What Is the True Will?

Each of us can name several conscious intentions or goals we hold at any given moment. We might be working on an important project, or we might be seeking the ideal mate. We might be in the middle of executing our 3-year plan. Or we might be working upon realizing our plans for this evening. Short or long term, we have ideas about how we’d like our lives to be, and we can call these intentions our personal true will.

So, what actually is True Will?

The personal will is one of the primary organizing principles of our lives. When we place the will in its proper function, our lives become neatly divided into navigable categories of “important” and “unimportant”. The personal will liberates us from swaying aimlessly, tempted by this path and then that path.

With a strong will, we are heading somewhere, and that makes it very easy to decide what is a sensible use of our time and what isn’t. Everyone and everything in our environment become charged with meaning by way of the personal will. There are people and things which help us toward our goal. And people and things which do not help us toward our goal.

The personal will organizes our surroundings even if we neglect it. Ignore your dreams, or fail to work on behalf of them! And you will find the ordinary world turns into a chaotic storm. Everything around you turn into a representation of your lack of initiative. People reflect back to you your untrustworthiness or lack of integrity. The simplest matter becomes catalyst for overwhelming anxiety, and relationships become rife with resentment, miscommunication and confusion. Such is the importance of taking a stand in this world by naming what you want and then going for it.

The personal will belongs to the ‘ego’, or the personality, or the lower self. The attainment of the personal will may or may not make us happy, for the personality is limited in its perspective. We may get what we want, and then find that wanting it was far more enjoyable than actually having it. And no matter what, as soon as we get what we want, we will immediately want something else, for the desires of the personality are inexhaustible.

Higher Purpose

There is another will, however, that is affecting your choices. This will does not change, but remains constant over the course of a lifetime, and sometimes over many lifetimes. This is the will of the Higher Self, and it is the True Will. The Higher Self is that spiritual essence of an individual which persists across many lifetimes. The Higher Self is not only the collection of all past lifetimes. It is also all future lifetimes as well, for it exists outside of time.

Before entering each lifetime, the Higher Self sets a particular intention for the incarnation by choosing certain lessons it wishes to learn. It sets its True Will. This is somewhat related to the concept of Karma, although in popular culture karma is deeply misunderstood. Karma is not a question of murder for murder. It is not that if you steal from a person in this life that same person will steal from you in the next. Karma is the unfolding evolution of a given soul, a process of learning and balance that happens throughout incarnations.

We come into each lifetime bearing the marks of the lifetimes which have preceded it. We may have lived a life of extreme poverty, or extreme wealth. Plus, we may have been imprisoned, or we may have been a master holding slaves in bondage. We may have lived many lives where the same dynamic played out again and again; for instance, we may be strongly imprinted with the experience of being silenced or ignored.

The Universe is striving toward wholeness and balance. Therefore, when we come in with certain excesses, deficits and biases, the soul longs to balance them so that expansion is greater and so that the soul returns to harmony with all that is.

A Process of Remembering

The experience of incarnation on earth is a rapid way to re-balance, yet first the soul must become aware of what element in his nature needs integration. The Universe helps us with this through the Law of Mirroring.

As long as a particular factor is in distorted in our nature, it will precipitate troubles in the external life which resonate with it. These manifestations of difficulty appear in the outer world to help accelerate growth; they make clear the necessity for us to make adjustments.

When we have done so, the pressure eases up and we are free. Yet if we refuse they become more and more drastic. Often we are trying all we can think of to overcome some difficulty. Yet it persists until we reach a far deeper awareness of the dynamic involved. We are not loosened from the chains of this problem until a major revolution has occurred inwardly, catapulting us into an entirely new level of being.

This attraction of particularly stubborn difficulties is one form the True Will can take. For the Higher Self is not concerned…