A Wisdom Archive on Will

Introduction and links to related topics

Will - Will. In metaphysics and occult philosophy, Will is that which governs the manifested universes in eternity. Will is the one and sole principle of abstract eternal MOTION, or its ensouling essence. " The will", says Van Helmont, "is the first of all powers. . . . The will is the property of all spiritual beings and displays itself in them the more actively the more they are freed from matter." And Paracelsus teaches that "determined will is the beginning of all magical operations. It is because men do not perfectly imagine and believe the result, that the (occult) arts are so uncertain, while they might he perfectly certain." Like all the rest, the Will is septenary in its degrees of manifestation. Emanating from the one, eternal, abstract and purely quiescent Will (Atma in Layam), it becomes Buddhi in its Alaya state, descends lower as Mahat (Manas), and runs down the ladder of degrees until the divine Eros becomes, in its lower, animal manifestation, erotic desire. Will as an eternal principle is neither spirit nor substance but everlasting ideation. As well expressed by Schopenhauer in his Parerga, " in sober reality there is neither matter nor spirit. The tendency to gravitation in a stone is as unexplainable as thought in the human brain. . . If matter can - no one knows why - - fall to the ground, then it can also - no one knows why - -think. . . . As soon, even in mechanics, as we trespass beyond the purely mathematical, as soon as we reach the inscrutable adhesion, gravitation, and so on, we are faced by phenomena which are to our senses as mysterious as the WILL."

Will - Another word for persistence and maintained attention. Will is one of the two natural human powers for altering reality (the other is imagination). When faced with an insoluble problem or great odds against us, it is the Will alone that leads us through to solution and victory. As the imagination is the power of the mind through understanding and enlightenment, the Will is the way of material action. There is no will without physical effort of some kind exerted over physical phenomena.

Colin Wilson says of the will:
"Modern civilization induces an attitude of "passivity." When a Stone Age hunter set out to trap wild animals, he was aware of his will as a living force. When the prehistoric farmer scored the surface of the earth with a crude plough, he knew that his family''s survival through the winter depended on his effort, and his will responded to the challenge. When a modern city dweller walks down a crowded thoroughfare, he feels no sense of challenge or involvement. This city was built by other people; all these shops and offices are owned by other people. He can get through an ordinary day''s work in a state approximating to sleep. Most of his routine tasks are carried out by the ''robot.'' There is neither the need or the opportunity to use the will."

Will-born - Will-born Used in The Secret Doctrine as equivalent to mind-born -- referring specifically to those beings in the early third root-race "while it was yet in its state of purity" who were created by means of will power through kriyasakti by the Sons of Wisdom.

This progeny is termed the Sons of Ad, Sons of the Fire-mist, or Sons of Will and Yoga. "It was not a Race, this progeny. It was at first a wondrous Being, called the ''Initiator,'' and after him a group of semi-divine and semi-human beings. ''Set apart'' in Archaic genesis for certain purposes, they are those in whom are said to have incarnated the highest Dhyanis, ''Munis and Rishis from previous Manvantaras'' -- to form the nursery for future human adepts, on this earth and during the present cycle" (SD 1:207). Theosophy teaches that in future ages generation by means of will power through krisyasakti will again be the method of producing offspring.

The Puranas also refer to will-born progeny, termed chhandajas.

Will-less - Will-less A condition of beings who have not yet evolved forth free will, hence without initiative or self-determination. A specific instance is the case where will-less may be applied to the gods in heaven against whom Satan rebelled (as narrated in Milton''s Paradise Lost). In theosophical literature, used in reference to mankind in its early stages before manas (mind) became awakened, hence to the first and second root-races and early third root-race. Even among these early races the will was not absent, but it had not yet come into functional activity.

Sons Of Will And Yoga - Sons of Will and Yoga Applied to the androgynous third root-race, before the separation of the sexes, which created by kriyasakti the Sons of Will and Yoga -- the ancestors or spiritual forefathers of all subsequent arhats and mahatmas.

