Going Where “You” Will

Going Where “You” Will

From an embryo, a human body, brain, sense organs (and so on) are formed; a baby is born, and the baby grows through infancy. Somewhere—throughout the process of conception through adolescence—we would say that this human organism acquires “will” (which we generally regard as autonomous, intentional choice and action). If we were to surmise that the bodily organism itself was a manifestation of the Void, or the “Ground,” then we would likely surmise that the organism’s subsequent “will” was also a manifestation of that self-same source. Many choose to refer to such a source in terms of “God.” In any case, to accommodate this latter form of terminology, we could say this: when will does become manifest, it is—from this perspective—not by our will (that is, the organism without will) that it becomes manifest, it is by God’s will. In this sense, it can be conceived that our will was God’s will, “always has been” God’s will. Obviously, personal will and “consciousness,” particularly “self” consciousness, are intertwined. And what can be said of the origination of will can be said of the origination of consciousness. And we would suppose, consciousness is intertwined with such manifestations as thought, imagination, belief, and memory. Typically, when conscious, we think and imagine; form beliefs; and we recall our images and beliefs through memory. It is such processes that appear to be at the base of our “will,” of our intentioned personal choice and actions. It seems, in general, that it is via this network of intertwined psychic phenomena—consciousness, thought, imagining,

conviction, memory, will—that we set about to establish our personal “relationship” to the “things” of our world and to interact with them. It is, in fact, the same will (that is involved in the creative perception of our world) which eventually desires to impose changes among the relationships of some of the things of this world: our same will “creates” and our same will “destroys.” In this, again, it could be supposed to be God’s will. All of the above elements of the network of the human psyche might serve a function; but (just as with the human body) these functions may be subject to change, to impermanence. It is evidently possible for memory, opinion, images, even thought to fall away, and for the body to continue functioning. Will, itself, and consciousness, may even fade away. There can come a time when even our most primal expression of will—the will to survive—dissolves. In this instance, where there is neither the will to live nor to die, we might say that our will is most like God’s will: the Prime Mover need have no will concerning survival or nonsurvival.

At this point of our discontinuance, when our personal will (and personal consciousness) falls away, our will is— as it was and has always been—God’s will.