The most common cause of failure in life is ignorance of one’s own True Will, or of the means to fulfill that Will. […] A Man whose conscious will is at odds with his True Will is wasting his strength. (Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Part III)
How can you be successful and live a good life? Well, don’t waste your strength. That’s simple volitional logic. But what is success? Success is subjective, and yet… you cannot define it for yourself. You can’t determine what success means to you, just as you cannot choose what you think makes your life worth living.
What you can do, however, is to get to know yourself, discover your original nature, and do what you truly want. If your thoughts and actions are in line with your True Will, you are walking on the good path towards the good life. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s start at the beginning.
What is will?
Will is a cognitive process that prompts action.1 Without will, you cannot do anything, let alone be moral, because you need a will for decision making and action taking. All your decisions, however, are influenced by what you cherish and feel, so your will is partly determined by your values and emotions.
Values are abstract ideas perceived to be good. If you value, say, freedom and loyalty, you will want to act differently than if you valued empathy and equality. Thus, your values constitute part of your will. Values are important because they are promises of honor and respect, moral heuristics for living well, and signposts for rising in social status. Without values, you would live a socially isolated life deprived of the meaning that comes from belonging to a group.
Emotions are conscious experiences judged as positive or negative. If you feel, say, angry and outraged, you will want to act differently than if you felt sad and depressed. Thus, your emotions also constitute part of your will. Emotions are important because they are, in a fundamental sense, the stuff that makes live worth living. Without emotions, you would be deprived of joy and pleasure as well as incapable of making decisions.2
Usually when you want to do something (i.e., have a will), you also have a goal you want to achieve. This makes a third constituent of your will become relevant: Reason allows you to make intelligent, unemotional plans, question value dogmatism (more about that in a second), and estimate the outcomes of potential actions. Moreover, reason conceptualized as instrumental rationality—the ability to make good decisions and achieve goals effectively—allows you to take rational action as you control yourself, resist temptation, regulate your emotions, and bring up the willpower needed to follow through with your plans.3
What is an untrue will?
A will is untrue if it is unduly determined either by values (dogmatic will) or by emotions (impulsive will).
If you become obsessed about following values and gaining power within a social group, you become bigoted and your actions dogmatic. The path of honor leads to conformist tribalism—a state of close-mindedness where you have ceased to think for yourself and began to ideologically subordinate your will to the opinions and shared values of those whose respect you desperately crave. You might say, “I don’t give a fuck what others think of me,” but saying that only communicates your adherence to the value of bold independence, which I’d guess is far from being frowned upon by the people you are talking to. It all reveals a will to ego reinforcement, which is the first untrue will.
Similarly, if you become obsessed about following feelings and chasing pleasures, you actually chase happiness away because your actions are too impulsive. The path of pleasure leads to short-sighted hedonism—a restless striving for dopamine highs through undisciplined consumption of sweets, fast food, drugs, porn, video games, social media feeds, movies, Netflix shows, YouTube videos, or whatever your unique expression of consumerism might be. Other forms of emotionality such as feeling alive due to anger, hate, outrage, and aggression can be just as eudaimonically myopic. It all reveals a will to instant gratification, which is the second untrue will.
Most people devote their lives to the gray areas, devote their wills to untruth, but what about those who want to maintain a rational frame? Unlike with staying true to group values or embracing fun and enjoyment, no excess—no gray path—exists for reason. While you may engage in overthinking and overanalyzing, these are by definition not (instrumentally) rational things to do, nor are they things you would ever want to do. Excessive rationality is an oxymoron.
Nonetheless, people can obsess about goals. Goal obsession isn’t bad, though, except if the goal is an ego dream or a hollow indulgance. Goal obsession is perfectly desirable if the goal is part of a purpose that contributes to eudaimonia. In other words, a good goal is embedded in a meaningful mission that contributes to maximizing well-being over a lifetime. In contrast, if goal obsession leads to problems in your life and interferes with other sources of happiness (e.g., relationships), then you are not coming from a place of reason to begin with, because a rational path of action allows for the management of conflicting goals. Now, this is still far from the whole picture, but we’re getting there:
What is the True Will?
The True Will integrates the good aspects of the paths of honor and pleasure:
- The True Will is rooted in values that are reliable personal heuristics to improve well-being in the long term and understood as such, for example, wisdom and self-discipline.
- The True Will is shaped by emotions that keep the mind cool and proactive. Three such emotions are childlike curiosity, grounded love, and genuine pride.
Personal values and proactive emotions supplement each other. Together, they ensure a healthy balance between honor and pleasure. You are not doing your True Will if you are dishonorable and feeling miserable, but your values must not be dogmatic and your emotions not distractive.
