ESOTERIC PSYCHOLOGY

A)

The Will, if that term be said to have any meaning beyond the aggressive fancy of masculine posturing & the interminable discourses of philosophical dilettantes, must be the practice and practical results of activities which require "staying on top of." Only situations and actions which tend to continually get away from our decisions can provide the requisite density of re-intending, recalling decision and re-implementing, responding creatively in reference to a relatively fixed local psychology.

It is of course observable in infants that many voluntary muscle systems -- arm flailing, inter alia -- are operable prior to being intentional. Thus intentionality must be perceived not as a prior force of pushing, blocking or steering but rather as an ongoing process of capture, of intentionalizing behaviours which already exist.

Of particular interest is the intentionalizing of mental awareness and/or the related brain systems, the result of which is call'd attention. The acts of attention represent the colonization of psychology by intentionality. Sustained efforts of the constraint of awareness to particular zones of stimuli account for much of the inner development protocol provided by our ancestors. Other than the altered states into which one may slip as the result of detaching brain function from changing circumstances, the benefit of these procedures must lie not in an unknown substance called "concentration" but in the strength and confidence of intentionality over mentality AND, critically, the complexification of psychology which occurs gradually in response to the mixing of "usual mind functions" with "sustained arbitrary mind functions."