What is Will? Are we not, by definition, conformed with it?
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Anyway, that's the best I got.
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My current solution: "No my will but Thine be done" while I do the best I can.
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Not a reply (no offense), but continuing.
What will you be freely fated to choose if I, myself, am freely fated to choose to encourage you to try to stop being the Ruach so much and to start being the Chiah a little more?
Knight to Queen's Bishop 3.
And is the King your Ruach?
Will you strive or yield?
Are you still interested in the game, or are you Not?
Now, decide.
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@Sardonyx said
"Anyway, that's the best I got."
Pretty great stuff. Definitely got some new synapses firing in all the right ways. No ultimate solutions yet but, then again, I'm still alive so I wouldn't really expect any.
@Sardonyx said
"But it's that sense of identifying with the personality and feeling bound to the material. In this sense, it would represent the bondage of the personality to the outcome of the "break" (as in a game of pool) of the original impetus of the universe.
The next stage, however, (he said pointing to your synchronicity) is the Tower, and the destruction of the illusion of personal Will.
"This! Stages. One foot in front of the other. Horse before the cart.
Also, apparently the Large Hadron Collider is spinning up to possibly create some mini-black holes this week or next which might possibly leak some gravity out of our dimension into a parallel one which might possibly disprove the Big Bang theory and replace it with an eternal universe theory (something I've long thought was overdue) based on the idea that universal forces affect things differently based on their wavelength, meaning that each color or sound has its own intrinsic experience of reality. In other words, the universe may be on the verge of getting a lot weirder than even I give it credit for and perhaps I should just stop pretending I know how it's meant to work and start letting it show me for itself.
Meantime, thanks for the posts... as long as they may last
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@Sardonyx said
"Anyway, you're describing stage 1 (column 1), with the result, in Case's tarot imagery, of the sense of being bound to the Devil. Crowley's key forgoes this bondage symbolism and forfeits some good things for others, imho. But it's that sense of identifying with the personality and feeling bound to the material. In this sense, it would represent the bondage of the personality to the outcome of the "break" (as in a game of pool) of the original impetus of the universe.
The next stage, however, (he said pointing to your synchronicity) is the Tower, and the destruction of the illusion of personal Will.
It doesn't resolve through reason, but rather through an experience of transcending identification with the personality. The Tower."
This just landed with a whole lot more resonance. Thanks again for the pointer... it sent me in exactly the right direction.
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Such an important question, and good thread.
If I may contribute, there's two main senses of "will" that are important here, and many shadings inbetween.
A human being wills something, meaning they have a preference for one state of affairs over another, and they go into action to realize that state of affairs.
A cosmic sense of will is more like this: even if there were nothing, there would still be the possibility of something. One of the possibilities is that there should be some means of canvassing those possibilities - of "running through" them in some sense. Existence, actualization, is a device whereby Nothing comes to realize the possibilities that are latent or inherent in it. Or something like that
Anyway, the point is, the cosmic will is very much tied up with this sense of running through possibilities, of experiencing the "rich tapestry" and all that.But that being the case, there's a right way and a wrong way to go about it if you have a body, the sense organs of which are the means whereby God's possibilities are canvassed. And the prior possibilities that form the conditions of the possibility of experience in a human body are quite rigid and delicate. Food (labour), climate (shelter), mental stability (friendship, love). All that good stuff.
So it turns out, that while God is impartial (His experience of His possibility of being some person horribly murdered is on a footing with His experience of His possibility of being in love on a sunny day), we cannot afford to be so impartial. Don't mix the planes. That means: there are requirements for being a vessel of, or incarnation of, God - there's a "path", a path through possibility, that has to be carved out or chosen by the total human organism, in order for that work of experiencing stuff to occur.
And this is the human will in conformity with, or aligned with, God's will, or the cosmic will. You choose things, and forego others, on the basis of a trajectory that suits your capabilities in life while obeying life's rules (in a practical sense), and in doing so, you are the envoy of God, as God sits in the chariot that is you, and runs through just those possibilities. Everything that happens now, and now, and now, is it. But there are ways of doing that that are, so to speak "ecological", and ways that aren't. Which doesn't matter to God, but it does matter to the human organism.
