When it is purified of selfish desire
and aligned with the Great Architect,
it becomes an unstoppable force of nature.
– Franz Hartmann
The will is the most misunderstood faculty in the human being.
In popular thinking, willpower is the capacity to force yourself to do things you do not want to do. To override the body, suppress impulse, push through resistance. This conception of will is not wrong, it is simply shallow. It describes the ego’s crude approximation of something that, in its true form, operates entirely differently.
The esoteric traditions drew a sharp distinction between personal will and what Franz Hartmann, following the Rosicrucian and Theosophical lineage, called alignment with the universal will. The personal will, driven by desire, fear, ambition, the need to prove something, is powerful in the short term and self-defeating in the long. It fights against the current of existence. It exhausts itself in the effort of control. The Bhagavad Gita described this as action bound to ego and result, the kind that generates karma rather than liberation.
What Hartmann was pointing toward was something the Hermetic tradition called theurgy, the alignment of the individual will with the divine intelligence that underlies all form. The Great Architect is not a God to be appeased. It is the ordering principle of the cosmos itself, the logos, what the Stoics called the rational fire running through all things. To align with it is not submission. It is the recognition that the deepest current of your own nature and the current of the universe are not separate.
The alchemical process begins with the purification of the base material. In the work of the will, the base material is selfish desire, not desire itself, which is a form of life-force, but desire contracted around the small self. Calcination burns this away. What remains is will in its pure form: intentional, clear, undivided, moving without friction because it no longer moves against anything.
Jung described the individuation process as the ego learning to serve the Self rather than rule it. The will that has undergone this transformation does not push. It draws.
– Source
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Aligning With the Living Light
• Mystical Participation
• Keeping the Spark Alive
• Gifts of Abundance
• “Everything Is Saturated With the Sacred”
• A Season of Listening
• Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence
• The Source Is Within You
• Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee: Quote of the Day – February 8, 2013
• Inayat Khan on Mysticism
• The Fountain of Happiness Within
• The Alchemy of Happiness
• A Light That Will Always Shine
• A Living Light
• A Perpetual Fire Within
• One Wisdom
• Awakening and Turning
• Trusting the Flow
Image: Artist unknown.
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