July 1, 1963 Dear Gail:
The subject is the fifth spiritual problem, “Who Is To Tell One What The Will Of God Might Be?” A subject which has baffled so many and yet is so simple. The answer is actually through intuition, but it cannot be a simple answer to most of us if we are not in the position to recognize what is the Will of God, and what is not.
Briefly, I will discuss the lower self so that you can get a better understanding of what you might be following or listening to within, and it may not be right. According to Freud (I think it is best to use his theory at this point about the divisions of the mind) we have three sections of the psyche or mind: superego, ego and id. The superego is that part of the psyche which is the conscience, the traditions, parental influence, carries on vicariously the expectations of man’s higher nature, the censorship on morals. The ego is that part of the psyche which is self-assertive, self-preserving tendency, and extrovertive. The id which is the reactive mind, the mass tendency of the lower mind, carnal mind, and the coarse, crude instincts. There is another part of this study called the libido, which is the sexual drive, the energy, motive, force, desire as arising from sex instinct or the primal urge to live.
I name these parts because their urgings can at times mislead a person into thinking that it might be the will of God. Even the gods of the negative, but physical world, can mislead a person; there are so many things which can make him think that the Will of God has brought him into a certain state. The ego is the weakest of the three parts of the psyche
because it is pulled both ways, and has to defend itself. The censorship of the superego is always ‘butting in’ and explaining to the ego that it cannot do certain things; the id is always whispering into the inner ear that it’s all right. So the poor ego follows that one which is the strongest. This is why the Catholics want the child baptised at birth, brought up in a parochial school, and trained in the church teachings.
They teach the superego, or the censorship, to be the strongest of the triangle including the libido.
The Will of God is seldom concerned with the conduct of the individual. That is, the Superego or the Id which takes charge. If someone tells you that it is the Will of God that he takes charge of your life, he is, if sincere, only speaking from the viewpoint of the Id, seldom from the higher planes. This of course is the voice of the negative gods, and one that nobody can have too much interest. So this brings one back to ‘What is the Will of God?’ The Will of God is that which is Shabda — that which is the Bani, the Word, the Voice of God. This Will is concerned only with the Jivatma and nothing else in man. The action of the intelligent will is a downward orientation towards that of the sense world, or it may take its upward orientation toward a settled peace and equality. When the Jivatma listens to the Audible Life Current, It turns upward, toward the highest heaven. Once the Will of God takes hold, there is no turning back; one must go ahead with his plans to get to the Absolute in those other worlds.
The Master’s Will is really the Will of God, for when a disciple is taken as a student, he must follow out the Will of the Master, because the Will of the Highest One is so subtle and invisible that it’s not likely that it will be noticed.
Therefore the Will of the Master must take over and guide the individual to the proper goals.
The surrender to a Master is not the giving up of all those things which one expects; it is not like the ascetic ways of St.
Francis, or many of the orders today throughout the world which practice austerities. The path is hard, but it is not without rewards; those perversions of the mind must go, and whatever might be holding the individual back from rising higher in the other worlds. It is hard enough to rid one’s self of what must go, instead of voluntarily fasting, giving up for the sake of austerities. The Master will never seem to be unduly hard, but he will apparently create incidents, or events which will make you face that problem which is deeply bothering you. And you will face the problem, work it out under his watchful eye, hard as it might appear to be
— but you can understand that it will never again bother you.
So many assume that the commands of the law-giver is the Will of God. The priests, the prophets and the kings all claim to know the Will of God as their own; but when we challenge their credentials to speak for God, they call us bad names. Ask them any questions of the right and wrong actions, they can never give the fundamental answer.
Whatever hinders or delays the Jivatma in Its progress toward spiritual freedom is wrong. Whatever creates bad karma is wrong, and whatever creates good karma is right.
Therefore you can say that whatever helps the Jivatma in Its progress toward spiritual freedom is the Will of God.
Whatever creates good Karma is the Will of God.
In the letter on Dharma, I explained this meant righteousness, doing right, obeying the Law of God, and this means doing “what is to be done.” This is the Will of God.
But hardly no one except the Masters can attempt to tell what the substance of obedience to the Will of God might be.
Danda, or the law which sets forth the concrete Will of God, is that foundation and support of all good societies. It is the
cornerstone, the pillar of the state, but it is an old trick of priests and politicians to teach the mob that whatever they give out is the “will of God.” But Danda serves the Will of God by restraining the evil tendencies of men, protecting the weak, and to some extent developing the higher impulses by inculcating higher ideals. It helps the well-disposed people to establish a whole swadharma, the self-imposed discipline.
When one gives himself to the Guru, he will receive the Guru. There is an old Sufi saying, “Give us all you have, and we will give you all we possess.” If the disciple gives up all, mind, body, wealth and Soul, to the Master, the Master will in return give the disciple such wealth as no king ever possessed. The divine paradox is — by surrendering all to the Guru, you gain your liberty, for it is only the man who is free who does always the Will of the Master. It is the Will of the Guru, which is the Will of the Supreme One, because the Guru is the representative of the Supreme, by following him, one in turn follows God.
By doing or acting in the name of the Master, one acts in the name of God, and hence he is doing the Will of God.
Sounds paradoxical, but one must realize that as an earth-bound Jivatma he cannot reach up to God, so he must find a representative of the Absolute and put himself under the Guru. Otherwise he will blunder, slip and slide through a number of lives until perhaps a Guru will come along and feeling sorry take him under his wing, show him the pathway to heaven by the Audible Life Stream. This is the Will of God, this Life Stream, and one only needs to follow it to know he is rightly following out the Divine Will.
More later.
Paul
93. How Can The Mind Conceive The Desire