The Will to Love: The Father, the Soul, and the Illusion of Free Will

The Prisoner and the Open Door

Imagine a prisoner who has spent years behind bars.

Every morning, a guard opens a small door to deliver his food. Every morning, the prisoner sees that door as a reminder of everything he has lost. Beyond it lies the world he longs to return to: freedom, family, sunlight, and the simple pleasure of walking wherever he wishes.

Naturally, he desires to escape.

His mind rehearses the possibilities. His imagination constructs a future. His emotions alternate between hope and despair. Every encounter with the guard becomes an opportunity to think about his freedom.

But consider another possibility.

The prisoner feels the same hunger, the same longing, and the same urge to escape. He does not suppress his emotions or abandon his ambition. Yet, beneath these experiences, something within him remains unchanged.

He receives the food. He feels his hunger. He recognizes his desire for freedom. And through it all, his soul remains directed toward something beyond the prison, beyond the world, and beyond the desires occupying his mind.

He remains receptive to the love of his Father, the source of his existence.

The prison doors have not opened. His circumstances have not improved. His hunger for freedom has not disappeared.

Yet something fundamental has changed.

He is no longer waiting for the world to satisfy his desires before becoming receptive to love.

This is the beginning of The Godward Way, a spiritual philosophy built upon a deceptively simple proposition:

There are only two fundamental Wills and one great illusion: the Father’s Will to give love, the soul’s Will to receive love, and the ego’s illusion of free will.

To understand this proposition, we must reconsider what it means to will anything at all.

What Is the Will?

We use the word will constantly, often without distinguishing it from other mental activities.

We speak of willpower when someone resists temptation. We speak of free will when someone makes a choice. We admire strong-willed people and describe others as weak-willed.

But are these expressions describing the same thing?

Consider a person standing before a table of food.

The body experiences hunger. The senses recognize something appetizing. The mind remembers previous meals. Desire arises, followed by the decision to eat.

Which of these experiences represents the person’s Will?

Is it the hunger? The preference? The decision? The physical act?

Ordinary language tends to group them together, but several philosophical and esoteric traditions distinguish them.

An impulse is an immediate movement within the body or mind, such as hunger, fear, or attraction.

A desire is the inclination toward a particular experience or outcome.

A choice is the selection of one possibility over another.

An intention is the purpose or direction underlying an action.

And Will, in its deeper metaphysical sense, may refer to something more fundamental than any of these: the enduring orientation of a being toward its ultimate purpose.

This last definition is central to The Godward Way.

A person may experience countless desires throughout a single day. Each arises, occupies consciousness, and eventually gives way to another.

But must the soul’s Will change with every desire?

The Godward Way proposes that it does not.

Desires belong to the changing contents of experience. The soul’s true Will belongs to its enduring orientation toward the Father.

This distinction separates the activity of the mind from the direction of the soul.

It also introduces a radical possibility: that we can experience any desire without allowing that desire to become the ultimate purpose of our existence.

The First Will: The Father’s Will to Give Love

The foundation of The Godward Way is a theological proposition:

God the Father is the source from which love proceeds.

This does not mean that God experiences love as human beings do.

Human love is frequently intertwined with longing, attraction, attachment, memory, pleasure, and the need for companionship. We love people because of what they mean to us, what we recognize in them, or what we hope to share with them.

But if the Father is the ultimate source of existence, His Will cannot be understood merely as another expression of human need.

The Godward Way therefore conceives divine love as a primordial act of giving, rather than a psychological emotion.

The Father does not give because He is incomplete. Giving proceeds from His nature as source.

This understanding has important parallels in classical theology.

Thomas Aquinas, for example, distinguishes human love, which responds to goodness, from divine love, which is understood as a cause of goodness. Augustine similarly places love at the center of the soul’s relationship with God.

Yet The Godward Way is careful about what can be claimed concerning the Father.

God cannot be fully defined, imagined, measured, or contained by human thought.

Even the words Father, source, and love are expressions used by the human mind to describe a reality it cannot comprehend.

This distinction is essential.

The Godward practitioner does not construct an image of God and direct consciousness toward that image. Such an image would remain a creation of the mind.

Nor is God understood as a larger version of the human soul, or as a powerful consciousness existing somewhere within the universe.

The Father is transcendent: the source beyond creation, toward whom the soul remains directed.

To say that the Father’s Will is to give love is therefore not to claim complete knowledge of His nature.

It is to state the foundational theological conviction of The Godward Way: the relationship between the Father and the soul originates in divine giving.

