Creative Will

Through the practice of presence, we create ourselves. To enter the deep pool of stillness, the conscious energy, and to abide in that stillness, moment to moment, we must be there. We must be.

At the beginning of this process, when we enter adulthood, we lack stability, we lack continuity of self-awareness, and we lack continuity of being ourselves. Our attention flits here and there at the mercy of incoming sensory impressions and our emotional reactions. More crucially, we are not here behind our attention to direct it moment to moment. A thought comes and we are gone down that associative train before we know it. In effect and in reality, we, as an individual, do not exist. Thus, our primary task in spiritual practice is to create ourselves, to give birth to, nurture, and establish ourselves, as an individual who is not separate.

This development involves both being and doing, both energies and will. On the side of energies, we work to perceive, gather, concentrate, generate, blend, and stabilize the sensitive and conscious energies, allowing them to form inner energy bodies, form our being, the vehicle of our soul. That soul is our will, our I, which requires integration and purification: integrating our scattered will into a unified whole and purifying our will of our self-centeredness, our selfishness, our separateness. Nearly the whole of the spiritual path revolves around those twin creations, of our being and our will, though the two cannot be separated. This is the process of creating ourselves.

In coming into this process and into that vast pool of conscious stillness that gives us an inner home, we witness unfolding within us the grandeur of the human condition. Prior to that, we take our situation too lightly. We are not serious about our humanity, about our own possibilities, about the work of discovering and actualizing our vast potential, about rising above pettiness and distraction. We can be so much more. We can be. We can be free. We can love. We can create.

To create ourselves and become ourselves is a wholly unexpected possibility. After all, we always thought we were ourselves. Yet through our inner work, we see that we have been living well below where we could be, out of touch with our true nature. And that glimpse inspires us to move toward that. The more we move, the more we see, the more we wish to move. We make ourselves the answer to the question: Who am I? The I. Not our thoughts, not our emotions, and not our body. The one who sees what we see and does what we do. In every moment, we create a place for our I and we enter that place. Continuously.

The difficulty with becoming alive in our will, in our I, is that will is not material. We cannot get a handle on it. Will is not even energy. We cannot perceive will in the way we might perceive energies. Indeed, will is always the perceiver, the subject, and never the object. That makes it elusive and requires us to turn inward in a new and different way. We cannot see our I, but we can be it, we can be ourselves, unmistakably.

How? A viable entry to the world of will is the practice of being the one who directs your attention. Although attention is a combination of will and conscious energy, will directing the conscious energy, there is always a creative element, with the creative energy enabling the will to interact with the conscious energy. What we focus on in this practice is that in us which directs our attention, which chooses where to put our attention and keeps it there. That is our will, our I. When you are paying attention to something, steadily, move inwardly back along the chord of attention to its root, its origin. In the famous phrase of the Korean Zen master Chinul, we trace back the radiance. Coming into the source of our attention, we find ourselves, our I. We can be that source of attention, because it is who we are. In this practice, we are creating ourselves. Where there was seemingly nothing, that nothing is revealed to be us, our I.

The more we are ourselves, the more we have created ourselves, the more we are free and able to turn toward creating value for the world around us.

For this week, create yourself. Practice being the one who directs your attention. Be the one who sees what you see and does what you do.