Will and Effort
Do you think you can control your body and mind?
Which is the master, the body or the mind? If the mind, is the will the servant and not the controller? If you are skeptical about this, then you will have trouble making it happen. At the very least, you should try to believe in the possibility. Start imagining yourself as having self-control and carrying out resolutions that are not yet completed acts.
You have to learn how to exert effort. You can learn a lot from effort. It lets you understand what you have and what you can do.
The Dynamic of Will
We want specific help in dealing with our personal problems, and among them the problem of will assumes a leading place. Will is important because concentration becomes an easier discipline if there has been a prior training in matters of will through habit-formation.
What is the Will?
Many people think that will is a sort of mental or moral biceps muscle which may be flabby, or of average firmness, or of bulging power. They look upon Will as a something that is quite separate from the other functions of the mind, just as the biceps is separate from the vastus externus and can be developed in comparative isolation. This is a huge error. Our minds are a unity of feeling, intellect and will. The three interact in unison and cannot work in isolation even if one is stronger than the other two.
Will-Power Illustrated
Let’s look at will as directed effort using an example – the difficulty of early rising or rather, the difficulty of rising when you should. Suppose you have to be somewhere in the morning and you set the alarm. The alarm goes off, and you turn it off and stay in bed, trying to find a good excuse for not getting up.
You can find some good excuses but you soon find reasons why the excuses won’t work. You finally realize there is no way around it – you have to get up and you do. But you’re already behind schedule and then in the rush, everything goes wrong.
You probably knew this would happen – so why did you try to argue with the alarm clock? Was it weak will? Likely. But why was it weak? Something allowed your desire for a comfortable feeling of warmth and rest, and of the state of half-awakeness to over-ride your need to be at your appointment. Your will cannot intercede and make you get up. It has to follow whichever of your desires is strongest.
The Formula of Will
Right willing comes from right feeling, and right thinking. We all know people who are paralyzed by indecision. These people think things over too much and can see too many sides to any argument. In other words, thought overcomes the proper functioning of feeling and will. There is a fable about a speculative young bear, who philosophized too much about the way to walk. “Shall I,” said he, “move my right paw first or my left, or the two front paws first, or the two hind ones or all four at once, and how?” The old she-bear chipped in with a peremptory order. “Leave off thinking, and walk,” she commanded.
All the difficulties concerning weakness of will arise out of wrong feeling or wrong thought. Will-power is essentially direction and control. Any failure in this respect means that some function of the mind – desire, for instance – is usurping rights which belong to other functions. There is a kind of civil war being waged among the mental powers. Our methods of psycho-synthesis transform this discord into harmony.
The Need of True Perspective
Why should there be any conflict at all? Because the mind has not been trained in true perspective; it does not work synthetically; feeling and thinking have been allowed to go beyond the right limits, or else they have been depressed and not allowed their due position in the economy of intellectual procedure.
To diagnose a diseased will, examine the conditions of the emotions and the nature and power of the thinking equipment. You will generally discover the mischief immediately.
Control the Body
Begin by acquiring bodily control. The will to be healthy results, as a rule, in physical righteousness. Anyone who tries to diet, quit smoking, or cut back on drinking knows how hard this can be.
Control the Mind
Mental control is control par excellence, and this control comes by the operation of mental law. Let a person try to cut back on bad drinking habits—the battle is between a desire to reform and the desire to drink.
Habit and Will-Power
When your aim is to change a habit, you have to consider the power of the habit. That is a very important word in all training of will-power. A strong will means a group of strongly ingrained habits of the best kind. To cure a bad habit we must begin to form a better one, inasmuch as our lives are made up of habits, good, bad and indifferent. Herein habit and will have to work together.
“Sheer Will”
“Sheer Will”? What is that? The Hindu fakir answers the question. He raises his arm aloft and vows he will never lower it again; or he may close his hand and vow he will never open it. He succeeds. Westerners may call it foolish, but it is marvelous display of will-power exerted to show forth a religious belief. Sheer will-power can accomplish great things, and some psychologists believe in this kind of will-training.
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