The Second Will: The Soul’s Will to Receive Love

If the Father’s Will is to give, what is the essential Will of the soul?

The Godward Way answers: to receive.

Not to acquire possessions. Not to obtain pleasure. Not to gain recognition, power, security, or even spiritual achievement.

Its essential Will is to remain receptive to the love proceeding from the Father.

This requires distinguishing receiving from wanting.

Wanting usually begins with the recognition of an absence.

A hungry person wants food. A lonely person wants companionship. A frightened person wants safety. An ambitious person wants achievement.

Desire divides experience into what is present and what is preferred.

It directs attention toward a condition that has not yet been fulfilled.

The soul’s Will to receive love is different.

It does not demand that the world first become desirable.

It does not require suffering to end, ambitions to succeed, or circumstances to improve.

The soul can remain receptive in the very moment that life presents.

This does not mean that hunger, ambition, fear, and sorrow are illusions to be eliminated.

They are experiences arising within creation, and they may be as intense as circumstances permit.

The prisoner can still desire freedom.

The hungry person can still seek food.

The entrepreneur can still pursue success.

But none of these desires must become the ultimate direction of the soul.

The body may want food, while the soul remains receptive to the Father.

The mind may pursue an ambition, while the soul remains receptive to the Father.

Anger may arise with extraordinary force, while the soul remains receptive to the Father.

The soul does not have to abandon desire. It must simply cease to mistake desire for its own deepest Will.

Nor should receiving love be confused with experiencing a pleasant emotion.

Gratitude, peace, joy, and spiritual excitement are themselves experiences within consciousness. They may accompany receptivity, but they do not constitute it.

Even gratitude can become an object of attachment when a person begins seeking the feeling of gratitude rather than remaining receptive to the Father.

The soul’s Will is therefore more fundamental than any spiritual sensation.

It is a continuous openness toward its source, whether that openness is accompanied by joy, sorrow, confusion, silence, or no recognizable emotion at all.

The Third Will: The Illusion of Free Will

We tend to believe that we are free because we can make decisions.

We select our careers, choose our partners, develop preferences, and pursue ambitions.

But the freedom to choose among available possibilities is not necessarily the freedom to originate those possibilities.

Consider the cards dealt to a player.

The player may decide how to use them, but he does not choose which cards he receives.

Human life presents a similar problem.

We did not choose the circumstances of our birth. We did not independently design our bodies, our earliest experiences, our inherited tendencies, or the society that shaped our understanding of the world.

Even our desires are influenced by forces we did not consciously create.

Why does one person desire fame while another desires solitude? Why do certain experiences produce fear in one person and excitement in another?

Biology, upbringing, memory, culture, and countless other influences contribute to these differences.

We may become conscious of a desire without being conscious of everything that produced it.

The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza offered a powerful explanation of this problem in his Ethics. He argued that people consider themselves free because they are conscious of their desires while remaining ignorant of the causes that determine those desires.

Arthur Schopenhauer later developed an even more radical philosophy in The World as Will and Representation, where Will is understood as a fundamental striving underlying life itself, rather than simply an act of conscious decision.

The Godward Way shares their suspicion of ordinary freedom but proposes a different metaphysical conclusion.

The illusion is that the ego mistakes its ability to choose for the power to originate its own Will.

The prisoner may choose whether to eat, protest, cooperate, or attempt escape.

But his choices arise within a world he did not create, influenced by desires and conditions he did not freely originate.

The Godward Way does not deny that practical decisions occur. Nor does it claim that every philosophical question about causation has been settled.

Rather, it rejects the assumption that these decisions make the ego the ultimate source of its own existence.

The deepest freedom, according to this philosophy, is not found in the multiplication of choices.

It is found in the soul’s orientation toward the Father, a direction that need not depend upon whichever choices the world makes available.

Kabbalah: The Will to Bestow and the Will to Receive

Perhaps the closest historical parallel to The Godward Way appears in Jewish mysticism, particularly Kabbalah.

The Hebrew word ratzon means will, desire, or volition.

In Kabbalistic descriptions of the ten sefirot, the highest sefirah, Keter, meaning Crown, is associated with divine Will.

Keter is frequently described as transcending ordinary intellect. It represents a dimension of willing that cannot be reduced to conscious reasoning or particular desires.

In some Kabbalistic accounts, the absolutely infinite divine reality, Ein Sof, transcends even the categories through which divine Will is described. Will becomes meaningful at the level of divine manifestation.

