The Inner Judge & Voice of Self Will – PART 2

Opposing nature and the solution

Self will is a very powerful thing. Some may say it’s actually the most powerful force. What humans can will themselves to do, and have done in the history of the human story, would account for at least half of all events, figuratively speaking. That’s if we were to use the analogy that our competitor or partner in the story is the power of nature.

This analogy has always seemed somewhat interesting to me (that’s putting it mildly), in that we assume there are two forces present which seem to be

human self will, and
the rest of the universe

as though those two things are disconnected from each other.

This is a never-ending philosophical tug of war that goes right back to at least ancient Greece, this duel between human self will and the wider natural order. Taoist philosophy, the ancient Chinese (arguably older than Greek) expressed originally in the Tao Te Ching but noticeable in much else of Oriental history and the work of energy cultivation like Qigong, has a term ‘Wu Wei’ which is the way of life that ensues when the self and it’s desires are relinquished, and a re-connection with the powers of the holistic system of the whole universe, or consciousness itself, is established.

Views of the worlds major religions and philosophies

Self will is seen in Taoist terms as that which goes against nature.
Buddhism, a close cousin of Taoism, shares the belief that there is a ‘middle way’, known as ‘The Way’ which is how we reconcile the two forces.

This gives obvious validation to self will as I do, but the proper development of the idea is that its correct use manifests when it is connected to an overarching, higher intelligence of the natural order, or that we are guided by what the Abrahamic religions call the ‘Logos’ – spiritual guidance or the Word of God.

Human action is then always a manifestation of the spirit of the universe expressed through the unique characteristics of each individual.
Actions, life itself, is the dance of the never-ending feedback loop of what we receive and what we do, the passive and the active, the in breath and out breath.

Acting in isolation

Now to bring this back to how we can change as people, how we can grow, develop and become happy and fulfilled.

It isn’t that self will can’t affect change, but rather it changes things at an endpoint, outside of the system of which it is part,

It’s as if self will all of a sudden pops up as a lone actor, an isolated entity, devoid of the deeper guidance, detached from the Logos, Wu-Wei-less, with no memory of or affiliation to its roots (the rest of the interdependent universe) and believes it has the knowledge, the power and is in charge. It then goes against nature with its own agenda. This is where we can see similarity and interchangeability with modern usage of the term ‘ego’. Indeed, self will can be seen as the primary tool of the ego.

Many existing therapeutic and recovery methodologies maintain that the nuances of self will are born as modes of survival.

Survival from what, death? Not always. It’s more the survival in the face of being unloved, unwanted, neglected, afraid, worried, insecure, invalidated, unapproved of and lonely. Or a response to trauma.

We may be completely miscalculating every time we try to figure out what it is we need to do because it is all of the above we are trying to either fix, control or avoid.

What if this isn’t true?

If this wasn’t true, we would expect to find that there was little struggle in the world, struggle being the representation of our supposed inability to have control of life and act in ways that serve us.

If it wasn’t true we would find that most people would sail through life easily overcoming obstacles, with few major concerns, few troubles, few confusions, few inadequacies, minimal suffering, so on and so forth…
Is that the case?
Is the human race gliding through life effortlessly on the whole?

Spoiler alert: life is not a breeze.
To quote from the classic book on self-transcendance The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck:

“Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult – once we truly understand and accept it – then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”

Eckhart Tolle says the reason we love movies is because their premise – that which can be expressed in three words – Something Goes Wrong – is always resolved. But of course this is synthetic. Life isn’t like this. It seems as if it’s one big journey of struggling to reconcile with things outside of our control, en masse. Self will is employed as a controlling mechanism, in clear opposition to Peck’s observation that the true path is acceptance.

So the world appears to be in one sense a jumbled up confusing mess of many people trying to change or control life by using the limited, skewed set of norms employed by self will, the miscalculating, misfiring decision-making system. What’s flabbergasting is that this is the norm in our culture.

Holding my hands up..

I’ve discovered I’m as bad as anyone. If the truth about our culture is that it is terrified of handing over control to something other than self will then my most of my life experience shows me to be a classic example.