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Hey GG, thanks for swinging by. I've always enjoyed running across your posts in the archives. Your introduction of "body off" awhile back on some other thread was a game-changer for me. Good to see you in the digital-flesh, as it were.
I've managed to find a new rabbit hole to fall down on this topic thanks to some of the suggestions above and it's proving to be very fruitful so I don't really want to reset myself back to the square one at which I started the thread, but your post does seem to take as read a few of the things that are causing me to get hung up on this issue. Mainly, in your last paragraph, you seem to hinge it all on an individual's choice but that sort of personal volition is what I'm having trouble getting to jive with my understanding of natural law. So as not to leave anything out, what I'm working through now is pushing me toward a realization that choice is somehow part of that law, thus making it both necessary and voluntary at the same time. But no Aha! moments yet.
Any thoughts on that? Do we really have volitional ability to change the direction of cause-effect? Or is there another angle to look at it that helps to break down the resistance my mind is giving me?
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From the perspective of someone who has little experience in Thelema but some experience in thinking about this... yes and no.
Yes in that what is at our core drives our feelings and interpretations of the world around us whether we're being self- and other-destructive, or self- and other-productive.
No, in that the core -- like many traits -- is not fixed. Passion in the wrong context or used in the wrong ways can be destructive, and anger in the right context or in the right ways can be productive. Representative of someone's intention and identity or not. Whether the emotion is real or honest or not doesn't matter at all. Kind of like how I see some people causing damage with their emotions and think that part of themselves that's otherwise fine is just not in a good place at the time or being turned to healthy ends.
Maybe useful, maybe not. Hope I at least didn't waste your time.
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Will is what works for you, if what works solves your conflict then its good for you.
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@Vadox said
"Will is what works for you, if what works solves your conflict then its good for you."
Thanks for joining the discussion, Vadox, but I'm going to have to ask you to be a bit more specific. How does this address the particular questions of the OP?
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@Gnosomai Emauton said
"Hey GG, thanks for swinging by. I've always enjoyed running across your posts in the archives. Your introduction of "body off" awhile back on some other thread was a game-changer for me. Good to see you in the digital-flesh, as it were.
I've managed to find a new rabbit hole to fall down on this topic thanks to some of the suggestions above and it's proving to be very fruitful so I don't really want to reset myself back to the square one at which I started the thread, but your post does seem to take as read a few of the things that are causing me to get hung up on this issue. Mainly, in your last paragraph, you seem to hinge it all on an individual's choice but that sort of personal volition is what I'm having trouble getting to jive with my understanding of natural law. So as not to leave anything out, what I'm working through now is pushing me toward a realization that choice is somehow part of that law, thus making it both necessary and voluntary at the same time. But no Aha! moments yet.
Any thoughts on that? Do we really have volitional ability to change the direction of cause-effect? Or is there another angle to look at it that helps to break down the resistance my mind is giving me?"
Hey there, sorry I didn't reply to this earlier.
Of course it's the old philosophical problem of Free Will. I think the correct answer is always going to be some kind of Compatibilism. The solution is ditching the pompous philosophical notion of a Free Will that could be free of causation, and understanding that the only kind of free will (no caps) worth wanting is perfectly compatible with determinism, and in fact depends on determinism to function.
It's the same kind of free will a sophisticated robot would have, which makes sense as we are basically "moist robots" - IOW, a deterministic mechanism requires deterministic methods to negotiate a deterministic world, but, for the simple reason that it lacks total information about the state of the deterministic world, it still needs to make decisions and choices (on the basis of that limited information) about what to do next (therefore concomitantly, what options are thereby foregone) and it can make wrong and right decisions.
Which leaves determinism as the "free will" of the Universe at large - i.e. just the way the Fool happens to wander. But we, as mechanisms embedded in that wandering, don't have that kind of free will. Even though we can attain a sort of consciousness of that state of God's free wandering.
UNLESS the internal magickal theory is correct and there are ways, as-yet-uncanvassed-by-science, but known as a rough and ready art by magicians, to influence or alter determinism as we know it. As I'm in a rationalist phase, I doubt the possibility of that, but even if it were the case, I don't see how that wouldn't be just a deeper understanding of determinism really, still some kind of law-governed flowing of stuff, those "laws" being as above said, a description of the stuff's free wandering (looked at from a higher point of view).