This is relevant to The Godward Way’s insistence that the Father cannot be contained within a thought or definition.

An even closer parallel appears in the teachings of the twentieth-century Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag, known as Baal HaSulam.

Ashlag’s spiritual system distinguishes two fundamental principles: the Creator’s will to bestow and the created being’s will to receive.

In this account, creation is characterized by its capacity and desire to receive from the Creator.

The resemblance to The Godward Way is striking.

Both philosophies begin with an asymmetrical relationship between a giving source and a receiving creation.

Yet an important difference emerges.

In Ashlag’s teachings, spiritual correction involves transforming the intention behind reception toward bestowal, developing what is called an equivalence of form with the Creator.

The Godward Way does not make equivalence with the Father its ultimate purpose.

The soul does not seek to become divine, merge with the source, or reproduce the Father’s nature.

It remains the receiving soul, eternally directed toward the giving Father.

This does not deny the possibility of generosity or loving actions toward others. It simply means that such actions do not define the soul’s ultimate metaphysical identity.

The Father remains the Giver. The soul remains the receiver. Their relationship is not fulfilled by abolishing the distinction between them.

Thelema: True Will Beyond Personal Desire

Another important connection comes from Aleister Crowley and the Western esoteric tradition of Thelema.

Thelema derives its name from the Greek word for will.

Crowley’s famous principle, Do what thou wilt, is often misunderstood as permission to indulge every personal desire.

But in Liber II: The Message of the Master Therion, Crowley explicitly distinguishes True Will from simply doing whatever one likes.

True Will concerns the individual’s essential nature and proper course.

Crowley compares individuals to stars, each following a distinctive orbit.

The ordinary person is distracted by conflicting desires, passing emotions, and attachment to outcomes. Discovering True Will involves recognizing the deeper course beneath those fluctuations.

This provides an important parallel.

In The Godward Way, the prisoner’s desire for escape may change in intensity from one moment to another. Hunger, fear, frustration, and hope may compete for his attention.

But the Will of his soul remains constant.

The crucial difference lies in what that Will means.

For Crowley, True Will expresses the individual’s particular nature and cosmic course.

In The Godward Way, the soul’s ultimate Will is neither a personal destiny nor the accomplishment of a unique worldly mission.

It is the enduring will to receive the Father’s love.

The individual may have talents, ambitions, and a particular life to live, but these belong to the changing circumstances of creation.

The soul’s fundamental orientation remains Godward.

Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: The Many Selves Within Us

The teachings of George Gurdjieff, particularly as presented by his student P. D. Ouspensky, offer another compelling explanation for the illusion of ordinary free will.

Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way describes the ordinary human being as largely mechanical, governed by habits, external influences, and competing internal impulses.

Ouspensky famously argued that what we ordinarily call the self is not a single unified master.

Instead, a person experiences numerous temporary identities, which he calls the many I’s.

One moment, a person wants to exercise.

An hour later, another part wants to rest.

In the morning, someone promises to abandon a destructive habit. By evening, another impulse produces the opposite decision.

Each temporary desire speaks as though it represents the whole person.

Yet each eventually disappears and is replaced.

Ouspensky connects genuine Will with the development of consciousness, self-remembering, and a more unified inner being.

The Godward Way recognizes the importance of observing these competing psychological movements.

But it differs in what awakening ultimately serves.

In the Fourth Way, conscious development is associated with overcoming mechanicalness and attaining inner unity.

In The Godward Way, consciousness does not awaken so that the individual can become an autonomous spiritual master.

It awakens to recognize that these competing impulses are not the sovereign Will of the soul.

Anger may speak. Fear may speak. Ambition may speak. Pleasure may speak.

Yet none must become the authority toward which the soul is ultimately directed.

The soul remains receptive to the Father even while these competing experiences arise.

Austin Osman Spare: Beyond the Tyranny of Desire

A more unusual connection appears in the work of Austin Osman Spare, whose writings influenced later developments in chaos magic.

In The Book of Pleasure, Spare explores the relationship between desire, belief, consciousness, and what he calls Kia, a principle beyond ordinary conceptual definitions.

His Neither-Neither approach attempts to move beyond the habitual oppositions through which the mind organizes experience.

Pleasure and pain, attraction and aversion, belief and disbelief can become mental structures that constrain consciousness.

Spare’s work is complex, and its concepts should not be treated as interchangeable with those of The Godward Way.

Nevertheless, the comparison is illuminating.

The Godward practitioner is not required to make pleasure the ultimate good or suffering the ultimate evil.

