin to do that, you're going to face resistance. Some of it will come from within you -- it takes effort to wake up and even more effort to stay awake, and the internal pull toward slumber is a real factor.  Some of it will come from around you -- other people are going to become uneasy if you're not dozing along with them, and you'll have to deal with that. Some of it will fall into a middle ground, because when those external pressures are repeated often enough -- especially when you were a child -- you internalize them, and they become habits of will. 

The pressures are unusually intense just now, for reasons rooted in politics. In 2013, to cite only one example, a publisher reprinted a self-help classic, Wake Up and Live! by Dorothea Brande. It's a fine little book -- you can download it for free from Archive.org here -- and you'd think that its republication would have passed without a quibble. Not so; no less an organ of the conventional wisdom than The Nation took the time to publish an article denouncing Brande as a fascist and attempting to tar her book with the same brush. Why? Because if you help yourself, you aren't dependent on a certain privileged class to help you, and their power comes from their claim to be the only people who can help you. 

In its own way, that resistance is helpful -- it gives you something to push against -- but it can also be a challenge, and when it comes from people you care about, it can hurt. Be ready for that. 

The following exercise will help you begin to perceive the landscape of possibility and resistance you face. 

Exercise 3:  Get a notebook, or create a file on your computer. Once each day -- the time is up to you, though evening is traditional -- think back over the previous 24 hours. Notice when you were using your will consciously and when you simply operated on habit. How awake were you at the different times of the day? What seems to strengthen your will, and what seems to weaken it? Don't pass judgment on yourself; just observe, and take notes. 

Got it?  Good. We'll go further next week. 

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.