There is No True Free Will

[Nau7ik]

I’m continuing to study the Tarot and I read something very interesting having to do with the concept of Free Will. I think this is a true and proper understanding:

To this picture [VII The Chariot; BOTA/Rider-Waite deck] we assign the psychological idea, Receptivity-Will. The uninitiated believe their “will” to be something originating in the personality. The occultist, without in the least denying the fact that free will is part of our equipment, refuses to believe that “personal” free will exists. For the occultist, all that we mean by “volition” is but a synthesis of innumerable cosmic influences, coming to a focus at a point within is.

Hence all the great initiates say, with Jesus, “Of myself I can do nothing.” For the same reason Jacob Boehme wrote: “If thou canst, my son, for a while but cease from all thy thinking and willing, then shalt thou hear the unspeakable words of God. . .When thou art quiet and silent, then art thou as God was before nature and creature; thou art that which God then was; thou art that of which he made thy nature and creature: Then thou hearest and seest even with that wherewith God himself saw and heard in thee, before ever thine own willing or thine own seeing began.”

The more perfectly we understand that the office of human personality is to serve as a vehicle for cosmic forces, the more freely does the Primal Will behind all manifestation find expression through us. To others we may seem to have very strong personal will. We ourselves will learn from our practice that the strength of our volition is measured by the degree of our willingness to let life find unobstructed manifestation through us.

This willingness takes form in thought and word, and the thought itself is unuttered speech. It is a willingness developed through purposeful concentration. Relaxation of body, passivity of mind, one-pointed attention to the real presence in our personal field of the limitless powers of the whole universe, with progressive freedom in the expression of those powers as our dominant purpose—this is the infallible practical formula for triumph in the mind and elsewhere.

Impress subconsciousness again and again with the suggestion that it is a vehicle for Universal Will. Base these suggestions on reason. See that the One Energy enters into all modes of power, celestial and terrestrial. Self-examination will convince you that not the least of your personal actions is an thing more or less than a particular manifestation in time and space of some phase of the sum-total of cosmic influences. At our present stage of mental development, perfect conceptions of this truth may be impossible, but reasonable ones we may have at a little expense of observation and reason.

Subconsciousness is the vehicle through which all plans, ideas, designs, inventions and forces enter into the personal field. Thought and speech are potent in mounding subconscious response. Furthermore, because subconsciousness is also the body-building and body-changing power, suggestions of the type here indicated will eventually make profound alterations in physical structure, so that it becomes able to transform into personal activities cosmic forces whose very existence is unsuspected by the greater number of human beings.

Complete receptivity is the secret of the most powerful manifestations of will. Receptivity may be increased by control of language. Herein lies the key to all mighty works of practical occultism, for, as Elphias Levi says truly, “All magic is in the will.”

—The Tarot by Paul Foster Case