Experiences arise. The mind identifies them, interprets them, and assigns value to them.

But consciousness need not allow these distinctions to become its ultimate center of gravity.

The difference is that Spare’s metaphysics approaches an absolute conception of Self beyond conventional identity.

The Godward Way maintains an enduring distinction between the soul and the transcendent Father.

It does not seek to discover that the deepest self is God.

It seeks to remain directed toward the Father without turning either God or the observing soul into another mental object.

Sufi Mysticism: The Power of Spiritual Intention

Within Sufi esotericism, particularly the writings of Ibn Arabi, spiritual intention occupies an important place.

The Arabic term himma is associated with concentrated spiritual aspiration or the gathering of the heart’s powers toward an aim.

In Ibn Arabi’s metaphysical writings, imagination, intention, and spiritual realization possess meanings far beyond their ordinary psychological use.

Some interpretations attribute extraordinary creative efficacy to highly concentrated spiritual intention.

These belong to the metaphysical claims of the tradition rather than established scientific descriptions of consciousness.

The Godward Way shares the emphasis on an underlying direction more fundamental than passing wishes.

But it does not define spiritual achievement through the ability to control events or alter reality.

Indeed, the wish to become powerful enough to command the world may itself become an expression of the ego’s desire for sovereignty.

The soul’s highest purpose is not to acquire supernatural power.

It is to remain receptive to the Father, regardless of how much influence the individual possesses within creation.

In this sense, the Godward practitioner may seek worldly power without confusing that power with the soul’s ultimate Will.

The power belongs to the circumstances of life. The direction of the soul belongs to its relationship with the Father.

Christian Mysticism: The Unknowable God and the Naked Intention

The anonymous medieval Christian text The Cloud of Unknowing offers one of the closest contemplative parallels to The Godward Way.

The work teaches that God cannot be fully grasped through intellectual activity.

In Chapter 24, the author describes the essence of contemplative practice as a naked intention directed toward God.

The contemplative is not seeking merely to escape pain, obtain reward, or experience spiritual pleasure.

The direction toward God remains primary.

This bears a strong resemblance to the Godward prisoner.

He may seek freedom, but freedom is not the condition of his receptivity.

He may experience suffering, but suffering does not become the final authority over his spiritual orientation.

Meister Eckhart, the medieval Christian mystic, explored a related principle called detachment. In his writings, detachment involves remaining inwardly undisturbed by changing conditions such as honor, disgrace, pleasure, or sorrow.

The twentieth-century philosopher and mystic Simone Weil similarly described prayer in terms of attention directed toward God. Her writings emphasize receptivity, waiting, and the limitations of forceful mental effort.

Each offers a different perspective on the possibility of a spiritual orientation that does not depend on ordinary satisfaction.

Yet The Godward Way differs from these Christian traditions in its refusal to identify the Father with any image or representation available to consciousness, including one constructed from inherited religious descriptions.

It also resists interpreting ultimate spiritual fulfillment as the dissolution of the soul into divine identity.

The relationship remains that of the soul directed toward the Father.

Kavanah: The Practice of Remaining Directed

How can a person live according to this philosophy?

The answer lies in a Hebrew concept central to Jewish spiritual practice: kavanah.

Kavanah means intention, direction, or purpose.

In Jewish religious life, it has long been associated with the inward intention accompanying prayer and religious action. Kabbalistic traditions have developed elaborate meditative uses of kavanah, sometimes involving specific divine names, symbols, and contemplative structures.

The Godward Way adopts the underlying meaning of directed intention but gives it a distinct application.

Kavanah is not an attempt to concentrate continuously on an image of God.

Nor is it a requirement to experience peace, joy, or gratitude.

It is the orientation of the soul toward the Father while ordinary life continues.

This requires a subtle distinction between attention and orientation.

A mother caring for her child must pay attention to the child.

A surgeon performing an operation must concentrate on the operation.

A prisoner attempting escape must remain aware of the immediate circumstances.

The Godward Way does not require these people to withdraw practical attention from their activities.

Instead, it proposes that the soul’s underlying intention can remain Godward while the mind performs the tasks demanded by life.

One might compare this to a compass.

A traveler can walk through a forest, observe obstacles, change paths, and respond to unexpected conditions.

Yet the compass preserves a direction independent of whatever happens along the journey.

The analogy has limits. The Father is not a physical destination, and the soul is not an instrument with a measurable orientation.

But it helps distinguish the changing objects of attention from the deeper direction of intention.

