True Will

I mentioned in a previous post that I had been exploring dark magic and somewhat glossed over the specifics of this as it was not relevant, however I would like to discuss one of the topics I stumbled across when exploring it and that is the concept of True Will.  For those who are interested where this concept comes from, I stumbled across it when I was reading about Thelema I am not sure if that is where the concept originates or if the Thelemic belief in True Will was influenced by another teaching but the origin for now is not relevant.  What is relevant is the definition of True Will, the concept is closely related to the interconnecting concepts of fate and destiny.  Where Destiny is defined as an ultimate destination you will arrive at, and fate is defined as decisions you will make along the way no matter how much you try to fight them.

The concept of free will in contrast to destiny and fate is the belief that you can do whatever you want, make whatever choices you want, and that ultimately your life is what you make of it.  Destiny and Fate limit that freedom by establishing frameworks within which you must live your life, with the former pinning down your destination and the latter deciding key points along the path that you must pass through.  Naturally the concept of free will is one that is associated more with rational thought, scientific endeavour and logical deduction, whilst the concept of fate and destiny are associated with spirituality, religion, and the supernatural.  Despite these associations arguably in truth they should be swapped.  That is to say religion should be centred around free will as it usually claims that this was a gift from whatever deity it is centred upon whilst the concept of scientific study on the other hand professes the belief that with enough information and accurate modelling any system can be predicted with precision, the study of Chaos Theory for example the field of Determinism takes this concept to the extreme, Laplace's Demon posited that if you knew the exact position of every atom in the Universe that you could determine their past and future positions, the conflict here then arises when free will is considered and the impact it has.

Regardless of the intricacies of these conflicts, the concept of True Will on the other hand takes both destiny and fate, as well as the concept of free will and combines them into one unified belief that professes destiny and fate to be your true will, or your true path in life that you were meant to take, and also acknowledges free will by basically saying you have a destiny but you are free to deny it if you wish.  The concept of true will and free will are then contrasted and reframed as an argument for and against cosmic harmony.  That is to say, cosmic harmony occurs when your free will aligns with your true will, when you freely choose to walk the path you were destined to walk, whereas cosmic discord occurs when you deny your true will and actively push against the universe to create your own path.  The underlying belief here is that although you are free to do this, the path you walk will get harder the further from your true will you stray and that ultimately to find peace, joy, and harmony in your life you have to follow the path you were destined to follow.

To sum this up better we can use the analogy of a play.  Everyone is on stage at the same time, playing a role, and everyone has a script that they are meant to follow, this is your true will, the part you are meant to play.  You are free to improvise because you have free will, you can change dialogue and move around as much as you want, but the further you stray from the script the more disruption you cause, the play eventually loses direction and stops making sense, in order to restore it to something that is coherent, you eventually have to return to the script.  The concept of true will extends beyond the self, to the Universe itself, in this case the play.  Whilst you may deviate significantly from the script, the others around you are free to do as they wish, and most of them will continue playing the parts they played, few will follow your improvisation, and when you inevitably pass on, the characters that remain will continue to tell the story in line with the original narrative, the more time passes the less your legacy of disruption is upheld.

I found this idea interesting because I have seen this play out in the lives of other people.  I have seen people who fight their nature, sometimes in the extreme becoming incredibly self destructive in the process, but ultimately their nature wins out in the end and they accept it and become the person they fought all along.  This is the same idea as obsessively pursuing the wrong path until finally admitting defeat and following the right path or to put it another way, discovering how easy life becomes when they don't fight to swim upstream and instead flow with the current.

For me personally and my life I have decided to make the conscious choice to give up on some of the ideas I had held onto and the aspirations that went with them, and instead I have decided to go with the flow and take the easiest route I can in each situation to see what will happen, to see if it will lead me to a different place or if it will be more fruitful as opposed to fighting to swim upstream which to be honest I just didn't have the energy to do any longer.  Only time will tell how successful this strategy will be, but one thing is for sure, this mentality is one that I once held when I was much younger, when I didn't think about life so much and lived it instead of over-thinking, trying to pursue this strategy once more is in many ways a return to my nature, let's see how effective this Thelemic belief is in practice.