43- THE DELIBERATE WILLPOWER

How can we avoid being swayed by others’ actions, words, and thoughts?

When we are able to cut off all influences and judgments by external minds, our inner mind will be tranquil, separated from all past and future. It is completely empty at the present time, so that we can perceive even a grain of sand, a thread of silk, or the mildest wind. A moment of agitation, a stream of thought, or a second of interaction between the outsider and ourselves, we can catch it!

Since that moment, our life will change: a marvelous change. Life will become sacred in every breath and every step. This would be living but not living, delivering but not delivering. It is a complacent mind and a physical body: a complete transformation and redemption of a human being. We enter a real path to the ultimate Truth, Goodness, and Beauty: this is the shore of True Enlightenment.

Enlightenment is a thousand miles distant, but also an inch away. It can be considered a luxury in life, but also a very simple form of living. It is difficult but easy, easy but difficult to reach. The inner happiness, the inner emptiness, or the peace of mind can be reached, if we know how to advance with great efforts and a very strong willpower. This will power must end all torments and pains of greed, hate, and delusion, derived from our arrogant ego -- the incorrigible ego. That ego is as hard as rock or a steel block, while our willpower is like a thousand-pound hammer that can smash the rock into pieces, or a glaring fire that burns the steel block.

A strong willpower is a Deliberate Willpower. Such willpower should be patiently forged by many failures, but should still stand up bravely to start all over again, even from the very beginning. Such willpower should always be kept alive, although it might give way many times to our stubborn ego. Thus, the starting point of our willpower should be our deliberate will, not borrowed from books, thinkers, religions, or cultures.

If our willpower is borrowed, it is simply the false presentation of greed. While a deliberate willpower derives from love, self-discharge, and sacrifice to serve others. It should derive from existence to emptiness, not from one existence to another masquerading as emptiness. This false Emptiness or this false Existence has a purpose: it serves as a foundation of ignorance, in which human beings submerge in sufferings -- karmic consequences -- through many previous existences, this life, and the coming reincarnations.