Dual Deeds and Free Agents

While we may pretend to be solitary castaways on uncharted social islands or the supreme leader of a mental banana republic where our will can be the singular force that governs our world, the truth is that our will is always compromised by the encounter with the will of the other. The greater our consideration of the desires and wishes of others, the more we may have to put aside or revise our own exceptions. Shelving our own plans and intentions in order to maintain a good relationship with another exemplifies the bargaining and trade offs that place peaceful negotiation and economic exchange of desires over the war of wills. We might have free will but our capacity to exercise it and still be part of something larger than ourselves comes at a price. Though it could be argued that our will of wills is to participate with others (depending on the cost), nonetheless we do invest our everyday expressions of will or expend our freedom in relationships which often results in our doing the opposite of what we want.

When my will runs counter to your will, the effort to work and play together means that some new synthesis of will (that is neither mine nor yours, or more yours than mine or more mine than yours, or totally yours or totally mine) arises interactively and sustains the relationship. Spouses contend with this all of the time. If my wife likes going out to eat (an interest that she expresses with some regularity) and I am a content to eat at home and shy away from public places (a reservation that I frequently voice) then either my will bends to her will or her will to my will on any given occasion. However, I have an even greater desire to keep her happy. Happy wife, happy life. The will-to-please-my-wife envelopes (I would like to hope and think) my specific desire–or lack thereof–to frequent a restaurant. So I say to myself: ‘even though I don’t particularly want to go out tonight, I know she does so I will agree anyway.’ I will myself to will or to be willing.

Over the years I have come to know the extraordinary degree of neuroplasticity that even an adult brain can demonstrate as I have found that after numerous instances of willing myself into the will-to-go-out-to-eat, that now my own basic desire has somehow shifted. It has become habitual. At times, I even want to go out to eat and she doesn’t. In that bizarre role reversal situation, I have to ask myself: was it that I needed to overcome my lack of enthusiasm for going out to eat so that now I am more than comfortable with it and naturally enjoy it, or was my task to transcend my own wants and desires to be able to do what she wanted?

To rephrase this in the terminology of Chassidut: was I striving for transcending my specific desire in order to replace it with another specific desire? Is my will nullified to her (specific) will (i.e. going out to eat) or to her? It’s her will (at least the rule of thumb with her will and desire) to go out to eat. But there are always exceptions: She could be too tired, bank is broken, kids need us, alien invasion, etc….Yet, once she got me on to the restaurant kick, I found that I want it now for me–almost like the desire was mine all along.

I could even become confused when I plan on us going out and she is not willing to. ‘But I thought this is what you wanted?’ The ‘what’ was an object of desire or a specific application of will. It was not the willer or the volitional agent–my wife. So I must again ask myself: do I want to get hung up in what she wanted (or wants most of the time) or that fact that she has wants? After all, I am not given over and devoted to the will (ratzon) but the possessor of will or the one who wills (ba’al ha’ratzon). In other words, it had nothing to do with going out to eat, taking out the trash, cleaning the house, picking up the kids from school. It has to do with my attachment to the one who wills (my wife). The emphasis on the restaurant (application or target of will) would be an example of ‘misplaced concreteness.’

The calculus becomes more complex when we factor the difference between one’s revealed desires and one’s hidden agenda or what one really wants. I can say that I want one thing but deep down I want sometime else. I might even be testing you to see if you know me well enough to recognize what I really want. Are you going to be taken in by the literalism of my expressed desires or will you read into them to get to my ultimate intent. Once you know my ultimate intent, then even more of temporary diversion from my explicit will can counter-intuitively serve the purpose of this ultimate intent.

This same set of considerations govern our relationship with the Divine according to Kabbalah. God also has a revealed and hidden will. The revealed will might be to not eat from a certain tree, but the hidden (non-explicit) will is that we have free will and not just operate robotically. Each new test informs us that we have a choice. We can follow the directives handed down or we can sense–even in the failure to follow directions–that we have learned something. Failure is never just failure plain and simple. Each time we learn something even if it is only how not to do something.

Since the Torah reminds us that there is no reality or existence other than the Divine, He too would seem to play a part in our violation of His will. We always have an accomplice. After all, who continued to give me the strength to act contrary to my instructions? Breaking the connection to the explicit Divine will goes one step further and allows the disclosure of the hidden will or the will behind the will.

Take the test. Fail. Then feel like you were set up from the beginning. But why? Could there really be something critical that can only learned from tripping over red lines or crossing boundaries? Yes. All of history is one grand dialectic of the will and the will of wills within the Divine order. Historical time, as we will attempt to show, erupts out of the conflict of explicit and implicit intentionality within the Divine will. In fact, the greatest conspiracy of all is the covert complicity of the Divine in what seems to be pure human fallibility. The esoteric tradition unmasks the co/operation that insists that when we act, God is acting at the very same time. The knot that binds our action with the Divine cannot be untied.

In Part 3 we will look at parallel performances and coordinate actions that drive history thought the interplay of the created with the Creator.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/the-history-of-histories-part-3/

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/the-history-of-histories-part-1/

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