21^st February, 2024 • Søren Aas

Chapter VI - Love and Will

Our inner voice must be our guide, we can hear it better through meditation and it must be this that we use to navigate our existence. Our thoughts are a wonderful and powerful tool, but they must be subservient to our intuition. If we are led solely by thoughts, we cut ourselves off from a higher consciousness and lose touch with our feelings. Intuition is a dimension above thought.

God has been called pressure, and is not love, at its most essential, a pressure that compels us towards something? If love, or wants, are the spark, they can ignite the fuse of will which if we are disciplined enough our will will keep lit, until it explodes into manifestation. Please excuse the firecracker of a pun.

Our task is to align our wants with Reality and through will manifest them.

Commentary

Our path depends on simplifying our character through letting go of what we have realized through our meditation what is not real. Simplification and meditation are both necessary. Meditation reassures us of Reality and that a calmer existence is possible. With knowledge that a more harmonious way of being exists, we are able to find motivation to continue our arduous process of self-adjustment, which in turn deepens our meditation practice.

From this it follows that perception of, and adaptation to, the Spiritual World in which we dwell, we are able to consolidate our energies. This sounds simple, yet the journey may be both long and hard. and as we progress our will, heart and mind will eventually align and we will be able to meet life with a suppleness and peacefulness that we previously did not posses. We are able to focus an intense effort of vision, the passionate and self-forgetful act of communion. What Underhill is telling us is we are now in a state where we can create freely. We could call this being in the zone, or having a flow in what it is we choose to pursue, having both resolve and courage to complete our chosen works.

Now that we have come to get a sense of mysticism and realize how central our feeling and intuition are to our spiritual pursuit. We have come to realize that our intuition is our only certain guide. What we come to realize is that for many of us, we have let our intellect lead us, that we put our thoughts above all else, we cut ourselves off from our intuition, and we therefore can come to ignore our feelings. But we are also reminded that we must value our intellect, it is a formidable tool that has allowed us to enjoy domination of the planet. We should contemplate the relation between thought and feeling, there is no dichotomy, one is not better than the other, they are different beasts all together. What the spiritual person realizes is that intuition does not oppose thought, it is able to transcend and complete it. We must think, but in the final analysis we need to feel that our thoughts are in alignment with what we know to be Reality.

Now that we have become familiar with detachment and we are able to keep our attention on an objective. We are starting to learn how to focus our love, will and thought. By love we are meaning in a very wide sense an attraction to something, a desire, or pressure. Our want has given will its marching orders and it proceeds to obtaining that what we desire. Thought in turn analyses, schemes and plans how to make our will come true.

However, our desire is now set on the spiritual and thus our thoughts can no longer make sense of what we want, because the spiritual can not be explained by mere thoughts alone. Our intellect is simply not equipped for this task, we must put our wants above our thoughts and let it guide us on wards. The feat we are trying to achieve means we both must be object and subject, we are the ones changing ourselves, and this is trying, we are at once the clay and sculptor.

By focusing on reaching continually for Reality, we will tend to move towards it also. Our simultaneous wanting and accepting Reality, a giving and taking, will in time make us apprehend the real and eternal. Our will will become the way in which we express our love. Here Underhill uses the expression to look with the eyes of love which she tells us is central to our spirituality and that this action of seeing affords us predictable results. The attitude we should have when seeing like this is one of humility and receptiveness, we accept Reality as it is, without trying to criticize or analyze it by thoughts.

We can now see things as they are, not as we want or think they should be. This does not mean we will see clearly at all times, certainly we will stumble and fall, but we will now know what we are capable of and can return to seeing Reality if we should stray from the narrow path. Our contemplative abilities now need a strengthening of our will. It has been weakened for so long by focusing on wants and interests of the self, and not that which is real. We can create our universe and go our own way through willing and desiring Reality.

Want can seem like a crass word for love, and indeed what we can all think of many wants that we would never call love. But what Underhill is trying to get across to us is that our wants must both be in alignment with Reality and not in contradiction to our other wants (why simplification is essential).

Final thoughts

Our love tells us what we want and our will is what makes this happen. What makes this hard is that often our desires are all over the place and contradictory. We want both toffee double cream dessert and slender tummies. When we can see Reality clearly we are able to let go of this nonsense and focus on what our innermost desires are. Once we can identify wholesome wants that align with Reality we can start working towards them. Though this work is work in a very real sense, it takes discipline and dedication, and yes, sacrifice. But if we do not make sacrifices, in terms of letting go of things that are not real, we essentially do not achieve what we want, and thus sacrifice what we want. Pick and choose. Actions and consequences.