However, your True Will is more than a rational balance between honor and pleasure. The key feature is still missing, namely, your talents. Talents are, broadly speaking, the idiosyncratic nature of your genetic makeup: your natural aptitudes.4 They are your unique potential in life, your vocation. When you do your True Will, you are building on your talents and realizing your innate potential. Some people call it “destiny” or “what you’re meant to do” or “what God called you to do” or “what the universe wants through you,” but such phrases invoke fate-based metaphysics that are not needed here.
Together, your core values, proactive emotions, and unique talents constitute your true self.5 We can accordingly define your True Will as a will that expresses your true self. In reality, however, nobody is perfectly aware of his true self. Therefore, we can define the True Will further as what you would want to do if you had perfect self-knowledge, that is, if you were perfectly aware of all your values and why you have them, all your emotions and why you feel them, all your goals and why you pursue them, and all your talents and cognitive biases. (Since you will never have perfect self-knowledge, the True Will is, of course, an idealistic concept. But is not every great idea idealistic? Truth, freedom, enlightenment, just to name a few…)
In most cases, your talents are extremely relevant for finding your purpose in life. But your purpose isn’t static; it changes over time, as does your True Will. For example, as a man, you go through different phases in your masculine development. You may focus during one phase on developing social skills and gaining sexual experience, in another on pursuing mastery and building a career, and in yet another on making children and becoming a father. Every phase is associated with a different purpose in life, a different content of Will. Hence, what is true to your Will can be different at different stages in life. You may spend your early 20s chasing women and be doing your True Will. However, if your purpose then shifts towards, say, financial freedom and yet you keep hitting on chicks in clubs several nights a week, you are failing to do your True Will as you devolve into a short-sighted hedonist, chasing pleasure because you could not quit identifying with your ego attached to the skill of picking up women. Similarly, you may be doing your True Will as you devote every waking hour of your life to further your career. However, if your purpose then shifts towards, say, family life and yet you keep working without rest and relent, you are failing to do your True Will as you devolve into an honor-obsessed workaholic, chasing success because you could not quit identifying with your ego attached to your professional role in society. Know, therefore, that your True Will is inherently dynamic.
Know further that although the True Will implicitly aims at eudaimonia, a mind focused on the True Will does not obsess about maximizing well-being over a lifetime. Happiness as a goal is a psychological trap, and you cannot control what you happen to find meaningful in life anyway, nor can you control all the external factors and social contingencies that will affect your well-being over the long term. Reason, of course, focuses on a specific goal to exert willpower, but this is only one aspect of the True Will. So, should your mind generally be focused inward, focused on the will, focused on what can be “controlled” in the world?6
Focusing inward is useful when you have to reevaluate your values, regulate your emotions, and remind yourself of your talents. Other than that, however, you want to focus neither too much on the origins of your actions (the green area) nor too much on the intended outcomes (the blue area).7 Rather, you want to be mindful of the actions you are taking at the moment, mindful of the actions that flow from your True Will. In other words, you want to focus on walking the good path with open eyes and untiring legs.
What is the good path?
We’ve already discussed the rational good path: using self-control to take rational action to achieve a concrete goal. But the good path that emanates from your True Will is about more than willpower. In fact, the greater part of the good path is quite the opposite of conscious control and effort: it is spontaneous action, effortless doing, or what Taoists call “wu wei” (non-action). This is the spiritual good path, which transcends reason.
You don’t have to think about acting spontaneously, you just do it. Thus, the most elemental spontaneous act of the True Will is breathing. Your breath expresses your True Will because everything else you could ever want to do depends on this basic function of
self-preservation will-preservation. Hence, as long as you are breathing, you are not completely off the good path, even if all else goes wrong in your life.
Further essential acts of spontaneity include all the daily habits that keep you on the good path, in particular, taking care of your bodymind through hygiene, healthy diet, physical exercise, and mindfulness practice. These are all part of your basic True Will and prerequisites for every greater purpose you want to pursue. Those who live unnatural lifestyles in modern environments will initially have to exert a lot of willpower to develop good self-care, eating, exercise, and meditation habits. After a while, however, the discipline to take care of your bodymind will become second nature, something you don’t even have to think about doing, an effortless striding along the good path.
In a Taoist sense, the path of reason is the path of a sage in training. A true sage has over decades acquired so many good habits and automatized so many useful action patterns that he no longer has to use intent and willpower to stay on the good path. Like a musician or athlete who after thousands of hours of effortful training can eventually let go of his rational mind and fully submit to the spontaneous flow of his performance, so can a sage submit fully, without any resistance, to the flow of life, because he has found back to his original nature and trained himself to spontaneously act in harmony with it.
