Year Six

Aesthetic Exercises to Accept the Will and Mirror the Will of the World

Sixth Year:  Non-Will

In this final year of the second phase, the initiate reverses the will’s direction.  It is not as if the will disappears, as even the title of this section suggests and some so-called sages write, but that the will becomes extended to its limitations and when it reaches its limitations it goes beyond and in going beyond it changes its nature and by changing its nature it fulfills itself.  The will, beginning with the body and its individual common urges, reaching beyond the body to land, beyond land to social structures and symbols, beyond social structures and symbols to the species as a whole, finds beyond all its questing the universe¾an entity beyond its grasp, an entity that stands outside and subverts all the products of the will.  This thing, this ever-changing constant whole, this shape-shifting blackness with random transient points of light, becomes the object of the will in this sixth year and in becoming brings the will into itself and this bringing within is what we call non-will.

It is not a non-will that removes the will, but places the will within non-will.  When the will is brought within non-will, the assertions and structures of the questing will are not negated but subsumed.

The non-will that is greater than the will that the will can place itself within without losing itself and by so doing become itself is what once was called by some God. 

Let us speak more of the stretching of the will from its beginnings in the body to its fulfillment in the limits of the universe, which is to say in the centre of itself.

When the will begins stretching itself past the glory of the species to which it belongs, itself not an easy boundary to surpass, it finds itself in a moor of dark tractless space without a moor, and this displacement¾even but an intuition of it¾is frequently enough to drive the one who contains that will back to familiar space.  If, however, this one should stay¾and this is precisely what we require the initiate to do this year¾the will continues stretching, falling, into the seething blackness of space where not only the individual and species will, but all the manifestations of will between, are but specks among countless other wills.  As the initiate experiences this, and does not look away, and continues to experience, and does not look away, her will begins, as it reaches the outer reaches of the universe, to curve, and this curvature alters the form of the will so that it is more itself than itself.

As this year is devoted to an inner experience, the initiate cannot do anything to aid this experience.  She should live so as to sustain herself, but devote all available strength to the experience we have described, allowing as few distractions as possible and engaging active will as minimally as possible.  Because there is nothing for the initiate to do, there is also little to say.  Yet the initiate who truly experiences what we have described, who does not shrink from the stretching, will find that the world at the limits of will is vibrant and full of life.