54: Man's Will to Be

54

Man’s Will to Be

“Man does not simply exist but always decides

what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.”

Man’s Search for Meaning

Victor Frankl

Not all of my spiritual musings come to me in a synoptic vision wherein I see the whole truth of my concept or idea and then have to work it out in the writing (and not without considerable thought and effort, I might add); some, if not most of my musing insights have to gestate in my unconscious for months and often years before they take seed and sprout in the soil of my conscious mind and grow and blossom into their full meaning, like the insight for today’s spiritual musing that I have called “man’s will to be.”

This dynamic between my creative unconscious and conscious mind goes to the very heart of writing my spiritual musings, which I have to reflect upon for a moment or two before I proceed with man’s will to be; not to detract from my musing, but to help explain the mystery of the creative process that is central to today’s spiritual musing on man’s will to be.

In my long journey of self-discovery I came to the realization that man’s greatest need in life is to be what he is meant to be. This is an a priori need that exists before we even come into this world, and it drives all of our other needs like our need for air, water, food, sex, and emotional succor. This need to be what we are meant to be presupposes itself because it is encoded in our soul, just like the oak tree is presupposed in the acorn seed; and our purpose in life is to grow and become what we are meant to be. This is why Carl Jung said, “As each plant grows from a seed and becomes in the end an oak tree, so man must become what he is meant to be. He ought to get there, but most get stuck.”

The biggest, and probably most important discovery of my life was the realization that we do not come into this world ready-made, as such; we have to grow into what we are meant to be, which makes becoming what we are meant to be the very purpose of our existence, and what we are meant to be is our true self which is our essential, spiritual self.

I’ve already explained in my spiritual musings (and in more detail in my books Do We Have an Immortal Soul? and The Pearl of Great Price) why we come into this world with an a priori need to be our true self, which Jesus called “the pearl of great price,” but the realization that came to me in my journey of self-discovery was that to be our true self we have to become our true self just as the oyster has to create its pearl from a tiny mineral fragment. That is what I meant by saying that we do not come into this world ready-made; we have to “create” our true self like the oyster creates its precious pearl. Our precious pearl is our true self, the evolving identity of our essential spiritual nature.

And this is where I part company with Christianity (but not Christ’s teaching that addresses the dynamic of becoming our true self) which contends that our immortal soul is created at the moment of human conception and is ready-made, and Buddhism which disavows the existence of an individual self altogether, and all non-duality teachings that categorically believe that we are one Self complete unto ourselves without having to go through the pilgrimage and penance stage of becoming our true self as Jesus taught with his sayings and parables; and we cannot become our true self without participating in the creative process of our becoming, which brings me back to the theme of man’s will to be.

In effect, we have to work with our creative unconscious to become our true self, because this is how we grow in our spiritual nature; and even though this is a natural process that we go through despite ourselves (we are forever making decisions that involve the creative process of our unconscious mind), our need to be cannot be satisfied without a strong will to do, because only through doing can we satisfy our will to be.  This is why some people get “hooked” on life, like running, cycling, hiking, mountain climbing, gardening, and one’s work even, because they have a voracious hunger to satisfy their will to be because the logic of life is that the more we do the more we become what we are meant to be.

This is how we become our true self through the natural process of evolution through karma and reincarnation; but—and this is a very big but—we cannot satisfy the longing in our soul to be our true self through karma and reincarnation alone until we take evolution into our own hands, which we can only do with what Gurdjieff called conscious effort and intentional suffering—the Sufis call it “conscious dying,” or “dying before dying,” and Jesus expressed the same process of becoming our true self in his saying “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.”

“Man must complete what nature cannot finish,” said the ancient Alchemists, the Gnostics of the soul; and it was this realization that man’s greatest need in life is his will to be that added a deeper layer of meaning to the existential premise of Victor Frankl’s remarkable book Man’s Search for Meaning which posits that man’s fundamental need in life is to know the reason for his being, which Dr. Frankl reduced to “man’s will to meaning.”

As I said, not all of my spiritual musings come to me synoptically, they gestate in my unconscious until they are ready to take seed in my conscious mind; and when they sprout in my conscious mind my Muse will find a way to assist the seed to grow and blossom into its full meaning, as it did when quite by “chance” I came across Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning while looking for Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces in my basement library this summer and which I was strongly nudged to read; and as I read Man’s Search for Meaning the seed of today’s spiritual musing sprouted as “man’s will to be” because it completed Victor Frankl’s “will to meaning.” (And this, if I may be allowed to say so, is how the collective unconscious works through the consciousness of the individual self to help expand and raise the consciousness of humanity.)

Victor Frankl was a young psychiatrist when he was sent to the concentration camps by the Nazis in WW II, and like all the prisoners in the camps he suffered many humiliating indignities in the hands of his tormentors who stripped him to his primal, naked being; but out of his unthinkable physical and mental anguish was born his existential psychology of Logotherapy (“a meaning-centered psychotherapy”) which has become a remarkable healing modality for tortured and conflicted souls that suffer unbearable loss of meaning.

The seemingly senseless nature of the brutal suffering that Victor Frankl and his fellow prisoners suffered in the hands of their evil captors in the concentration camps forced him to part the veil of life and see that the prisoners who had something to live for, even if only in their own mind, found meaning in their unbearable existence; but what gave them their will to meaning was the inherent teleological purpose of their life, which is man’s will to be. In conclusion, we have a will to meaning because we have a will to be our true self, and no amount of suffering can extinguish the holy flame of our existence.

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