Catch and Offer

The practical expression of this philosophy is called Catch and Offer.

Catch means recognizing what arises within consciousness: a thought, emotion, desire, fear, impulse, or bodily sensation.

Offer means remaining intentionally directed toward the Father as that experience arises.

These are not two separate stages in which a person first withdraws to observe an experience and later decides to turn toward God.

They are simultaneous aspects of one act of kavanah.

The observing consciousness recognizes the experience while the soul remains directed toward its source.

The anger is recognized and offered.

The desire is recognized and offered.

The joy is recognized and offered.

Nothing must first disappear. Nothing must first become pleasant.

Nor does the practitioner need to manufacture a mental image of an inner observer.

The Godward Way sometimes calls the observing consciousness the Bigger Eye, but this is a metaphor, not a separate object hidden inside the head.

The moment one imagines a great eye watching the mind, that imagined eye has itself become another thought.

It too must be recognized and offered.

The same applies to representations of God.

A powerful spiritual sensation, an image of the Father, or a convincing feeling of divine presence can arise within consciousness.

But The Godward Way does not equate such experiences with the Father Himself.

The Father remains beyond what consciousness can represent.

Thus, the practice is not simply awareness of experience.

It is awareness inseparable from Godward intention.

The Meaning of Good, Evil, and Obedience

This philosophy also challenges conventional assumptions about moral and spiritual life.

Most systems of ethics ask human beings to identify desirable actions, avoid undesirable ones, and organize their lives around a conception of goodness.

The Godward Way does not place human moral judgment at the center of the soul’s ultimate purpose.

Its highest authority is the Father.

This distinction has a precedent in biblical accounts of divine obedience, including the difficult narrative of 1 Samuel 15.

In that passage, Samuel conveys a command attributed to God requiring King Saul to destroy the Amalekites, including women, children, and livestock.

Saul disobeys aspects of that command, preserving King Agag and some of the animals. He offers religious justification for his decision, but Samuel rejects it.

The narrative emphasizes obedience to the divine command over Saul’s preferred interpretation of what would please God.

The Godward Way takes seriously the underlying theological question: Does divine authority depend upon conformity to human judgments of good and evil, or does the Father’s Will stand beyond those judgments?

Within The Godward Way, the Father is the ultimate authority.

Human approval, social harmony, personal happiness, and prevailing moral conventions cannot replace that authority.

However, this claim introduces an equally important question: how can a finite mind know whether an apparent command originates from the Father?

A feeling of certainty is still a feeling.

A thought claiming divine authority is still a thought.

Even a compelling spiritual experience appears within consciousness and remains subject to the mind’s capacities for interpretation and illusion.

The Godward Way therefore distinguishes the Father’s actual Will from a person’s conviction that they have understood it.

This distinction does not make contemporary morality the final authority. Rather, it prevents the ego from claiming divine authority merely because its own certainty is intense.

The soul’s receptivity does not automatically transform every desire, choice, or action into an expression of divine command.

In philosophical terms, the problem is one of discernment: distinguishing what truly belongs to the divine source from what belongs to human interpretation.

The Godward Way does not resolve that problem by pretending that the unknowable Father has become fully knowable.

Instead, it makes humility before the unknowable an essential feature of Godward consciousness.

Receiving Every Moment as a Present

Return to the prisoner.

A guard arrives with food.

The prisoner feels hunger. His mind remembers life outside the prison. He experiences frustration, hope, and perhaps anger.

All of these experiences are real.

He can eat the food. He can consider how to escape. He can act upon the opportunities available to him.

Nothing in The Godward Way requires him to surrender his ambitions or become indifferent to his circumstances.

But he does not need to make the fulfillment of these desires the condition of his soul’s relationship with the Father.

He can remain receptive in the present moment.

This introduces a different meaning of gratitude.

Ordinary gratitude is often a response to receiving something desirable.

We are grateful when someone helps us, when an ambition succeeds, or when circumstances improve.

But Godward receptivity is more fundamental.

It does not require the current event to be pleasing.

The experience of gratitude may arise, but even that emotion remains something to Catch and Offer.

To receive the present moment is not necessarily to declare every event morally good, nor to claim certainty that every event was personally arranged by God.

It is to recognize that whatever circumstances have arisen, the soul’s capacity for Godward orientation need not depend upon changing them first.

The prisoner may still escape.

But escaping is no longer the condition of receiving love.

The entrepreneur may still build a successful business.

But success is no longer the condition of receiving love.

A person may still pursue relationships, wealth, influence, knowledge, pleasure, and achievement.