The sage does his True Will without effort: reveling in his nature, enjoying the fruits of his wisdom and discipline, and expressing his true self without restraint or hesitation. The self-trust and world-trust underlying his spontaneous action are so radical that his ego is free to dissolve. This, however, makes the spiritual path of True Will quite dangerous. In particular, you want to be wary of three threats:
- Bad and mediocre habits are problematic. As long as you have not developed solid habits that consistently keep you on the good path, you will be spontaneously inclined to act impulsively and succumb to short-term hedonism. Even if you have only a moderate tendency to consume empty calories, unhealthy drugs, meaningless sex, or useless information, you won’t naturally act in accordance with your True Will. Instead, you will feel drawn to your comfort zone. So, before you can trust your intuition, you must first align your habits with your greater purpose and make it your natural tendency to do what maximizes eudaimonia rather than momentary pleasure.
- Mental illness is problematic. For example, a pathologically depressed or dysfunctionally aggressive man will not naturally be on the good path. Trusting his “intuitive genius” and going with “the flow of the universe” would only lead him to passive idleness or impulsive destruction. Taoist wisdom might alleviate some forms of mental suffering, but it cannot cure mental diseases. If you have mental health issues, your first True Will
must beis to use reason, self-control, and professional help to improve yourself to a point of positive psychological functioning.
- Manipulation and complexity are problematic. Unless you live a simple rural life, your spontaneous instincts, even if they are well developed, will often lead you astray. To stay on the good path, you must watch out for products and technologies that hijack your brain; use your rational strength to correct for misleading impulses. Moreover, decisions that affect vast numbers of people with vastly different wills, especially political decisions, are too complex to be made spontaneously; use your rational strength to calculate the outcome probabilities of potential policies, for otherwise you will succumb to conformist tribalism.
Overall, you are on the good path when you decide and act in line with your True Will. The True Will is the answer to the question of how to live a good life. Sometimes, this means being goal-oriented, reasonable, and self-controlled (rational True Will); other times, it means being intuitive, spiritual, and spontaneous (deep True Will), and the long-term aim is to become a sage who can fully trust in himself, trust in (his) nature, and trust in the universe to effortlessly lead him towards eudaimonia.
|Rational True Will||Deep True Will|
|guided by reason, calculating the outcome probabilities of actions8||guided by wisdom, including good habits and intuitions that optimize outcomes effortlessly|
|focused on a goal and mission||focused on the present moment|
|expressed as willpower (self-controlled action)||expressed as spontaneity (non-action, wu wei)|
One wants to become like a mighty flowing river, which is not consciously aiming at the sea, and is certainly not yielding to any external influence. It is acting in conformity with the law of its own nature, with the Tao. (Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, Chapter XVII)
Tao is another word for the spiritual good path, but the reality of the world also requires willpower and rationality, which are just as legitimate expressions of the True Will as non-action is.
- How to Do Your True Will
- Against Morality & Ethics
- Why the True Will Is Not a Free Will
- Will Vs. Flow: Can You Force Yourself to Do Something?
- The scientific term for ‘will’ is volition, which denotes, objectively, flexible, endogenous behavior that is practically unpredictable, and subjectively, intentional behavior that is experienced as an action, associated with a conscious sense of agency; see Chris Frith (2013), The psychology of volition, Experimental Brain Research 229(3), pp. 289-299.
- This is a basic neuropsychological finding; see, for example, Antonio Damasio (2003), Looking for Spinoza.
- In scientific terms, we’re talking here about prefrontal activity, self-regulatory strength, executive functioning, and top-down cognitive control.
- Every person also has a general genetic makeup, determined by our common human evolution. Acting in harmony with one’s “primal self” is an important aspect of the True Will. It is the challenge of living well, as a human animal, in a modern, unnatural, civilized environment. However, I won’t explicitly discuss the “old will” problem in this blog post because it’s implied in the relevance of emotions and the importance of well-being. I’ve written about it here, here, here, and in several other blog posts.
- I don’t find it necessary to mention personality traits here, but I’m open to debate whether maybe they should be included.
- I should note here that I do not believe in “free will.” The will as a whole cannot be controlled. Nonetheless, every will, being a complex system with integrated feedback loops, can regulate itself. When you make decisions, which is a function of your will, you cause shifts within your will’s composition (I use the words “you” and “your” only for the sake of grammar). Your will may, for example, become more responsive to the emotion of pride and the value of loyalty over time if it repeatedly leads to actions that induce corresponding affective and moral conditioning. This self-regulatory dynamic makes it possible for people to gradually shift from doing an impulsive or dogmatic will to doing the True Will. The result of this shift is what I call freedom (in a Spinozist, neo-Stoic sense), but it is not a matter of your will itself being free.
- The latter is what Crowley calls the “lust of result,” from which a pure will is delivered—”freedom from outcome,” as pickup artists would say.
- In other words, reason estimates the potential effects of different actions on long-term well-being.