After the separation of the sexes, they were invited to multiply as the rest of humanity did, but the Sons of Will and Yoga refused to do so until the seventh root-race, when humanity will once more have acquired the power of spiritual-intellectual or immaculate reproduction. In another sense they are the nagas or good serpents, and mythology recounts the struggles which took place when the Sons of Will and Yoga, together with the last "unfallen" remnants of the third root-race, warred against the "fallen" Atlantean sorcerers sunken in the beguilements and illusion of gross material existence. They took refuge from the great cataclysm which brought about the end of the Atlantean continental system, in the "Sacred Island" in Central Asia, whose site is now hid in mystery and surrounded by immense desert wastes.

The Sons of Will and Yoga is also a title given in any root-race to those who carry on the original divine archaic tradition from age to age -- the initiates of every race who thus form a group set apart, originating during the third root-race and continuing as a body of more or less steadily increasing numbers into our own day.

Free Will - A philosophical and theological notion asserting the individual has the ability to make a choice independent of prior conditioning. Free will is usually contrasted with determinism. and the laws of cause and effect.

Free Will - Free Will The inherent power or capacity of choice, divine in its origin, which every being in the kosmos exercises in some degree as, consciously or unself-consciously, it evolves forth its essential self. Every thing and being has its own essential characteristic or svabhava and, the universal urge being towards self-expression and self-consciousness, of necessity each has its relative share of inherent free will with which to work out its destiny. Since evolution is a coming forth of the involved monadic essence, the unfolding of inner capacities and attributes, it cannot be produced, however stimulated, by something outside of itself. The one divine will is the force behind evolution on all planes of manifestation throughout the kosmos. Hence, each entity, as a unit of the divine All, has its portion of free choice and power to bring forth what is within itself.

Free will is manifesting, however feebly, in vegetative or automatic action in the whirling electrons of the atom; also in characteristic actions of matter, such as cohesion, polarity, and electricity; in the varied growths of vegetation; in the range of animal activities; in the evolving human being, and in the perfected humans called gods; and so forth up the scales of being. It acts in the urge which brings the monad to cast off its former garments in the minerals in order to assume new ones in the vegetable kingdom, from which again, after casting off these latter, it progresses to the animal kingdom; and from this again, the monad rejects beast forms and assumes the human shape where it gains in range and momentum because now acting self-consciously in greater or less degree.

The karma which brings to a person conditions which he does not choose or wish for in his present life, is yet consistent with his free will because he is the result of all his previous actions, now expressing themselves in results. These reactions of causes which he set in motion in this or in former lives, being the result which was inherent in his previous choices, is a self-imposed destiny; but it is not fatalism, because he is now free to decide again how he will meet the results of what he previously had chosen for himself. Karma is mathematically exact, both physically and metaphysically, but it is so constantly involved with new elements of choice and of proportion that its effects of necessity are measured on a sliding scale of being, so to say.

There is an automatic phase of free will in the purposeful instinct which marks the various activities of even minute and lowly forms of life. The unself-conscious beasts are protected, and therefore guided, by the wills of celestial beings who make the so-called laws of nature, yet even the beasts instinctively choose to run true to their own inner types or svabhava. They unconsciously will to be themselves and to copy no other. They have free will exactly in proportion to their consciousness, just as any person has it in the higher degrees of his intelligence and more active intuition.

Thus human beings have the power to work out their evolution, for the kingdom of heaven is taken by strength. The gods have gone ahead on the pathway towards omniscience -- so far as our universe is concerned -- by their own individual efforts consciously to act with an ever-enlarging measure of harmony with the one divine will. Thus the volume or power of free will is in strict proportion with the degree in which the entity has brought forth the central spark of divine willing fire which animates all that is. Nevertheless no single being or entity has completely unfettered and perfectly irresponsible free will, because of its relative imperfection and because of its inescapable subordination to greater wills, each such entity ever evolving from its stage of imperfection as it ascends along the scales of being: those on the higher rungs of the hierarchical ladder consciously willing in ever-enlarging degree to follow the greater divine will which holds all in its keeping.