Life Will and Conscious Will

In life and sleep we have two powerful actions working in us. The first is our waking experience based on having a body, its limitations, vulnerabilities and a particular gender. Our second is the power that gave us life and continues to express as spontaneous movement in dreams, in our breathing and heartbeat – our life. This I have given the description as the Life Will.

While we sleep our conscious self is largely or totally unconscious, and while we sleep and dream our voluntary muscles are paralysed – therefore another will or motivating force moves our body. So we have a Conscious Will, and what I will call a Life Will. The first one we have experience of as we can move our arm or speak in everyday activities; but the second will takes over when we sleep. See Sleep Paralysis

This Life will can move us to speak, to move our body, breathing will asleep, heartbeat, yawning and all spontaneous movements, and in fact do things that we cannot do with our Conscious Will. As Freud pointed out this inner will has full access to our memories. It can do so many other things that are described else where – See Edgar Cayce and the Cosmic Mind; ESP in Dreams.

For simplicity I have called this experience, of what is actually waking lucid dreaming, ‘LifeStream’. It would take us too far out of looking at dreams to explore it, but it can be studied within these features: LifeStream – People’s Experience of LifeStream – Life’s Little Secrets – Arm Circling Meditation

This Life Will or motivator has been active for millions of years and we see it working all the time in animals. We are partly split in half because we are often opposed to what our Life Will – our natural instincts – in us wants. So the only way to express what is our best interests for us, is in dreams, when our conscious will is largely passive or we able by being passive and receptive to allow the Life Will to move us, speak through us, exercise us and generally expand our awareness and so grow as a person.

Life Will created your body and pre-existed you as a person you know today. It was working in you prior to your ability to speak or know in the way you do now. But of course it has fantastic wisdom and skills, as can be seen in animals as instinctive knowledge. Such knowledge, that allows all life forms to do the amazing things they do, is not by our conscious thinking using words, but by a form if direct knowing and abilites learn from their peers. But when that is added to our own conscious awareness our ability to know is magnified enormously, as demonstrated by Edgar Cayce already mentioned

But we have to remember that having a personality with self awareness is a very new thing and has only existed for a short time. Before that we were like animals that lived only in the Life Will – what we usually call instincts. So the development of self awareness was and is an immense step, and leaves us very vulnerable, and still does. Look around at the number of people who have to take anti-depressants, or who have to use alcohol every day, or smoke or take other drugs – all means of facing the difficulty of meeting self awareness.

That is actually the story of the Garden of Eden. At first we were all living in an instinctive Life Will state, having no decisions to face and all directions automatically handled instinctively. But when we left the our instinctive condition/the Garden of Eden, by having developed our own will, we felt naked and afraid – in the words of Genesis. See Secret Bible

So we are in a situation in which we have only a limited awareness instead of the amazing wider world of the unconscious – the Life Will when allied with our personal awareness. We are in general very small creatures, and when we begin to meet the enormous world that we left in the Garden, and we meet it with human personality, it often frightens us because we are so unused to it. See Opening to Life