[Please note: ACIM passages quoted in this article reference the Foundation for Inner Peace (FIP) Edition.]
I did an interesting lesson yesterday. I chose a line repeated four times in the Workbook: “My will is Yours.” This is a central concept in the Course, one that weaves throughout the Text and Workbook, yet one that I never hear anyone talk about.
The idea is that I don’t understand my own will. What is the will? It is the organ by which the mind expresses itself, reaching out in order to bring about a desired result. We assume that we know what our will is. Our will is to have things, and status, and pleasure, and special partners, along with a good dose of entertainment and escape. Thus, when the Course comes along and tells us to go after higher things, it is nearly impossible to not think, “Oh, I get it. I am being asked to go after what is right and good because those things are God’s Will, even though they are not really my will.”
What the Course is trying to tell us over and over again is that we don’t understand our will. We have identified with a false will, one that is not actually ours. We are like a gay man who has been put through a harsh training program that tries to convert him to heterosexuality. At the end, he might actually have some weak heterosexual impulses. But when he follows them, he is never satisfied, for those impulses are not him. He is not being himself. That is the situation we are in. We think our impulses for conventional happiness are the natural expression of our will. But they never satisfy because they are actually expressions of the false will. Our true will is a whole different creature. What we really want are the exact same things that God wants.
I love this concept, but, to be honest, I have a very difficult time internalizing it. It is somehow far easier to think “This course is not my will, but it’s the right thing, so I will try to bend my will in its direction.” It is far more difficult to think that I don’t understand my will, that the impulses that currently move in me represent a false will.
So I started the day saying, “My will (in this situation) is Yours.” But when I realized that it wasn’t sinking in, I moved to making it a question: “Could it really be that my will is Yours?” I tried to ask this question very searchingly and sincerely. That helped. To imagine that what I truly want in this situation is the exact same as what God wants is mind-blowing. Could it really be that my true will, the natural, spontaneous desire that flows automatically from my nature, is the exact same as God’s Will? Could that really be?
Another thing that helped was realizing that what I call my will is not just some wonderful hand that reaches out and grabs goodies. It is actually a tremendous burden, a burden of guilt. Lesson 227 has us say: “I thought to make another will, but nothing that I thought apart from You exists. And I am free because I was mistaken, and did not affect my own reality at all by my illusions.” Notice the implication: the other will I thought I made has caused me to feel un-free, because I thought what it did was “affect my own reality.” In plain language: I thought this selfish will imprisoned me by turning me into a monster.
It also helped to realize that I do have natural desires for the things of God. In other words, there is a will in me that resembles God’s Will. I think what I often do is label this the artificial will, as if it’s a kind of dutiful, do-gooder will that has been artificially grafted onto me, a kind of Freudian superego that runs contrary to my spontaneous (id) impulses. By labeling my higher impulses the artificial will, I implicitly prejudice the whole situation against them.
The point of my practice yesterday was to reverse these sorts of normal assumptions. Maybe what I call my will is not what I really want. Maybe that will, with all its greedy grabbing, lays on me a constant burden of guilt, causing a loss of faith in myself. Maybe those nobler impulses in me are the truly natural and authentic ones, the ones that are most truly me. Maybe, just maybe, what I really want is exactly the same as what God wants. And therefore, maybe I am a whole different sort of being than I thought I was.
This lesson really did uplift my day. But I have such a long way to go with it. True, it is easier to just concede that my current “will” is my real will, and then struggle against it for the sake of a higher truth. But I know that is the path of failure. Eventually I am going to have to completely overturn my whole sense of what my will is.
Is this a topic you have given thought to? What is your relationship with this whole “will” issue?
