Will (philosophy) - Idealism: Will As All

Idealism: Will As All

Further information: Idealism, New Thought, Magick, Thelema, Karma

In idealist models of reality, the material world is either non-existent or is a secondary artifact of the "true" world of ideas. In such worlds, it can be said that everything is an act of will. Even if you are arrested by the police, this is actually an act of your will, too; if you didn't want it to happen, you could have decided otherwise. This line of thought is seen among proponents of a spiritual or mystical universe such as the Carlos Castaneda, New Thought writers Frank Channing Haddock (The Power of Will) and William Walker Atkinson (Personal Power Volume V: Will Power).

The concept of Will is especially important to certain Hermetic and esoteric traditions, particularly in the West and those mystical practices associated with European ideology. Perhaps most notably, the concept takes on an essential role as the philosophical-spiritual basis of Thelema (and its various delineations), an occultic system of thought developed by the writer-mystic Aleister Crowley: Crowley argued that Will provides for a certain ground of being, as well as the possibility that rituals such as ceremonial magic, yoga, and meditation allow for conscious beings to have direct influence over reality and both the spiritual and metaphysical world. Important to Thelema (the term itself meaning "will") is the notion of a difference between mundane "will" and True Will, the latter of which is the purposed fulfillment of human beings through a process of methods employed to achieve self-realization.