Uniting heart, mind and will

People are capable of overcoming all their inner conflicts and divisions if they have a divine ideal and cling to it come what may. If they nourish and cherish a sublime ideal, it will incarnate and materialize within them and take possession of them until it fills their whole being and they become this ideal. People without an ideal fritter away their energies and waste their lives.

If you are not getting the results you hoped for it is because you have not yet fully committed the three faculties of heart, mind and will; you have not yet yoked them together in harmony…

Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov The New Year 

Today I thought I would post some more from the brochure The New Year. In this extract the master talks about how we need to harness our faculties of heart, mind and willpower and get them to work together towards the fulfillment of all our goals, both material and spiritual – but especially our spiritual ideal. I have added a couple of photos of the master to this post because for me he is the perfect inspirational figure. During his eighty- six years on earth he manifested an extraordinary intelligence and wisdom, total self-mastery combined with warmth, tenderness and an impersonal love for all creatures. He’s an example of what we can become one day if everything within us, all our faculties of heart, mind, soul and spirit- are united in working towards a high ideal. (The link to read the complete brochure is at the end of this post):

‘Each faculty works, but each works for its own interests, unrelated to and out of step with the others. The intellect has, perhaps, understood how glorious it is to climb to the heights and reach the peaks, to melt into one with its Creator, but the heart, in the meantime, has its own preferences and they may lead in a totally different direction. In this case you must try to bring your heart into line and guide it in the right direction. It is possible to persuade your heart to desire that which your intellect sees to be right, wise and useful, and it is possible, also, to induce your will to act in order to achieve it. But most people do not even realize that these contradictions, these inner rifts and conflicts exist or, if they do, they think that they are inevitable and have no idea what causes them. They have no guide to advise them and tell them how to unify their three powers: intellect, heart and will, and steer them all in the same direction.

The sad thing is that this formidable alliance, this undivided union of heart, mind and will in pursuit of an ideal is found most frequently in criminals. Without realizing it they succeed, like the initiates, in combining these three faculties, the difference being that their goal is to kill, steal and destroy. And between these two classes of men (criminals and initiates), there is the multitude of those who have no fixed goal, in whom the three faculties are divided or at war with each other…

If some people never achieve anything worthwhile, either in their inner self or in the world around them, it is because their faculties of mind, heart and will are disunited. What happens in a family when the father pursues one goal, the mother another and the children all go their separate ways, each with their own goals? The family falls apart, of course, and that is exactly what happens to man’s inner family: the father – the intellect, has his own pet hobby; the mother has hers and it is not the same as the father’s and the children, that is…the will, are left rudderless and are always getting into mischief.

You are here, in an initiatic school, in order to learn quantities of truths which are new to you and which will enable you to straighten out your lives, to renew and organize them and set them on a path towards a heavenly goal. Try it! Restore order within yourselves; yoke the forces of your intellect, heart and will together and steer them towards one goal: the accomplishment of the will of God. You will soon see how your life changes. To be sure, you will not be immune to the buffeting of strong winds and earth tremors: as long as you are on earth you are bound to experience some unpleasant shocks, but they will pass far more quickly than before and will not leave the same scars behind them. Your houses will stand firm because they will be built of more resilient materials, whereas previously, they were liable to crumble at the slightest shock’.  Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov  The New Year

If you would like to read the full text it is available at FBU USA

Thanks for reading and please share your thoughts!