I write about this subject because I’ve led a life of trying be in control; of myself, my life and everything in it, including other people. I have no shame about this because I know its roots: all of the afore-mentioned reasons , the responses to that which could be condensed simply into one thing – fear.

The journey has been profound and amazing. There is so much distance, so much phenomena in between the initial, foundational starting point of fear and the actions performed in self will that it takes much work to see that they are linked. But linked they are. And I get daily reminders of it. I am both in some kind of fear and tempted into self will on a daily basis. I make no apologies for once again saying this is a work in progress. Most fear goes on unknown. It’s not as noticeable as you think, until you do the work of self inventory.

Success stories

If we were to measure the success of self will by what it achieves, my thoughts and views on it would appear completely Insane. Again, self will has probably ‘achieved’ at least half of what we see in the world.
The whole of culture and civilisation itself is akin to a self-will museum.

There are no ends to the feats of humanity, seemingly no limit on what one person can make happen. The buildings, the rockets, the technology, not to mention personal change…

So let’s not confuse things. I don’t deny its power.

So self will is all powerful, why am I giving it a bad rap?

Well let’s not doubly confuse thing and mix up ‘achievement’ with fulfilment. I could probably count on one finger the amount of things I have set about achieving that have endured as sources of fulfilment, and I’d like to think I’ve fared quite well within the parameters of my environment.

Contrary to my fears, things did not stop happening when I consciously chose to let go of self will. In fact, there are more things in my life now from which I can draw sustenance and nourishment. Many of them have come from letting go and letting life unfold, relinquishing control, and willing to hand over the reigns to the unknown.

I have tried, over may years to ‘work it out’, to work myself out, where I’m going wrong, what I should do instead, to educate myself, absorb all the information from all the experts, find some discipline blah blah blah……continual struggle, continual punishment and self judgment.

Nowadays, when I start to notice life unravelling or becoming unpleasant (putting it mildly) you can bet your life I have been too long in this ‘all-powerful’ mode of self will. It actually seems like beneath the short term achievements it is actually an active player in life becoming miserable. There are actual reasons for why this happens, which I consider some of the deepest philosophical, spiritual, universal truths which I hope to articulate in future writing.

So what is the alternative?

So how do we give it up and what is it replaced by?
What on earth do we do about our compulsions, behaviours we know that are harmful but we can’t stop, if our own self will isn’t the answer.

Well, for all I’ve said above, it’s far from a simple case of ‘give up, let something else I have no clue about take over and all will be fine.’

The right voice

Analysis and soul searching is necessary. We do have to find out why we are the way we are to some degree. In part 1 I spoke about using the right ‘voice’. The danger is in employing that judgmental, critical voice that wants to change us for the wrong reasons. This is what creates internal resistance. This is actually ‘going against nature’ if anything is.

Compulsions can be seen as the ‘habits’ of self will, they are ingrained behaviours that have been learned and are actually mirrored in our neurology. However just in the same way that our brain has ‘plasticity’, our neurology not being fixed, that goes for our behaviours too. They are changeable. But not with resistance. The saying ‘what we resist persists’ is true. When we forcibly change, we create resistance.

The first experience I had of this was giving up smoking. What seemed like a marketing ploy in Alan Carr’s ‘Easy Way to Give Up Smoking’;
‘No willpower needed with this approach’ turned out to be true. You could even smoke while reading the book! Once the mental patterning behind the compulsion to smoke was unravelled, the insane reasoning we attach to what is a simple biological urge to replace nicotine, and the factual information given about its harms, smoking for me was a lot easier to stop. I didn’t have to force anything. This approach also works on a grander scale for all of what I call my ‘conditioning’.

My own experience leads me to believe that It’s only what we non-judgmentally become aware of that makes genuine change. What then is possible is the two words that actually sum up the whole of the spiritual side of life: Letting Go.

The true solution is to have simple understanding about our behaviours and compulsions along with a non-judgmental, compassionate ‘voice’ and then the courage to ‘let it go’.