Higher vs. lower will

[Haribol]

How do you distinguish between the two of them, and act accordingly?

[stirling]

2 hours ago, Haribol said:

How do you distinguish between the two of them, and act accordingly?

 

A complicated question without some definitions. 

 

When I think about a "higher will" I think of the "will" (if such a thing were choreographed or planned) of the unity - the Dao, or the dharmakaya, or Crowley's "Do As Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law". 

 

The "lower" will is perhaps the will we all believe we have as separate beings in a world of separate things - our thoughts and choice. As it happens, these are a delusion, whether you look at it from a non-dual perspective (Buddhism, Sufism, Daoism, etc.) or, for example, a scientific perspective. 

 

Example: Science has actually proven that your hand starts motion BEFORE you decide to pick up a glass, and that, for MOST people we actually perceive reality as much as 1/3rd of a second behind what is actually happening, INCLUDING the seemingly personally directed movement of our own bodies. (The exception is of those who are not continually pre-occupied by their thoughts). Further, no source for our thoughts has ever been discovered - there is only a correlation with thoughts arising and certain kinds of brain activity. Are they even really "our" thoughts? Most dedicated meditators have skills and experience to throw serious shade on this idea. Add to the fact that some function of the mind (or something) actually fills in the center of our vision, and you can be sure that we are likely fabricating a reality that doesn't exist in the way that we think it does. Yes there is science for all of this. 

 

As for "higher" or "divine will", this is the idea that there is some "thing" (god or whatever) has a "plan" of some sort and acts through us. This is equally flawed. Who is this we are talking about? Where are they? My suggestion is that one sticks with what can be perceived, since the reality of these ideas is actually perceptible by most with a little effort. Again, meditation is the tool of choice. 

 

To see the reality of this is a fairly simple endeavor. The cultivation of seeing from enlightened mind is actually possible when there is identification as simple awareness. You can see, moment to moment, how you construct your relative reality from your thinking process, and how, when it is arrested, that relative story of doing and thinking and subject/object relationships drops away when you stop putting effort into them. What is left is simply things as they are. That "things as they are" is in constant flux. It is change, happening in this moment. This is what your Dao, dharmakaya, or Crowley's "Do As Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law" ARE. 

 

What does enlightenment reveal? Astonishingly, it reveals what what you can see is reality, when you look at it without your thinking mind. It reveals that there is the moment, here, now. There is what is happening now. There is an awareness of that, a simple, joyful being. It has never been hidden from you, and isn't even that hard to see, really. All of your thinking, brooding, and conceptualizing has never gotten you closer to seeing it.

[Haribol]

🙏

[Haribol]

Beautifully written, @stirling. It made me think about the garden of Eden and the subsequent fall. Until man ate from the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, we excisted in a state of harmony and oneness. But with knowledge came the fall. The fall from oneness to seperation, from unity to shame.

 

Best wishes.