But none of these need become the ultimate purpose of the soul.

There is something beautiful in the English word present, which describes both the current moment and a gift.

The Godward Way finds spiritual significance in this coincidence.

Every moment presents another occasion to remain receptive.

The moment does not have to become what the ego wants.

It has already arrived.

The body lives through circumstances. The mind lives through possibilities. The soul remains receptive to the Father.

The Paradox of Spiritual Freedom

We can now return to the original question of free will.

If so much of human experience is conditioned by biology, history, circumstances, and desires, what freedom remains?

The Godward Way proposes that freedom is misunderstood when it is defined merely as the power to choose among worldly alternatives.

That power may be limited, conditioned, and sometimes absent.

A prisoner has fewer options than a free person. A sick person has different options from a healthy person. A wealthy person may possess opportunities unavailable to someone living in poverty.

If freedom were merely the abundance of available choices, some people would possess far more of it than others.

But the soul’s ultimate Will is not defined by the number of choices available to the body.

It is defined by its orientation toward the Father.

This does not settle the philosophical debate over whether human beings possess free will. Philosophers continue to disagree about whether meaningful agency can coexist with causal determination.

The Godward Way proposes a different level of freedom: one that concerns the ultimate orientation of consciousness rather than absolute control over the contents of life.

The paradox is that the soul discovers its deepest freedom not by becoming sovereign, but by relinquishing the claim to sovereignty.

The ego says: I am the master of my existence.

The soul recognizes: I did not create myself.

The ego says: I will be fulfilled when I possess what I desire.

The soul remains receptive without demanding possession.

The ego says: My power is measured by how much I can control.

The soul’s Will remains directed toward the Father, even when control is impossible.

The highest freedom, within this philosophy, is therefore not freedom from all limitations.

It is freedom from making anything within creation the ultimate source of one’s fulfillment.

The Two True Wills and the Great Illusion

We began with the proposition that there are three wills in life.

After examining the philosophical and mystical traditions surrounding Will, a more precise formulation becomes possible.

The first is the Will to Give Love.

It belongs to the Father, the transcendent source from which existence and love proceed.

The second is the Will to Receive Love.

It belongs to the soul, which remains directed toward the Father without needing to possess Him, represent Him, or become Him.

The third is the Illusion of Free Will.

It arises when the ego confuses the changing world of desires, choices, and personal circumstances with ultimate sovereignty over existence.

Strictly speaking, the third is not another fundamental Will.

It is a misunderstanding of what Will is.

Desire seeks particular experiences.

Choice selects among possibilities.

Intention directs activity.

But the soul’s true Will concerns its relationship with the ultimate source.

The Godward Way does not promise a life free from desire, suffering, ambition, uncertainty, or conflict.

It does not demand that consciousness become empty or that human life become peaceful.

Nor does it require the soul to become divine.

It asks something both simpler and more demanding: that no experience, however powerful, replace the Father as the ultimate direction of the soul.

The body may struggle.

The mind may question.

The emotions may burn.

The person may act, succeed, fail, create, lose, love, and suffer.

Yet throughout these experiences, the soul’s fundamental Will can remain unchanged.

To receive.

Not because the world has become perfect.

Not because desire has been satisfied.

Not because the mind has discovered every answer.

But because the soul remains directed toward the source from which love proceeds.

Perhaps that is the deepest meaning of Will.

Not the power to demand that existence become something else.

Not the power to make oneself God.

But the enduring willingness to receive from the Father, in every moment of existence.

The ego wants the world to give it what it desires. The soul wills to receive from the Father, whatever the world may bring.

And therein lies the essence of The Godward Way.

Philosophical and Historical References

The Godward Way is presented here as a distinct contemporary theological philosophy. The traditions discussed provide parallels, contrasts, and conceptual resources, not evidence that their authors taught the same doctrine.

• Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism: Moshe Miller, Keter; The Sefirot; Kavanah, or Intention; Introduction to Ashlag’s tradition of reception and bestowal.

• Western esotericism: Aleister Crowley, Liber II: The Message of the Master Therion; P. D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution; Austin Osman Spare, The Book of Pleasure.

• Christian and Sufi mysticism: The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 24; Meister Eckhart, On Detachment; Ibn Arabi, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Simone Weil, Waiting for God.

• Philosophy of will and freedom: Spinoza, Ethics, Part I; Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Free Will; Harry Frankfurt, Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person (1971).

• Biblical theology: 1 Samuel 15, especially verses 1–3 and 20–23.