To Learn How To Will

If you looks deeply at one’s attempts to utilize will-power to accomplish any task, to bring about some change in one’s being, or to develop in some direction, it quickly becomes apparent that there are elements within our own being that are not supporting the focus, intensity and direction that one is trying to bring about. The will is in the mind, but the vital nature or the physical being are resistant or simply not interested. They want to continue along their habitual lines of activity, and do not see the necessity or urgency in accomplishing the change that is desired by the mind. Or there are different aspects of the mind itself that may hold opposing and quite contradictory ideas. One may at the same time have a great aspiration for spiritual growth, and be tied down by ideas of success in a career or in developing a romantic relationship, or in simply enjoying oneself without concern. In some cases we see a spiritual aspiration dulled and restrained by the idea that one should not make any efforts at all, that everything is preordained and one simply needs to let happen whatever is intended to happen.

The Mother makes it clear that the issue is primarily one of harmonizing and unifying the different parts of the being so that they are all aligned to the same goal, purpose and effort. She even goes so far as to point out that until one is able to shape oneself around a will, that there is nothing stable that can make any clear and definitive decisions and carry them out. In the normal exte
al life, this generally takes place by unification around the ego-personality. As an individual takes up a focus on spiritual growth, the organization and unification takes place through the psychic being coming forward and taking up a central role in the individual’s life.

The Mother writes: “To learn how to will is a very important thing. And to will truly, you must unify your being. In fact, to be a being, one must first unify oneself. If one is pulled by absolutely opposite tendencies, if one spends three-fourths of his life without being conscious of himself and the reasons why he does things, is one a real being? One does not exist. One is a mass of influences, movements, forces, actions, reactions, but one is not a being. One begins to become a being when he begins to have a will. And one can’t have a will unless he is unified.”

“And when you have a will, you will be able to say, say to the Divine: ‘I want what You want.’ But not before that. Because in order to want what the Divine wants, you must have a will, otherwise you can will nothing at all. You would like to. You would like it very much. You would very much like to want what the Divine wants to do. You don’t possess a will to give to Him and to put at His service. Something like that, gelatinous, like jelly-fish… there… a mass of good wills — and I am considering the better side of things and forgetting the bad wills — a mass of good wills, half-conscious and fluctuating.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter V Will-Power, pp. 49-50